Design Matters: Nobody Likes the New Budweiser Cans

Posted by The Editorial Desk / Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

In an effort to boost their sagging sales (while craft beer sales are up! Go team!), the King of Watery Domestics, Budweiser, has taken their can back to the drawing board for the 12^th time. The result? Well it’s pretty terrible, actually.

The new can highlights the “Budweiser Bowtie” an element that has never played a huge part in the brand’s formerly floral, text heavy tins. The new look gives the can a kind of a sleek, pared down feel that everyone seems to want these days.  The result? Nobody likes it.

The color scheme has edged more towards an in-your-face red and the trademark medallion and ribbons have melted into the background. I know that Budweiser is about as corporate and soulless as it gets in the beer industry, considering it’s a product of the largest brewing company in the world, Anheuser-Busch InBev, but allowing for that corporate lack of regard for history and tradition to leak out of the can and onto the design is about the last thing a Big Beer company should do.

Look at Milwaukee’s Best. Milwaukee’s Best had a great can design for years. Now look at it. The logo fully embraces the brand’s place as the go-to brew for frat boys and bars where patrons dance on tables.

Now look at Budweiser’s main competition: Miller High Life, Coors, Pabst, National Bohemian – all bad beers, all great cans.

Now I realize that calling Budweiser soulless is sort of like harping on McDonald’s for a lack of integrity, but if there’s one thing Budweiser had going for it, it was it’s consistently old school can and bottle designs. When it comes to cheap, filler laden brews, aesthetics matter, because good lord, it’s not like flavor plays much of a factor. Coors has kept its golden can essentially unchanged, and Miller High Life is still all ribbons and pretty girls perched on the Moon.

They get it.

Drinking from a can that’s gone mostly unchanged since its inception gives a nice sense of tradition, something that only a handful of the country’s micro-brews can fence with, despite a better product. The unwavering designs give a feeling that one day your kids might grow up to drink the same cruddy beer out of the same cool can.

By completely overhauling their new can, Budweiser has broken the unstated rule of the big beer industry when it comes to design. Keep the main product traditional-looking, as sort of elder-statesman of the brand, and then go and make your light beer cans as ugly as you want.

Oh, and they’ve also raised their prices.

So to hell with it.

- Kris King

Tags: beer, budweiser, design, miller lite still has the worst design to be fair, old school design no flavor, watery domestics