Germans Don’t Love Budweiser. It Won’t Take No for an Answer.

Something was off at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.

It was a chilly Saturday night in January. German fans of the Hertha Berlin soccer club were lining up to buy beer from the concourse taps. But the beer wasn’t German.

The stadium had replaced its domestic brew, Beck’s, with an American import, Budweiser.

Fans seemed surprised. What was this mass-market lager of American baseball parks doing at a German soccer match?

Why was it being sold to Germans as “Anheuser-Busch Bud,” instead of under its American name?

And why was its parent company trying — at a challenging time for American products abroad — to persuade Germans to drink it?

The answer appears to be: It’s a bet on a small but growing corner of one of the world’s biggest beer markets.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/germany-budweiser-beer.html