The story of American beer doesn’t begin (and hopefully won’t end) with American Standard Lager, but it did play an inconceivably huge role in the beer market we know today. Budweiser, Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, and PBR are the big players in this style, but there are some lesser-known examples being produced all over the world (I, for example, once gagged through a 30-pack of a beer actually called “Beer 30” in my very debt-ridden college years). If you’re like us, you probably find yourself in local breweries more than you’d like to admit, and you’ve probably noticed a lot of craft brewers taking a closer look at this style that for decades has been an abomination in any beer nerd’s fridge.

The enterprise we now call AB InBev (formerly Anheuser-Busch) began humbly when Eberhard Anheuser, who was at the time a soap manufacturer, bought a small company called the Bavarian Brewery in St. Louis in 1860. A local brewery supplier named Adolphus Busch sold supplies to the struggling brewery for years before buying a stake in the company in 1865 (there may have been ulterior motives at the beginning…he married Anheuser’s daughter in 1861). Busch recognized a massive business opportunity in an untapped marketplace, and sought to build a beer brand on a scale the world had not yet seen. There was still one huge problem…the beer sucked. The Bavarian Brewery wasn’t doing well, and it was because their brews were just plain bad. By 1868, Busch, who had no practical brewing experience, began reading industry journals and traveling to famous brewing regions in Europe to learn everything he could about it in an effort to turn that trend around.

What’s important here from a style standpoint isn’t that Busch turned the business around, although that is extremely important. Instead, it’s the motive (follow the money?). Busch wasn’t driven primarily by a desire to craft the best beer he possibly could–he was driven by the desire to build a brand and make bank. He did, and here we are. Based loosely on European lagers, and named after the city Budweis in modern-day Czech Republic, Busch’s “Budweiser” beer achieved massive success not because of its life-changing taste, but because it didn’t frighten people off with big flavors and it was marketed very, very well. One of those early marketing campaigns might sound a little familiar, by the way. In an ad from 1892, they claimed that beer made with corn caused weariness and stupidity, and finished with this (timeless) gem: “ANHEUSER-BUSCH brands are absolutely free from corn or corn preparation. Nothing but highest grade malt and hops are used in its preparation.” You’d think after a century they could hire a new ad firm.

For fairness’s sake, it’s worth noting here that Budweiser, as a brand, is less than kind to its namesake. They’ve sued Budějovický Budvar, národní podnik (Budweiser Budvar Brewery) around 100 times since 1907 to try to wrestle the trademark for “Budweiser” from them. The Budweiser Budvar Brewery has in some capacity been operating since the thirteenth century, from the Czech Republic city of Budvar.

We don’t mean to trash Budweiser, though (please don’t sue us!). While it may not seem like it, the American Lager has been crucial to the craft marketplace. As John Mallet of Bell’s Brewery notes in his book Malt, the research into ingredient and process quality supported by macro beer over the last several decades has quite literally made what we do in the craft beer world possible. The research they’ve done has elevated our understanding of malt, hops, and yeast, and how they behave under different conditions in the brewhouse. Development of larger markets for these ingredients ultimately trickle down to making them affordable for the average home brewer. True, their uninspiring flavor also gave many of us a reason to seek something more interesting when we order a pint, but without the big beer companies we might not have the small ones we love today.