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The Bud Light boycott was just the beginning. The right-wing battle against America’s favorite beverage has become deeper—and weirder.
By
Alexander Sammon
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Sept 29, 20255:40 AM
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Hulk Hogan had four months to live, and he had had enough at the ShopRite.
The grocery store in Montgomery, New York, was full of fans of the Hulkster, 200 or so. They had been waiting for a rare chance to come face-to-face with their hero, score a signature, a selfie, maybe even a hug. Some of them had sat around for hours in the frigid fluorescent aisles of the supermarket, between towers of chips and freezer-burned meats, for the opportunity.
Hogan was flogging Real American Beer, his new trademark swill, in singles and sixes and crates, sporting his signature handlebar mustache and durag. His black T-shirt read, “America First, Beer Second.” He had launched the brand directly in response to the Bud Light boycott, to capitalize on one of the most successful—and overblown—corporate backlashes in recent history.
But in the middle of the event, despite all the people waiting, Hogan decided he was done. The former WWE champion pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, and retreated. Brother! Whatcha gonna do when the Hulkster runs wild from you?
The residents of Montgomery and neighboring towns were gonna be furious, it turns out. One woman started barking at the Hulk, hurling epithets, screaming, cursing. A child began to cry, then another, then another. “It was really quick. They just stood up, the whole group, and bolted,” Robert Taylor, 42, told local station News 12.
Real American Beer was haunted from the beginning. Some version of this scene played out in half a dozen towns across the Hudson Valley where Hogan was scheduled to sell the beer. Even while local officials tripped over themselves to venerate the Hulk, one going so far as to inaugurate “Hogan Day,” he seemed uninterested. On one occasion, he reportedly refused to sign anything that wasn’t a case of Real American, and sometimes he wouldn’t sign anything at all.
What was the trouble? Initially, Real American seemed to be going gangbusters. According to Hogan himself, he created the beer to “bring America back together one beer at a time.” According to industry analysts, it quickly became the second-fastest-growing beer brand in the United States, a feat that sounds impressive until you remember that it was starting from zero. Per Fox Business, Hogan got venerable chain Hooters signed on immediately as “one of the first accounts to carry Real American Beer after its launch.” The WWE wasn’t far behind. “Light, crisp, crushable,” went the tagline. “200 percent American.”
But Hulk’s low cal, low carb initiative was not enough to save Hooters: the restaurant chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection not long after. Following that was news that WWE was “re-evaluating how they would use Hulk Hogan in conjunction with their Real American Beer sponsorship.”
Then came the checkered supermarket sprint, and not long after that, Hogan was dead. Heart attack.
In there somewhere was a metaphor for conservatives’ stormy relationship with beer altogether in recent years. Many MAGA culture warriors think of the Bud Light debacle—a brutal boycott over a fleeting social media post featuring a trans influencer—as a clean win for the movement, the loud and righteous voices protecting a sacred culture. The truth is more complicated. The right didn’t just trounce Bud Light, which already had problems. It’s come for the soul of the beverage that was supposed to define America in the first place. Wittingly or not, the conservative war on lagers and light beer and all other suds is being fought on multiple fronts—and beer is losing badly. It might never be the same.
In the spring of 2023, the conservative uprising began against Bud Light. It was one of the highest-profile beverage-themed revolts since the Boston Tea Party, except with more guns and influencers.
For 20 years, Bud Light was the most popular beer in the nation, beloved by frat guys and middle-aged guys and old guys alike, reinforced with boorish marketing aimed squarely at them. Then, that April, the brand engaged in a high crime: It paid transgender female TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney to post a short-form video boosting the beverage.
The backlash was swift and dizzying. After Mulvaney posted on Instagram, conservative country singer Kid Rock filmed himself wearing a MAGA hat, spraying bullets into three cases of Bud Light with an MP5 submachine gun, and yelling “Fuck Bud Light and fuck Anheuser-Busch!” Seemingly every conservative personality with a high enough profile wanted in on the action. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn even opened a congressional investigation into Anheuser-Busch’s ad campaign.
Menace rained down on Anheuser-Busch, including bomb threats that forced certain factories to close. The company pledged to “stay in our lane.”
Too little, too late. Sales plummeted. The stock of parent company AB InBev got hammered, shedding billions in value. May 2023 was the single worst month in its history. All of its beer brands suffered: Budweiser proper, Busch, Michelob Ultra.
The company pushed out a high-ranking executive. It rolled out new ad copy. Bud Light hired Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis, the straightest, whitest guys it could find, and put them in a Super Bowl ad. UFC President Dana White reached out directly to former President Donald Trump to encourage positive commentary about Anheuser-Busch, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC. Eventually, things cooled off.
Still, when the dust settled, it looked ugly. Bud Light had tumbled to the second-most-popular beer in America, then to third. It was surpassed by new No. 1 Modelo, and again by AB InBev’s own Michelob Ultra, which knocked Bud Light to a baleful bronze, barely even on the podium, where it remains stuck. A year on, the business press estimated that the company had lost $1.4 billion in sales because of the backlash; its stock lost a much more staggering $27 billion in valuation. Behold, the sheer force of the conservative boycott, a sleeping giant awakened.
Yet, despite the clear damage the crisis caused, its scale was probably overstated. The difference between the Wall Street reaction and the actual losses in sales seemed to indicate at least some snap overreaction. And AB InBev execs weren’t exactly ambushed by the whole incident. “A few months before the Dylan Mulvaney thing, AB InBev did say that they expected Michelob Ultra to overtake Bud Light in the next handful of years,” said Jenn Litz-Kirk, a reporter at Beernet, an alcohol industry publication. “Of course, that is not how they wanted it to happen. But AB InBev had already been planning that. They did tell wholesalers.”
“It had been declining for 12 years before,” said Jon Springer, a senior reporter at Ad Age, who covered the Bud Light boycotts.
This was where Hulk Hogan and Real American Beer and other crass cash-ins were supposed to capitalize—this was supposed to be a targeted strike against one brand, a quick regime change, not an all-out assault on the American beverage. But the anti-beer insurgency proved too powerful and far-reaching even for the mighty Hulk.
In fact, the early winner was not American at all. For a while, Modelo, a Mexican beer, wore the crown, America’s top-selling easy-drinker. Corona, also Mexican, got in on the action, too, nipping at the heels of Bud Light in fifth place, with its own sparkling ad campaigns featuring Snoop Dogg and Bad Bunny.
This was a huge and unlikely triumph, long coming. According to data from the Beer Institute, beer from Mexico accounted for more than 80 percent of imported beer volume to the U.S. in 2023.
But that coronation was short-lived. Soon enough, Modelo and Corona, both run by Constellation Brands in the United States, were the next beer entities to find themselves in conservative crosshairs. This time, it wasn’t influencers or country music stars or ex-athletes. It was the White House.
Shortly after Trump’s second term kicked off in January, Constellation Brands began sounding the alarm.
At first it was the tariffs. Selling primarily beers imported from Mexico turned out to be a disastrous business model in the face of an administration obsessed with keeping out stuff from abroad, especially stuff (and people) from Mexico.
In March, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on aluminum, a direct blow to Constellation’s canned swill operation. It got worse when, in April, he levied a 25 percent fee on foreign beer imports specifically. Then, in June, Trump ratcheted that aluminum tariff up to 50 percent. It seemed as if these economic policies were tailor-made to hobble America’s new beer giant.
Meanwhile, Trump’s deportations got worse, more violent, more far-reaching. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement convoys began tearing through Latino communities across the country, Latinos weren’t finding themselves in the mood for revelry. Large public gatherings became magnets for masked agents; street vendors were being tossed into unmarked vans. Military vehicles were rolling through the park. People were, in effect, hiding in their homes, a state of events that did not exactly put them in the easy-drinking-beer mood. “The fact is, a lot of consumers in the Hispanic community are concerned right now,” said Bill Newlands, Constellation Brands’ CEO, during a company earnings call in April.
According to Constellation’s own figures, Hispanic customers accounted for about half of its beer sales. In earnings calls in both April and July, Newlands pointed to a miserable social and economic environment for the Latino communities through the first two quarters of 2025: job losses, inflationary concerns, general sentiment akin to terror. That was not good for business. Newlands said many Hispanic U.S. residents, grappling with the fear of ICE, are “not going out to eat as much as they had, they’re having less social occasions at home.” They were cutting back on discretionary spending, including goods and services like restaurants, clothing, travel, and certainly beer.
Newlands tried to put a positive spin on it for investors. Hispanic customers, he assured them, were still “very interested in beer.” But the ICE raids showed no signs of abating. As long as they persisted, and with ICE’s turbocharged new budget set to begin in October, there seemed to be little hope for reversal.
And just so you don’t think Newlands was making excuses, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey also noted, during the company’s most recent quarterly, that they had seen a drop-off in Hispanic consumers.
Constellation Brands’ stock price has since done an AB InBev–like swoon, another titan felled. And, last week, perennial also-ran Michelob Ultra became America’s No. 1 beer.
The war on beer has a homefront too. Because Republicans haven’t been content merely to let a Republican administration hobble another beer franchise via policy or to box out a specific beer for wokeness. They are leading the charge in total desertion, giving up on drinking altogether.
Last month, Gallup published its annual report on U.S. drinking habits. For nearly 90 years, dating back to 1939, the firm has been taking stock of Americans and the good old American pastime.
Its findings this time were stunning. The percentage of American adults who reported drinking any alcohol at all had cratered to just 54 percent, the lowest number ever recorded in those nine decades of data gathering. That’s almost 10 points below the 80-year average of 63 percent.
The demographic leading the charge? Self-identified Republicans. Only 46 percent of Republicans reported drinking at all in the past year. That’s a decline of almost a third since 2023, when the Bud Light boycott began. More than half are off the sauce altogether.
The longer you look at it, the more absurd it seems. The Republican Party, as so many postelection postmortems have found, has gotten younger, running up the margin with young men in particular. Those guys are supposed to be beer’s lifeblood. But the opposite is happening. Half of adults age 18 to 34 do not consume alcohol, up from 41 percent in 2023. Incredibly, as America becomes abstemious, it is Republicans on the vanguard.
Surely there are nonpolitical explanations for this. Maybe it’s because of a concomitant surge in the use of cannabis or alternative nicotine products, or maybe all those young men and conservatives are shooting up Ozempic.
But the investment banks don’t think so. As Laurence Whyatt, a beverage analyst at Barclays, told the Financial Times, all of those explanations were “not particularly compelling for having such a seismic change in a short space of time.” He cited uncertain economic headwinds, also brought on by Trump’s tariffs and other policies, as a primary reason for the decline.
Whatever the Bud Light fiasco was, it was just the beginning. On multiple fronts, the Republican Party has inaugurated an epidemic of teetotaling. Maybe it’s not exactly surprising. Trump abstains from alcohol, though he also abstained from alcohol during his first term, during which time Republicans were tipping them back.
Could it be that manosphere podcasts are simply this powerful? There is a lot of talk in the self-actualization sphere about getting off booze and getting on protein. Charlie Kirk was sober; Tucker Carlson doesn’t drink. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has talked at length about his own sobriety, though he notably gave alcohol a pass as a potential cause of developmental problems in children in his “Make America Healthy Again” report.
It’s as though conservatives saw Hulk Hogan’s T-shirt and read it a very different way: “America First, Beer Second”—a very distant second, and in fact, it’s one or the other.
When Hulk said he was starting Real American to save beer and save America, some people laughed at him. Hyperbole from a professional clown. But it turns out the stakes of his quixotic journey were exactly as high as he said. With the ongoing loneliness epidemic and the fraying of society, maybe it was beer that was holding the whole American edifice together. At this rate, we may be about to find out.
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