You don’t have to be an expert gambler to understand why it’s verboten to interrupt a craps player’s hot hand at the casino, nor a historian of America’s pastime to grasp why a baseball team won’t say a word to its pitcher if he’s got a perfect game going. When something is working, you let it ride.
Well, unless “you” are Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), I guess. Two years removed from the Bud Light fiasco, the country’s largest macrobrewer has clawed its way back into a solid position thanks in no small part to the strong performance of its Busch Light brand. The bottom-shelf workhorse has been doing more than its fair share pulling the big red beer cart lately, and is up year-over-year 4.5 percent in dollars and 2.8 percent in volume year-to-date through mid-July 2025 in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana. Pretty darn good, given the category is down 3.1 and 4.7 percent (dollars/volume) by the same measure.
And speaking of big, red, and on a roll: Busch Light Apple’s return to shelves this year has been nothing short of triumphant. The line extension, introduced in 2020, bizarrely discontinued in 2023, then reintroduced in May, has been going absolutely berserk for ABI. Owing to the discontinuation, “Bapple” sales are up meaninglessly cartoonish amounts in Circana scans; Beer Business Daily reported that the brand has sold 1.7 million cases year-to-date. On the firm’s second-quarter earnings call late last month, chief executive Michel Doukeris touted it as “the No. 1 innovation in the industry, driven primarily by 21- to 24-year-old consumers.” Those customers, he added, are purchasing the fruit-flavored beer at a rate six times higher than the industry average. Virtually any way you slice it (ahem), Bapple’s comeback tour has been a big hit for a company that really needed one.
But over a month before the official start of fall — the traditional selling season for apple-oriented foodstuffs — ABI once again stopped shipping the brand. In fact, it’s already been replaced by Busch Light Lime, a beer with neither the cult following, sales data, nor seasonal appeal to support its rollout. Rather than let Bapple ride, ABI slammed on the brakes — leaving an open lane for competitors to court the American drinking public with apple-flavored beers of their own.
Why? Publicly, ABI hasn’t said, and its spokesperson declined Hop Take’s request for an interview. It was similarly tight-lipped when retiring Busch Light Apple two years ago, telling Good Beer Hunting (itself since retired) only that “Busch Light Apple is going out on a high note with the widest distribution to date.” Which, yes, correct: That fact is at the core (ahem x2!) of reporter Kate Bernot’s question in 2023, and mine now. But what’s the answer?
We can rule out production challenges or trade-war disruptions. ABI’s brewing prowess and supply chains are the best in the business, and while the Trump administration’s tariffs have created turmoil in the bulk apple market, Busch Light Apple isn’t made with real fruit (only “natural flavors”). The next most obvious explanation is that ABI’s execs are reveling in the hype that the beer’s here-again, gone-tomorrow availability has generated, and want more. There’s no doubt they’re pleased, and they have been since back in May when the brand first rolled back out. “With Busch Light Apple, if you didn’t see yet on the Instagram, Twitter, so people are traveling through the country, peering inside the stores,” Doukeris said with evident delight on ABI’s Q1 call on May 8. “Volume is flowing very quickly out of the shelves, and Busch Light Apple will for sure be one thing that people talk about during the summer.”
Having been pilloried in the press and on social media for much of the past two years over its public-relations boondoggle vis-à-vis Bud Light, and with said flagship still struggling, you could see why ABI’s head honchos would be basking in some actual good news for a change. And if Busch Light Apple’s scarcity is driving it, you could see why they might be willing to pull it back. Columns like this become part of the hype cycle, too, of course, underscoring the brand’s fleeting seasonality. There are benefits to cutting against conventional wisdom and existing demand.
The mass-market attention arbitrage of one of the most iconic anachronisms in American foodstuffs, the McDonald’s McRib, is instructive here. “For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair — only to be revived once again for reasons never made entirely clear,” wrote Willy Staley in his definitive 2011 essay on the seemingly arbitrary release schedule of the slippery McRib at The Awl (RIP). “We’re marks, novelty-seeking marks, and McDonald’s knows it. … They know the sandwich’s elusiveness makes it interesting in a way that the rest of the fast food industry simply isn’t. It inspires brand engagement, even by those who do everything they can to not engage with the brand.”
Staley speculated that the McRib’s ephemeral nature was a function of commodity pork pricing, and journalists at Bloomberg would later put more meat on that bone (ahem x3!!!). While the vagaries of commodity markets can’t explain Busch Light Apple’s seasonal schedule, the thesis that the American consumer is a stone-cold sucker for scarce but affordable novelties maps pretty cleanly onto ABI’s enforced disappearance of the beer. There’s a solid logic to stoking John Q. Guzzler’s apple-addled sense of urgency.
The McRib remains a cult item, so much so that McDonald’s redeployed it in 2023 and 2024 to juice quarterly earnings and offset losses from an e. coli outbreak, respectively. But the sandwich tells a cautionary tale, too, and not just about heart disease, or the unintended consequences of financializing the United States’ agricultural sector. By restricting the McRib to limited-time offers, McDonald’s left demand on the table that competitors eventually figured out how to fulfill. Notably: KFC, whose 2010 Double Down gimmick was so popular that it extended its availability for four more years, bringing it back again for a limited time in 2023; Burger King, which rolled out a BK Rib Sandwich in 2013; and Arby’s, which engineered a turnaround last decade in part by tapping into the carnivorous desires of diners with its transformative “We Have The Meats” campaign in 2014. It’s not that The McRib has been usurped by any one of those appalling arrivistes. Just that it had demonstrated the opportunity in a segment — in this case, obscenities of the flesh — then vacated it for long enough to encourage new market entrants.
Beer — apple-flavored or otherwise — is a different business from fast food, but there are parallels. To wit, just last week, Beer Business Daily reported that Molson Coors (MC) was mounting a new push around Redd’s Apple Ale, a mid-pack brand that hasn’t been a serious comer since about a decade ago. (It was introduced to the U.S. market in 2012 from the portfolio of SABMiller, the then-owner of the company then known as MillerCoors.) A memo obtained by the outlet that MC execs sent to distributors earlier this month says ABI’s rival is “jumping at the opportunity to return more focus to Redd’s” with a marketing campaign positioning Redd’s as “the apple beer that started it all” and “reinforces the point that the crisp taste of apple beer can never be replaced by lime.”
The Light Beer Wars, this ain’t. Neither Busch Light Apple nor Redd’s is a flagship, and there’s no evidence yet that Bapple bros will trade from one to the other. The latter is also down in Circana’s off-premise scans year-to-date to the tune of 13.2 and 14 percent (dollars and volume), with its high-ABV offering Wicked down about half that. Drinkers are not fired up about Redd’s. But the reason MC even has a chance to try to change their minds is because ABI pulled its juicy seasonal off shelves. If the No. 2 macrobrewer in the country has luck with this gambit, expect others to follow.
And why not? ABI had a hot hand in Busch Light Apple, then stepped away from the table. Everybody else may as well roll the dice and pick up some of its winnings while it’s gone.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Over the past decade or so, the balance of power in the three-tier system has tilted ever-so-slightly away from macrobrewers and toward the increasingly consolidated middle tier. (And mega-retailers, too, for that matter.) For ABI, a low point came in 2023, when some of its distributors broke rank with the mothership to grouse about its mismanagement of the Bud Light fiasco in the press — a public display of dissent that would have been unfathomable even a few years prior. But pendulums swing in both directions, and the empire always strikes back. Last week, Beer Business Daily broke the news that ABI was pressuring a few wholesalers to sell their distributorships, or face being terminated for cause. The affected houses claim they’re being framed for, among other things, selling out-of-code Busch Light Peach; a delegation of uninvolved distributors told Beer Marketer’s Insights earlier this week that things in the red network are actually pretty peachy. Hmm.
📈 Ups…
California Beverage Solution, an independent collective of beer wholesalers, picked up both Archer Roose canned wine and Good Boy canned cocktails in the state… Ballast Point took on new investment from a San Diego hospitality group and a boutique investment firm, with the old investors exiting… Scout Distribution’s joint venture with Columbia Distributing in Idaho is being sold to Hayden Beverage Co., which has pledged to retain all staff…
📉 …and downs
Oh cool, convenience store foot traffic has been sliding this summer, and beer sales in the channel with it… Ball Corporation is “repositioning” to include “less beer” in its customer mix… Oof, Monster Beverage Corporation’s bev-alc division was down another 8.6 percent last quarter…
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