One peril of covering the brewing industry is that when people see beer commercials that baffle or annoy them, they text me about it. For example, Coors Light’s pretend typographical error to set up its new wet-noodle “Case of the Mondays” campaign had my phone buzzing this week. It doesn’t even have to be a commercial per se; your humble Hop Take columnist’s sources are myriad and voracious cultural sponges that call out oddball appearances by this or that beer brand wherever they occur. Which is how I spent a chunk of my day last week conducting a groupchat dissection with a bunch of fellow journalists on Michelob Ultra’s bizarre small-screen cameos on “Landman,” Taylor Sheridan’s latest hagiography of The American West™️.
For those who have yet to press play on Paramount Plus’s slick, series-length piece of fossil-fuel propaganda — or aren’t planning to, as I wasn’t until it was put in front of my face — here’s a representative snippet that illustrates just how ham-fistedly Anheuser-Busch InBev’s sleek, super-premium staple has been jammed into the script:
“I quit drinking, I’ll stick with beer,” says Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, Landman’s straight-shooting prospector protagonist.
“You know there’s alcohol in that, right?” says his bartender, a neon for Four Sixes Grit & Glory (a beer brand spun off from a spin-off of Sheridan’s massively successful “Yellowstone” series) conspicuously visible over his shoulder.
“It’s a Michelob Ultra, there’s more alcohol in orange juice,” retorts Thornton, going on to insist that if he drank six whiskeys he’d be in much rougher shape than if he drank six Mich Ultras.
The piss-and-vinegar male lead and the quippy yet clunky dialogue are standard fare for the Sheridan-verse (of which, I should admit, I’m no fan). The absurd barrage of consumer brands on screen is another hallmark of the blockbuster showrunner’s body of work. In December 2022, binge-watching “Yellowstone” in preparation to file a column about Coors Banquet’s placement deal with that show, I was shocked at how many other brands — of pickup trucks, cowboy boots, even liquor — Molson Coors’ old warhorse was competing with for airtime.
The gravy train has rolled on, and despite some fans’ complaints, it continues to pay dividends for the brands that have come aboard. Modern Retail reported that in-show placements on the latest season of “Yellowstone,” in combination with conventional ads, have yielded brands like Tecovas and Filson considerable sales boosts. “We knew it was a cultural fit,” Tecovas’ chief marketing officer, Krista Dalton, told the publication in November 2024, the month of the show’s most recent return to air. “We knew it was aligned with honoring the West and crafting its future and being innovative within the space. … We’re very grateful that we negotiated and committed to this in a bigger way,” she said. Coors Banquet also claimed to see lifts from its “Yellowstone” tie-ins.
This is all well and good — or if not good, given the consequences of American hyperconsumerism driven by advertising’s relentless infiltration into every facet of mass culture, at least governed by a recognizable commercial logic. “‘Yellowstone’ created a goldmine of stuff for consumers because they figured out what the consumers wanted, and they used their creative aesthetic to do that,” Andrew Feigenson, the chief executive of advertising intelligence at the data analytics firm Kantar and its consulting subsidiary, Numerator, told me in 2022. Firms from Molson Coors on down were happy to pay to play (though they wouldn’t disclose how much). The same holds true for “Landman.” In the Sheridan-verse, everything is for sale in more ways than one.
Two things vex about Michelob Ultra’s placements on Sheridan’s new show, beyond how utterly schlocky they are. First, the brand makes very little sense to me in media res in the West Texas oilfields. Coors Banquet’s remarkable overlap with the aesthetics and milieu of “Yellowstone” is the sort of serendipity you can’t always recapture, but the premise that a bunch of roughnecks and rogues in the Permian Basin prefer a beer known for its low calorie count and high price is hard to accept, Norris/Thornton’s pat explanation above notwithstanding. I’m not the only one who can’t get his head around the Mich Ultra placement, either: Reddit and TikTok are littered with posts of people calling foul. (E.g., “Ex-bartender from Midland/Odessa [Texas] here. The accurate oil patch beer is Coors [Light] … the [Michelob Ultra] sticks out like a big, fat, dumb sore thumb.”) It’s weird! This is the official beer of getting loaded on your realtor’s Sea Ray and inappropriately over-tipping cart girls (and also soccer now, too, I guess). When pre-InBev A-B was testing Mich Ultra back in 2002, they sent reps to 19th holes, not boreholes!
Given the narrative incongruity, I assume Michelob Ultra’s relentless screen time in “Landman” is the result of a product placement deal between ABI and the Sheridan-aligned 101 Studios. Hollywood Reporter flat-out names it as such. (Neither party, nor Paramount Plus, responded to Hop Take’s requests for comment.) On one hand, this would make a certain amount of sense, given Sheridan’s track record of blockbusters and the macrobrewer’s desperate scramble to the right to shore up its red-blooded bona fides with the retrograde jagoffs that rolled it on the Bud Light fiasco. The politics of “Landman” aren’t coherent, but they’re aesthetically aligned with the conservative project, and ABI is working on getting aligned with it, too. There’s a deal to be done there. Maybe the brewer and showrunner did it.
And yet: “Landman” doesn’t cast Michelob Ultra in a particularly flattering light. Its watery impotence is built into Thornton’s character, and that character is a recovering alcoholic. “Our beer won’t get you drunk like liquor, making it the perfect fit for your 12-step journey” is the sort of message most macrobrewers would consider litigating, not paying for. Not to mention one of its most prominent on-screen references — there were 23 in the show’s 10-episode rookie season, per data shared with Hop Take by BrandTrack.Pro, a media monitoring and analysis company — comes built into a culture-war swipe at its erstwhile portfolio-mate, Bud Light.
“We’re having a special on Bud Light,” a server tells Norris and his crew in the show’s seventh episode.
“I bet you are,” replies Norris.
“Yeah, how’s that working out for you?” his associate follows up, with a snort.
“Like a popcorn fart in church,” she concedes.
Eventually the group orders a pitcher of Michelob Ultra for the table.
From where I’m sitting (my couch) there are three potential explanations here, and none are great for ABI. The first is that this is product placement, and the mighty macrobrewer is so cowed by the conservative backlash it bumbled through in 2023 that it has prostrated itself before Sheridan, letting this heartland huckster mock its brands to his adoring fans in hopes of slowly reentering that fold. Bleak, man, but it’s not beyond imagination, especially given “Landman” also gives slices of screen time to Hoegaarden and Stella Artois, both ABI brands.
The second is that this isn’t product placement, and it’s just Sheridan and co. playing to their anti-woke, wannabe-gunslinger fanbase while sweetening his relationship with ABI’s arch-rivals at Molson Coors, who also see some screen time in the show via Topo Chico hard seltzer. (Molson Coors did not respond to a request for comment.)
The third is that Sheridan has simply decided to see how far he can push his dipshit-whispering capabilities for his own amusement. Can “Landman” convince the Zyn-ripping transphobes of the lift-kit bourgeoisie to embrace Bud Light’s more effete portfolio-mate through some stilted scripting and the sheer force of repetition, just a year after they rejected it? This explanation seems the least likely for a host of reasons. But Sheridan is a known egomaniac and basically the only thing Hollywood can bank on not named “Marvel” these days, and that sort of power can go to your head — unlike Michelob Ultra. Did you know it contains less alcohol than orange juice?
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
The dominant market trend of the past couple of years has been soft-to-hard crossovers, but lest ye forget that’s a two-way street, this week a former Boston Beer Company chief exec traveled it in the other direction. Dave Burwick, late of the troubled Twisted Tea purveyor, was announced as the new head honcho at Spindrift Beverage Co., concurrent with the acquisition of that high-end nonalcoholic seltzer brand by the private equity firm Gryphon Investors. Of course, Spindrift has its own alcoholic spin-off, Spindrift Spiked, and Burwick’s resume includes two decades at PepsiCo — BBC’s joint-venture partner on Hard MTN. Dew — so worlds are colliding in more ways than one.
📈 Ups…
Prost Brewing Co. was up more than 12 percent overall in 2024, and nearly 21 percent in the on-premise on 29,000 barrels… Vermont Cider Company and U.S. Beverage (parent company of Uinta and Captain Lawrence, among others) have struck a marketing partnership… Congrats to Monica Cohen on her new gig as chief exec of the American Cider Association…
📉 …and downs
Dick Leinenkugel says Molson Coors is stonewalling his family’s request to buy back the slated-for-closure Chippewa Falls plant… Circana’s total off-premise beer scans for 2024 fell 0.6 percent short of 2023’s in dollars and 2.6 percent less in volume… Constellation Brands revised its fiscal guidance down a couple points after a sluggish few months for Mexican imports… Tilray Brands last week announced plans to cut 300 SKUs from its 20-breweries-deep portfolio…
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