Something was wrong at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
It was a chilly Saturday evening in January. German fans of the football club Hertha Berlin lined up to buy beer from the taps. But the beer was not German.
The stadium had replaced its domestic brew, Beck’s, with an American import, Budweiser.
Fans seemed surprised. What was this mass market beer of American baseball parks doing at a German soccer game?
Why was it sold to Germans as “Anheuser-Busch Bud” instead of under its American name?
And why, at a challenging time for American products abroad, did its parent company try to persuade the Germans to drink it?
The answer seems to be: It’s a bet on a small but growing corner of one of the world’s biggest beer markets.
The multinational company that has owned American Budweiser since 2008 is called AB InBev. Based in Belgium, it also owns Beck’s. Its representatives declined to answer most of my questions about what is now the third attempt to sell Bud in Germany.
Officials would not say why they once again chose to introduce a quintessentially American product to such an isolated beer market. Or why they chose a moment when many Germans are flush with anger at President Trump and are not in love with the United States at all.
“Germany is probably the toughest beer market in the world, I would think,” said Oliver Lemke, who runs a namesake brewery with a number of restaurants around Berlin. “You’ve got lots of breweries. You’ve got an audience that doesn’t appreciate different styles of beer than they’re used to.”
Mr. Lemke said he doesn’t mix politics with sales. But based on the market, he said, “I don’t see why they had come here.”
The company has cast the move as a homecoming. Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch were born in Germany, emigrated to St. Louis and in 1876 began brewing a sweet lager. They called it Budweiser, after a Czech beer they admired, hoping to appeal to immigrants who remembered the brand.
I’ve always had a soft spot for it. When I was a senior in college, my favorite professor and mentor took me to lunch at an off-campus sports bar to discuss the magic and mystery of journalism. His name was Bill Woo. Because he came from St. Louis, we always drank Budweiser.
Most Germans have no such love for the beer – and no such exposure. That’s because Anheuser-Busch failed to sell its version of Budweiser in Germany for more than a century.
The Czech brewery from which Anheuser and Busch took their name, Budejovicky Budvar, claimed trademark infringement. The parties agreed in 1911 and 1939 to divide their beer-making worlds. The Czechs couldn’t sell their Budweiser in the US, and Anheuser-Busch couldn’t sell its version in much of Europe.
Twice the Americans tried to crack the German market under different branding. Both attempts succeeded. The first was abandoned after several years of disappointing sales. The other was dropped amid ongoing legal issues over the Budweiser name.
Last fall, AB InBev announced once again, this time with a product it had to call “Anheuser-Busch Bud” for legal reasons. A company official said the expansion would bring Bud back to its German “roots” — the founders’ country of origin — in time for its 150th anniversary.
“We are proud to make Anheuser-Busch Bud available in Germany again,” Florian Farken, a spokesman for AB InBev Germany, wrote to me in a message.
Hertha Berlin, the football club, announced that Bud would replace Becks during home games. Later, Bayer Leverkusen, a top club, and recently relegated Wolfsburg followed suit with a similar sponsorship deal.
Otherwise, the beer is hard to find. It’s rare to see in grocery stores, not even the special packages the company sells to celebrate the World Cup soccer tournament.
The story has another explanatory data point. German beer consumption is decreasing year by year. It was down 6 percent last year and is already down 9 percent this year, said Holger Eichele, CEO of the German Brewers Association.
But one segment of the market is gaining ground from a very small base: imports. AB InBev announced its German push for Bud last year, noting that “international lagers are among the fastest growing beer segments in Germany.”
Mr. Eichele could not speak directly about InBev’s strategy. But he told me that “consumers in Germany are very interested in testing, finding out about new products, new styles, new brands.”
Analysts are skeptical. “Given the continued difficult situation in the German beer market and the recent decline in the image of American products,” trade publication Getränke News wrote this spring, Bud sales in Germany “will probably fall short of expectations.”
At a Hertha game this spring, a visiting American fan was also skeptical: my father.
“Can’t we have a German beer?” he asked in line.
But back at our seats he called to me from the other side of the row. He held up his cup.
“Tastes better here!” he said.
Tatiana Firsova contributed with reporting.
