For All That You Apparently Do, This Bud’s For You
If they let people in more often, maybe they’d see they’d get better press than the occasional Anheuser-Busch local reax story:
Posted: July 15th, 2008 | Filed under: Queens, Sliding Into The Abyss Of Elitism & PretentiousnessLocal lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.
And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.
Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.
A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.
One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.