Brewers upset with Obama’s beer choice

President Obama will be drinking Bud Light at tonight’s White House beer summit with Sgt. James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates.

But his choice of beverage has some American brewers hop-ping mad. (Get it?)

While generally assumed to be an American beer, Bud Light is brewed by Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is actually a joint Belgian-Brazilian owned company, as the St. Louis Dispatch reports.

The Wall Street Journal tracked down a few TRULY American breweries, and it appears they’re “frothing” mad:

Among rival brewers, the news fell flat. “We would hope they would pick a family-owned, American beer to lubricate the conversation,” said Bill Manley, a spokesman for the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., a California-based brewer that happens to be family-owned.

Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Co., which brews Samuel Adams, decried “the foreign domination of something so basic and important to our culture as beer.”

Genesee Brewery, Rochester, N.Y., released a statement congratulating the president for having beer at the meeting but adding: “We just hope the next time the President has a beer, he chooses an American beer, made by American workers, and an American-owned brewery like Genesee.”

Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Congressman who has also written the White House amid the beer ferment, also hopes the meeting will promote beer-drinking nationalism. In a not-so-subtle dig at Bud, he said he knew he and the president “both share a common interest in fostering the success of American-headquartered companies.”

Then again, I doubt most of the white, blue collar voters Obama’s trying to assuage over the Gates affair will consider Bud Light somehow inappropriately foreign.

Seems like the President can “barley” catch a break….