Dive Brief:
- Budweiser on Tuesday announced the three new beers that will hit stores on Oct. 28 as a part of its Project 12 small-batch package for the year.
- For the package, Anheuser-Busch's brewmasters experiment with new recipes, naming each pilot brew after the zip code where it is made.
This year's Project 12 beers include:
- Batch 94534 from Fairfield, Calif., which uses North Pacific hop varieties, including Cascade and Palisade, in hoppy, 5.5%-alcohol-by-volume (ABV) lager
- Batch 23185 from Williamsburg, Va., a 5.5%-ABV amber lager that is aged on a bed of bourbon barrel staves and vanilla beans
- Batch 43229 from Columbus, Ohio, an amber lager that uses chocolate and caramel malts is 6% ABV
Dive Insight:
Last year's Batch 9146 went on to become a permanent beer-aisle fixture as Black Crown for Budweiser, so the same good fortune could come to any of these new batches in the coming year. These beers come geared to compete with independent brewers, who have become an increasingly formidable (and in many cases acquirable) presence in recent decades. In this case, the batches may be relatively small, but at the end of the day they're still being made under AB InBev.
