Anheuser-Busch’s Four Loko failures

Editor’s note: Below is a recent edition of 💊Fingers Time Capsule💊, an occasional booze-history feature. Usually, these are for paying subscribers only, but this one’s free to give you a taste of what lies beyond the paywall. Upgrade now to get more independent journalism about drinking in America: 

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The other day, a user named @LukeRules tagged me on a Bluesky post about Budweiser Extra wondering if I’d ever heard of it. Which, buddy, how do you think I got all this brain-poisoning if not reading and writing extensively about discontinued malt liquor brands from the Aughts?! Still, it occurred to me that some people may not be aware of the brief, embarrassing history of the King of Beers’ “B to the E.” So, let’s discuss.

You have to understand, Four Loko wasn’t the first brand to ride the forbidden “what if SoBe but alcoholic” lightning. The camo-wrapped cans of caffeinated malt liquor quickly became synonymous with the segment after arriving on shelves in 2005, but it was a quintessential beverage-alcohol fringe player back then, like similarly styled outsider-brand competitors 3SUM and JOOSE.

By the early Aughts, though, America’s biggest macrobrewers were already riding the segment hard. SAB Miller (now Molson Coors) bought Sparks (a so-called “energy beer” introduced in 2003 by McKenzie River Corporation, of St. Ides infamy) for $215 million in 2005 after a reported annual growth rate of “more than 100 percent.” “The growth potential is a lot steeper in this category than it is in other categories,” a SAB Miller spokesperson told ABC News at the time. “It's an extremely attractive segment right now.”

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The No. 2 firm’s longtime rival in St. Louis felt likewise. Anheuser-Busch was flying about as high as it ever would in 2005. Bud Light sales had yet to peak, craft beer was still super-niche and slumping, and the Brazilian-Belgian conglomerate that would eventually do a hostile takeover of the firm in 2008 had existed for just a year. A reported brainchild of heir-apparent failson August “The Fourth” Busch IV, it released not one but two caffeinated malt beverages nationally that year: Budweiser Extra in January 2005, followed by Tilt that August.

“B to the E” was explicitly meant to win back “Red Bull-and-vodka-swilling club-goers with a caffeine-, guarana- and ginseng-infused beer,” as Ad Age reported in 2004, in advance of its national rollout the following year. “Distilled spirits is definitely in the background of this decision,” an A-B exec told the trade magazine, adding that the brand was “targeting that [25- to 35-year-old] customer and no one else” with its unspecified caffeine content and sweeter flavors.

Red Bull and vodka might have been the competition A-B wanted, but Bud Extra quickly drew comparisons to the just-then-fading wine cooler and “malternative” fads instead. “Apparently their research showed a lot of consumers felt that wine coolers just weren't gay enough,” Jay Leno said on The Tonight Show that year. (Par for the course, there.) Bud Extra gained some early interest but faded fast. In 2008, A-B stopped selling caffeinated versions of both it and Tilt—which, with double-digit ABV and more energy drink-esque styling, was a much more direct analog to Four Loko et al.—following a damning investigation from the then-attorney general of New York, a rising-star liberal lion named Andrew Cuomo.

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Despite its tucked-tail exit from the segment, A-B (and SAB Miller, which pulled Sparks around the same time, out of similar concerns) would wind up looking like an adult in the room in hindsight. It took another two years, a couple conspicuous fatalities, and federal-level scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration to finally convince Four Loko & co. to follow suit.

💊 Previously in the Fingers Time Capsule: The Fourth’s disastrous, reportedly doped-up speech at the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s 2008 conference.