Busch Beer used to have some truly horrendous commercials, including one mid-80s gem that featured a cowboy sing-along. “Come on along, head for the mountains of Busch… beer,” they sang, as men in unironic bandanas sat on a fence drinking cans of beer. “Head for the mountains, it’s cold and it’s smooth and it’s waiting for you.” It’s basically what peak whiteness looked like before 40s of rosé were a thing.
Anyway, several decades later, Busch has traded the cowboys for Kevin Harvick’s race car, but they’re still trying to get people to head for the mountains… or to the woods, or mostly, into whichever part of nature where they’re about to hide a one-day-only pop-up bar.
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Busch announced the bar—which it calls the Busch Pop-Up Schop—on Twitter and in a YouTube video earlier this week. Basically, it’ll be tucking this joint into a national forest somewhere in the United States on Saturday, and one lucky (???) person who manages to find it will get free Busch Light for the rest of his or her life. (Everyone else who gets there will have to be content with “limited-edition merch” in the form of a Busch logo lumberjack shirt.)
“We wanted to take the concept of the traditional pop-up shop and flip it on its head in a very Busch way,” Daniel Blake, senior director of U.S. value brands at Anheuser-Busch, said in a statement obtained by Adweek. “Busch has the best fans out there who are always up for a little challenge, so we know they’ll be out in the forest finding our hidden ‘Schop.’ The chance to win beer for life also doesn’t hurt.”
But the bar has a bigger purpose than just trying to encourage beer lovers to get outside for a few hours: Busch is working with the National Forest Foundation, and has promised to plant 100 trees for everyone who manages to find the bar. (And for those of us who like trees, but also know that supermarkets exist can stay home and sign Busch’s online pledge; Busch will donate $1 to the National Forest Foundation for every signature—up to $100,000—as they both work to conserve 200,000 acres of forests.)
There are 154 national forests in this country, and they cover almost 295,000 square miles, so you should probably pack a lunch before you head out on Saturday. Busch will also be tweeting clues every day between now and Saturday to give you a better idea of where you’re going. We’d tell you to start heading for the mountains, but what do we know? We’re no TV cowboys.
