That leads us to the recent announcement that Oasis Beverages — Russia’s largest independent brewer and a player in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — will team with American private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners to buy Pabst for $750 million, yielding a pretty nifty take for the Metropouloses.

Unless you haven’t been paying attention to Pabst’s checkered recent past, it’s a little inauthentic to take offense that an embodiment of American ideals was being shipped off to Russia.

This is one of the pratfalls of reading more into beer than just what’s in the glass. There can be can be a disconnect between the people who love a beer and those who make it and those who profit from it. We see this in foreign ownership of large American brewers. We see this in corporate buyouts of beloved craft brewers. We see this, even, in people who recoil when learning the politics of their favorite craft brewers, or that their favorite craft beer is made under contract at a different brewery.