Budweiser is no longer the King of Beers. From now on, it’s Ye Olde Hipster Tipple. Be sure to get some foam on your ironic mustache.

At least that’s the idea behind the forthcoming Bud marketing campaign. The all-American brew from that Belgian company run by Brazilians has decided that its present audience (older, with a strong rural element) is unsustainable.

Sales have tanked. In the interest of driving them down a bit more, Budweiser is abandoning its current marketing strategy in favor of a desperate plea to fashionable millennials.

This holiday season, for the first time since Kris Kringle learned to stuff a stocking, Bud is ditching the Clydesdales in its TV commercials in favor of a campaign in which a series of young people will look directly into the camera and tell us which unseen friend they’d most like to give a Bud to.

Just a guess, but the names being checked won’t be “Earl,” “Mabel,” “Esther” and “Virgil.”

Sneer at millennials all you want (I sure do: How dare they be so young and good-looking?) but they’ve gotten one thing right: According to Budweiser research, 44% of young drinkers in the 21-27 age bracket have never tasted the King of Beers.

Crony capitalists, superfluous regulators and people with no taste: This Bud’s for you.

That’s some kind of miracle in an environment in which, as of 2012, Budweiser spent $449 million on advertising, ranking it 25th among all US advertisers.

Despite the product’s ubiquitousness, millennials are clever enough to identify tasteless fizzy swill without subjecting their tender tongues to it. Not unrelated, perhaps, is the factoid that some 50% of millennials consider themselves “foodies.”

Fancy that: Younger Americans actually care how stuff tastes.

OK, there’s one notable exception: the mystery popularity among the hipster cohort of the comparably putrid liquid they call “PBR” and you may remember as Pabst.

Even as Budweiser sales have fallen from 50 million barrels a year at the peak, in 1988, to 16 million today, PBR has gone the other way. PBR sales have been on a tear for more than five years and are now up to some 6 million barrels a year.

Still, that’s only a third of what Bud sells. Pabst’s parent company has actually tripled in value from $250 million (the last time it was sold, in 2010) to $750 million (what a private-equity firm, in conjunction with Russian-born American Eugene Kashper, just paid for it).

The main difference between Pabst and Bud, though, is that Pabst doesn’t advertise: That’s been policy since 1985. The success is strictly a word-of-mouth phenomenon.

The brand is forever stuck in a long-ago haze of kitsch, belonging to an era when we all used to watch “Gilligan’s Island” reruns on tiny black-and-white TVs.

Fancy that: Younger Americans actually care how stuff tastes.

For twentysomethings, it’s part and parcel of the aesthetic that says it’s cool to wear a navy-blue uniform with someone else’s name on it, mainly to signify that you’re of the class of people who would never accept dismal time-clock blue-collar employ. (It’s much more honorable to blog for nothing in Mom and Dad’s basement.)

And anyway, Pabst tastes better than Bud: According to Beer Advocate, it gets a crowd-sourced score of 69 (“poor”), compared with 57 (“awful”) for Budweiser, on a scale of 1 to 100.

The real problem for Bud is not insufficient appeal to the ironic drinker but that America’s taste buds have grown up and maybe even spent some time in grad school.

Craft beers — despite their tiny marketing budgets — account for 15% of the beer budget of the youngest legal drinkers. Bud’s market share, despite that gargantuan advertising spend, is down to 7.6%, nearly a 50% drop in just the last decade.

https://twitter.com/Budweiser/status/529317835357421568/

The failure of Budweiser is actually a story of the triumph of a liberalized marketplace, of decentralization and deregulation. Bottom-up demand produces a livelier, zestier array of choices than top-down command.

After Prohibition ended, tight government restrictions made it increasingly impossible for small breweries to operate. Around 1900, there were some 2,000 breweries in the United States, but by 1980 there were fewer than 200.

A series of actions swept away ridiculous government regulatory burdens that benefitted no one except Big Beer and their flavorcidal, lowest-common-denominator approach.

Jimmy Carter signed a little-noticed law legalizing home brewing in 1978, which allowed hobbyists to start tinkering around again, and in 1983, California and Oregon legalized brewpubs, inspiring other states to follow suit.

Today there are again more than 2,000 US breweries.

Having come of age in an age of brewski choice, millennials have begun ditching their parents’ habit of drinking whatever mass-produced pondwater was being pushed at them in $449 million worth of commercials.

Alas, Anheuser-Busch’s flagship brand will endure because it still has a core audience. Crony capitalists, superfluous regulators and people with no taste: This Bud’s for you.