Anheuser-Busch's Brew Across America crowns bipartisan winners at Nationals Park

Bipartisan teams of members of Congress paired with Anheuser-Busch breweries to brew competition beers at Nationals Park, and Missouri’s Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and Representative Wesley Bell (D-MO) took the Brew Democracy Cup for Arch Light Lager. The eighth annual Brew Across America Congressional brewing competition staged Jan. 21 brought lawmakers, large-scale brewhouse operations, and agricultural supply-chain partners into the same room for a high-profile public relations and industry-visibility event.

The People’s Choice Award went to Representatives Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Josh Riley (D-NY) for Hudson Valley Harvest Lager, produced with Anheuser-Busch’s Baldwinsville Brewery. Other congressional pairings worked with Anheuser-Busch partner sites including the St. Louis Brewery, Wicked Weed, Four Peaks Brewing Co., and the Los Angeles brewery, putting a spotlight on commercial-scale mash, fermentation, and packaging operations rather than homebrew setups.

Anheuser-Busch also announced a $25,000 award for the Manufacturing Institute’s Heroes MAKE America initiative, tying the competition to workforce development and manufacturing training. The event’s pageantry included the brewery’s signature Dalmatians and Clydesdales, underscoring the consumer-facing image Anheuser-Busch cultivates alongside the technical and supply-chain conversations happening on the floor.

For craft brewers and homebrewers, the event matters because it emphasizes connections between grain, hops, maltsters, and large-scale processors that set commodity prices and availability across the brewing ecosystem. Seeing lawmakers teamed with major brewery operations demonstrates how policy, agriculture, and manufacturing training affect ingredient sourcing, packaging timelines, freight costs, and taproom supply. The competition format also offered a practical view of scaling recipes from a pilot or homebrew batch into a production run handled by a full-scale brewhouse.

Community relevance extends beyond spectacle. The funding for Heroes MAKE America signals industry investment in manufacturing pipelines that can supply brewing operations with skilled operators, quality control technicians, and maintenance personnel. Local breweries can leverage the visibility such events create to advocate for workforce programs, grain or hop contracts, and policies that ease distribution and logistics burdens.

What comes next is more of the same: expect Anheuser-Busch to continue using Brew Across America as a platform for bipartisan outreach and supply-chain storytelling, and watch for limited releases or taproom tie-ins that let local drinkers taste the competition results. For brewers and homebrewers, the takeaway is to pay attention to how large-scale dynamics shape ingredient costs and labor access, and to look for opportunities to plug into training programs and local advocacy that support a healthy brewing ecosystem.