Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went after Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bud Light’s parent company, for “marketing beer to children” on Tuesday despite the Texas Republican looping his pre-teen daughter in to help with a name of an IPA from the beer giant in 2019.
Cruz, who launched a Senate probe into the company after its right-wing backlash-causing Dylan Mulvaney partnership, wrote in a letter to AB InBev CEO Michel Doukeris that the company failed to “cooperate” and offered an “unacceptable” and “blatant disregard” of congressional oversight.
“The level of cooperation the Committee receives will bear significantly on my assessment of whether this is part of a broader problem across the [AB InBev] product line and whether changes to federal law are necessary to prohibit [AB InBev] from marketing beer to children,” Cruz wrote in a letter shared Tuesday.
The Texas senator, however, appears to have recruited one of his own children to help market beer for Anheuser-Busch back in 2019.
Cruz, in an X (formerly known as Twitter) post shared by Mediaite, wrote that he “teamed up” with the company to brew IPA before revealing how his then-11-year-old daughter Caroline would help him.
“It’s made with grapefruit from the valleys of TX & my daughter Caroline helped me come up with the awesome name: Ale-vengers IPA. #DontMessWithTexas,” Cruz wrote of the beer.
Cruz, who worked with the company’s Houston brewery on the drink for the Anheuser-Busch Brew Across America beer festival, also shared pictures of himself drinking the IPA.
″…I gotta tell y’all, it tastes a lot like the sweet taste of victory! #BrewDemocracy,” wrote Cruz.
Conservatives’ Bud Light backlash appears to have deflated over the past month.
Deutsche Bank, on Wednesday, said Bud Light has shown “substantive signs of progress” after the beer dropped its top spot to Modelo as the best-selling beer in the U.S.
The bank, in a statement, noted that the amount of people “very unlikely to buy the brand” in the next three to six months dropped from 18% to 3% while the amount of “beer drinkers” not willing to buy Bud Light went from 21% to 19%, Insider reported.