Anheuser-Busch, Inc.

Chelada is an alcoholic beverage produced by Anheuser-Busch which combines Budweiser, the king of beers, with Clamato, a drink made from tomato juice and clams.

Take a minute. Read that first line again if you have to. Study the picture. It’s ok, we’ll still be here. Savor this moment—you’ll never have another like it in your lifetime. In a thousand years of satire, in a hundred thousand comedy skits, no-one could ever make this up. It’s as if we stand at a crossroads: on our left is Bizarro World, on our right is The Twilight Zone, behind us is yesterday and straight ahead is clam beer.

The brilliance of this cannot be overstated. Combine a clam, a tomato and a beer in any combination and you’ve just created a joke of some kind, and the details don’t even matter—it’s comedy on an subatomic level, it’s a diagram of a perfect joke, it’s the happiest we at Small Foods Laboratories have been in years.

Every detail of the can has been painstaking crafted to render the customer speechless with glee: the deadpan fine print cautioning “CONTAINS: SHELLFISH/CLAMS”; the “DO NOT SHAKE, ROTATE GENTLY TO MIX” diagram; the tagline “Drink a Red One!” and the even bolder claim, “The Perfect Combination.”

The final punchline is that it’s kind of delicious. It’s like a salty, beery Bloody Mary, and we imagine it would go down especially well on a hot day.

The only way it could be better is if each can was hand delivered by a clown—no, actually, even that couldn’t make it any better. The only way it could be better is if it had pulp.

When’s the last time a beer made you laugh before you drank it? For that matter, when’s the last time a beer made you laugh for two days?

When you’re sad, just think of the Clamato beer. When you’re blue, have a red one.