Narrowing down my proposal: why too much beer is bad for your project

Having received feedback from my proposal I have come to the realisation that there is such a thing as too much beer. My previously planned three-tiered approach is going to either be too large for a 5,000 word essay, or is going to be too thin on details. After some deliberation on how to deal with this, I have decided to now focus on the international legal battle over the name ‘Budweiser’ as this will allow me to still involve the transnational history of the beer, and the agency of Adolphus Busch, but only to the point that it has been relevant to the court cases.

One of the side effects of this alteration is that it will alter the balance of my project into a more even focus between Budvar and Budweiser, which is not a bad thing. Budweiser is the world’s most American beer, in spite of its name, its origins and that its current owners are Belgian. This feels like another aspect to this transnational project that could be looked at. My previous focus on the origins of Budvar beer, and the clash between German and Czech nationalism will be minimised, which I am slightly sad about as writing the short essay on the micro-macro link made me realise that, if done well, this could have been effective. However on the other hand this would have definitely been the most challenging part of my project as I would have had to compress large amounts of information, and also as a result of a lack of sources

This change certainly helps me in terms of sources, as I can look at court records for these cases, and there has also been a bountiful amount of newspaper coverage for some of these cases. Having done some research on Amazon, there also seem to be quite a few books on the history of beer that look like they will be fruitful in their pages on Budweiser. This has also helped me in that the previously troubling language barrier I had with Czech can now, to some extent, be avoided, as the court records I have found thus far are in English.

Overall I am happy with the alterations I’ve made as they make the project feel slightly more manageable. Now I just need to tuck into some court records to get a far better understanding of how the project is going to come together!