Paulaner Is Now Available In Cans

Dark. I have fond memories of drinking Dortmunder Ritter Brau Dark on draught at the Phoenix Club in Anaheim. Great German food there was the icing on the cake.

 

Lots of things are available in cans, but not here.

 

Yes, I can't find it here at my local liquor stores either. Although we get a lot of Paulaner in my neighborhood, nothing new ever seems to arrive here anyway, either craft or import...

 

From the Press Release in the OP:

...and since Spring officially started yesterday--- (Granted, brewers don't always follow the normal calendar and there's no doubt that many distributors and retailers are still reluctant to carry some brands, especially "Imports", in cans.)

I've quoted the below fact frequently over the time (slightly varying from source to source, year to year, of course) but recently came across the same info in a 1980 article on imports in the NY-NJ metro area. From a Gannett wire service article:

From the same era, a New York Magazine article on Guinness in the US noted half of all Guinness in the US was sold in NY and most of it was bottled Extra Stout - only 33 bars had Guinness Draught in NYC.

Had recently been doing some copy/pastin' of my 1964 NJ Official Beer Price List (so, a decade and a half earlier than the above quote) and collected the German (+ 1 Dutch) beers available in the state in both a "light" and "dark" version.

I was surprised that the 3 brands you mentioned, although sold in their "Light" versions didn't (yet) offer a "Dark" version in the state. (Heineken's has gone in and out of distribution in the US since that time, IIRC). Besides the imports many US brewers still offered both "Dark" (many only as a draught product) and a seasonal "Bock".

Ever the "glass half empty" consumer even back then, I recall stopping into a local bar that eventually developed a state-wide rep for having the best imported beer tap list around. This was in the 70s, so it added up to 10-12 beers.

Sitting at the bar, sipping one of the German beers I noted to my friend, "Well, really, when you look at it, they're all German beers, light and dark, plus Heineken. No English, Czechoslovakian or other countries brands. Not even a Canadian beer..."

Wouldn't mind coming across that tap line-up today (bonus if the prices were the same, too - likely under a buck a beer).

 

If you were a "craft" beer fan back in 1980, it sounds like it was a real find to see Guinness Draught in a bar.

 

Well, I was talking closer to '74 than '64 (and probably more like '78) -- '64 wasn't even near that time I picked up my dad's Drewery's and gave the look that asked, "Can I?" I should have recognized the meaning behind his, "Suuure, go ahead..." reply before taking a drink and spitting it out on the lawn.

That I can relate to -- there were still a great many bars with German taps and buck beers around in the late '70s. I guess inflation just didn't grow as fast back then?

 

It was. Sometime around the mid-80s Guinness really started pushing the Draught cans and shortly after you started seeing the draught systems popping up in bars -- at least in Northeast Illinois. I've heard it started earlier in NYC and Boston.

 

Makes sense with the Irish heritage in Boston.

Heck, you STILL see Guinness at most bars in this area even with the large number of breweries today.

 

People out east always forget that there's a huge Irish population in Chicago (we're the ones who dye our river green, remember?) -- maybe they were also the ones importing the Guinness and forgetting the Midwest?

Definitely -- it's a nice fall-back when the selection is all IPAs.

 

Yeah - I lived too far for quick trips to NYC to drink (esp. popular with north Jersey kids when the legal age was 18 in NY and still 21 in NJ - seems there were Staten Island bars that catered to that crowd). I recall my first Draught Guinness in an "Irish" bar in Red Bank, NJ sometime around that same period (1979-1981).

Paging through some other material, in 1979 a Guinness exec is quoted as saying if you want Draught Guinness head to NYC or DC (although I've found reference to it being available in St. Louis and Pittsburgh, too, in the '60-'70s). By 1982 (during the period of rapid growth of imports in the US), Guinness was claiming Draught was available in "about" 400 US bars, but still about a 1/4 of them in NYC.

Another Guinness Fact - into the mid-1970s, they claimed the peak year for sales in the US was 1913.
(Not sure if that includes the period in the late 40s-early 50s when they were brewing in Long Island City, NY - that brewery also kegged that stout, which seems to have been a version of Extra Stout).

Yeah, just noting the fact that, only a decade earlier than the coming US import boom, although there were many German beers exported to the US in "light" and "dark" version, two of the most notably (and long-lived) German imported "Darks" weren't even yet available. And Löwenbräu's Dark - likely the best selling one - well, always difficult to judge beer color in old photographs (circa early 1970s in this case), but I think many a modern beer geek's reaction to the one on the right would be:
"No, no - I ordered the Special Dark Löwenbräu."

 

I’m surprised to see the large number of dark beers, on top of the big list of imports. I can’t help but think something feels lost nowadays...

Would these darks have been normally Dunkel? That Löwenbräu looks more Vienna-like.

 

Guinness-Harp (the US importing subsidiary of Guinness at the time, which handled Guinness, Harp and Bass) took over importing Guinness into the US in the mid-1960s, with headquarters in NYC. Previously it had been imported by Heublein.

G-H also initially owned a NYC-based wholesale distributor, Metrobeer - so, essentially, they "self-distributed" in the NYC metro region, as well as acting as the distributor for Beck's, Labatt and Carlberg, along with domestic brewers Piels (inc. Trommer's) and Schlitz. Being both importer and local distributor in part explains the heavy percentage of Draught Guinness sold in NYC.

 

The big three I assumed were Chicago, NY, and Boston. I only mentioned Boston because I live here, so I can speak to that.

But apparently Chicago isn't filled with as many Irish as we think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_Irish-American_populations

Chicago is 15th on the list!

And if you don't trust Wikipedia, here's a link from Forbes (2013 though):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/#12f18138628c

This one is for the most Irish towns in the US. Four out of the top ten are in MA. And Boston tops the list.

 

Was this prior to Miller brewing the beer(s) on this side? I can only remember seeing Löwenbräu imported from Switzerland (confusing for beer novices in the late 70s - early 80s), but they had light and dark variants too.

 

Yeah, it was always nice to pop into a bar and find a "Dark Beer" on tap, either imported or domestic. Lots of US brewers offered them as a draught-only product, but quite a few were bottled but they slowly died out during the '50s-'70s. Besides the local breweries, even national and large regional brewers offered them - Schlitz, Stroh's, Miller (labeled Münchener), Schaefer (Braunslager), even AB - originally called Anheuser-Busch Classic Dark, I think it eventually morphed into Michelob Dark, which was bottled for a time.

In New England, one would often find a tap handle just labeled "Bavarian" and that'd be the "Dark" version of whatever AAL they had on tap (usually Narragansett or Falstaff by the '1970s). Researching ads from the pre-craft era, all over the country one finds bars simply advertising "Dark Beer on Tap" without any specific brand named.

They varied quite a bit in color - that Löwenbräu pic surprises me but, who knows? I'd say, from dark to light amber, the US dark beer styles would go Porter - Bock - Dark Beers - but some brewers "Darks" would be darker than their Bocks.

The "Vienna" terminology was used quite a bit after Repeal, and to a lesser extent, "Munich" "Kulmbacher" and a few others, but I can't recall ever seeing a US brand advertised using "Dunkel" terminology - but that's not to say they weren't around in the areas of numerous local breweries like NY, PA, WI, MN, etc.

As the authors 25 Years of Brewing, (1958 - by the American Brewer magazine) of wrote:

Oh, yeah - the "MUNICH" on the glass should signify that but once Miller got the license, who knows? The pic, tho', is from an ad when Hans Holterbosch was the eastern US importer, so pre-1975. (He even sued the two breweries to try to stop the Miller deal).

 

It's the suburban exodus -- I wonder what it would look like if they counted the collar towns now.

Also, those are percentages of the total population -- 8% of 3 million is 240,000. Pittsburgh at a population of 306,000 has 49,000 Irish at 16%.

 

Take a look at the chart on America's Top Irish Neighborhoods -- a Chicago suburb is #4. It's all semantics in this day.

The population of Dublin is 528,000 -- I wonder what percentage* is Irish?

(*83)

 

I think Miller still kept some sort of Munich reference on their labels and such.

Speaking of... I haven't looked at a Beck's label in a while. I imagine there's still some German connection there...

 

This is what you're looking for (from 2015, so a little better).

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallerie...ish-cities-in-america-nyc-philadelphia-boston

"Closely following the City of Brotherly Love is Chicago, with the Census Bureau's survey estimating 1,078,354 people with Irish ancestry."

"While the Boston-Cambridge-Newton area may trail Chicago metro by a mere 41,000 estimated people of Irish ancestry, it however boasts the greatest density, with 22.1 percent American-born Irish throughout the city."

 

Thus my "should" - but the glasses in the ad were sold (in 1969 for a buck each, no extra shipping charge!) by Hans Holterbosch, the importer:

AB was sued over it, initially. They simply made "PRODUCT OF THE USA" a bit more prominent on the label (changed the color of the print and background IIRC), while keeping the larger "ORIGINATED IN BREMEN, GERMANY".
Comparing an early Miller label w/o the large "MUNICH" to the first and post-lawsuit Beck's: