Old Milwaukee?

I love these heritage brands. I can’t say I love the beer but I used to drink it a lot lol

 

I'd think that all the beers listed in the Post were so close in quality and flavor that the ranking was almost random. Here is the Consumer Reports craft (specialty?) lager category (some are contract brands, some are big brewers' crafty entries, some are just normal AALs, and only Dominion and Legacy come from a craft brewery). But there are some stronger flavored entries"
"Here's the top ten from that category, as ranked: 1. Brooklyn Lager (contract) Brooklyn Brewery of Brooklyn, NY, rated "excellent"; 2. Leinenkugel's Red, Jacob Leinenkugel (Miller) of Chippewa Falls, WI., "very good"; 3. Samuel Adams Boston Lager (contract) Boston Beer Co., Boston, MA. "very good"; 4. Killian's Irish Red, Coors Brewing Co., Golden, CO., "very good"; 5. Red Wolf, Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, MO. "very good"; 6. Henry Weinhard's Private Reserve, Blitz-Weinhard (Stroh) of Portland, OR. "good-very good"; 7. Sterling, Evansville Brewing Co., Evansville, IN. "good"; 8. Legacy Lager, Chicago Brewing Co., Chicago, IL. "good"; 9. Dominion, Old Dominion Brewing Co., Ashburn, VA. "good"; 10. Lone Star, Lone Star Brewery (Stroh) San Antonio, TX, "good."
-- from Modern Brewery Age, May 27, 1996 (https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Consumer+Reports+rates+beer+in+recent+article.-a018509608)

 

At Ohio University in the late 1970s, Goebel was the cheap beer of choice. $1.25 for a six-pack. We could always scrape up five quarters, but when the price went up to $1.30, finding that extra nickel was hard.

 

Well. let's just say that some Ph.D. programs in beer tasting are better than others...

 

I have always enjoyed it for what it is, but it doesn’t have anywhere near as much market placement as it did even ten years ago. It was also among a handful of such American pale lager brands that my father used to buy by the returnable* case, so there are fond memories attached!

*Did I buy it back in college to use those returnables for bottling home brew? You bet!

 

In the late 70s and early 80s, I bottled with the green Molson bottles. They were shorter than the 12oz returnable exports, so took up less space than returnables, and, with the green glass, they were easier to monitor the fill levels when bottling.

 

I miss the green bottle and that "Draught Beer" taste (so difficult to find in a lightstruck beer!).

Scotch Buy, brewed by Falstaff (which was the source of numerous private labels and generic "Beer" brands in that period - but hardly the only one) was so bad its sale was banned - until some do-gooder judge came along.

Scotch Buy was a sad replacement for Safeway's famous house pilsner, Brown Derby, which had been brewed by over at least a dozen different breweries over the decades. Granted, by the 1970s, Brown Derby was just another cheap beer.

 

Had 6 x 16oz of them last year while I was on an AAL tear.

It wasnt' too shabby!

 

By the late 1980s, Old Milwaukee had become Stroh's best selling beer and was still in the Top Ten of US beers into the early 1990s, selling over 5 million bbl. - a US total market share of 2.7% (Stroh's got the brand when they bought Schlitz at the beginning of the decade). After Pabst bought most of the Stroh/Heileman portfolio in 1999, Old Milwaukee became their best seller, initially outselling Pabst Blue Ribbon.

"LAD", a retired Miller-Ft. Worth worker who used to post here on a BA noted a decade ago:

Greg Duehs, who was the Pabst "Master Brewer" from 2012-2018, back when they briefly revived a few of the Ballantine ales (IPA, Burton, Brewers Gold), told me that Pabst blended a few different beers to create other ones, noting that the then-current Miller-Coors version of Ballantine XXX Ale's

So, it's obvious that the MC-brewed Pabst brands do not all have unique recipes. IIRC, many of them had very similar listed ABV's in the 4.6 - 4.7% range and they've also mentioned "high gravity brewing" and suggested post-fermentation additions of hop extract, so it wouldn't be difficult to create slightly different beers from the same basic base beer.

 

Old Mud was my grandmother's beer of choice.
I'll tell you what, it may not be the best drinking beer out there, but paired with some freshly caught blue crabs and Old Bay, it makes one heck of a great crab boil!
Plus, it also tastes good washing down those salty crabs on a hot & humid Florida day. It just didn't get much better than that.

 

In the early 70s in CA, Safeway had a choice of cheap beers: Brown Derby or Padre, both brewed by General (S&P controlled). I never saw Scotch Buy. And "just another cheap beer" is right. Every chain drug store and supermarket seemed to have a General private label. (Remember Regal Select, "one of America's two great beers")? I have a Rose Maddox CD with a recording of part of the Maddox Bros. radio show from the 30s sponsored by Regal brewery. I never saw Brown Derby or other private labels when I visited Portland (even with a General brewery almost next door). Wholesaling laws might have made them unattractive there.

 

Brown Derby sounds like what happens in the Porto-potties after a long day of drinking at a beer fest.

 

Yeah, in the mid-70s I was living in L.A. and had a buddy back in NJ who collected beer cans and thanks to my shipping/receiving clerk job, I was sending him back all those General cans and learned which chain carried which brands. (I shopped at Vons, but can't recall which ones they carried - that happens after 50 years, I guess). Never did find Padre, as I recall.

I have a Maddox Bros. & Rose cd, too (I think - haven't listened to it in years, wonder if it's the same one?) but, recall that Regal was among the best selling CA breweries in that era, before the so-called "Eastern breweries" (mostly from the mid-West, like AB, Schlitz, Goebel and Pabst - but also /briefly/ Liebmann/Rheingold) moved into the state post-War.

Yeah, that one was a puzzle when I first came upon the slogan.
"What, are they trying to play it safe so they don't get into arguments at the California chapter of the Master Brewers Assoc.?" But, apparently, it referred to their other brand, which was the namesake of the brewery at the time of the above list. (Later called Regal Pale Brewing Co., so they had a "variety" of beers ).

It was a cool way to keep those heritage brands alive, even if it was likely all just Lucky Lager - or something worse! - inside the cans and bottles. Cooler to buy Regal Select or Brew 102 in California than Shop Rite Beer in the northeast. I mean, that's someone's Mom with a shopping cart in silhouette on the label!

Yeah, store private label beer brands were illegal or just too many hoops to jump through in certain states (that's the origin of that "Scotch Buy ban" headline from Nebraska).

 

Cascade was an old Acme brand that I saw in San Diego (never saw Acme, though). They were brewed by Blitz, and Cascade was awful. A-1 came from the National brewery in Phoenix. I thought that was pretty good (like 3.2 National Boh?). Pabst still brewed Eastside (and maybe Old Tap?) We bought Eastside once returnable quarts. Burgie was still around too. I believe General brought in Einbeck Bock from its Walter brewery in CO.

 

Yeah, Burgie had a bumpy ride in the 1960-70s, as I noted in an earlier thread:

The once-huge SF/California brand, Burgermeister (#3 in CA in the 1950s), bounced around a lot - the brewery bought by Schlitz only to have the Feds rule they had to sell it over anti-trust concerns (Schlitz was looking to buy Labatt, which owned half of General/Lucky Lager - #1 in CA at the time). So, Schlitz sold the brewery and brand to Chicago's Meister Brau which closed the SF brewery after only a few years, selling the Burgie brand to Theo. Hamm (which at the time had breweries in LA and SF) and then a few years later, Hamm sold it to Pabst (which still had a CA brewery) when Hamm shut down their CA breweries and were bought by Olympia.

Workers at the closing SF Hamm plant hoped to remain open to brew Burgermeister after the Hamm's brand and St. Paul brewery were sold to Olympia but the brand went to Pabst, giving them a 3rd California cheap brand, along with Old Tap and Eastside.

 

Safeway now has Faded Flannel house beer. Craft beer but pretty lame and almost the same price as Hop Valley etc. Why bother?

 

Only ever see the Old Milwaukee NA up here in Oregon. When i was in Atlanta back in the early 90s i like Old Milwaukee Ice. It was new back then and quite a kick for your buck (which i was all about then, being poor).