Grandpa Brews

Why not buy some Genesee Bock beers?



https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-733.608088/#post-6413490

Cheers!

 

If you clicked on my last post that I had mentioned, you would see that I am quite a regular buyer of Genny Bock


Cheers!

 

Well, the brewers traditionally claimed they were brewed in the fall/early winter for a spring release, but just as in the current beer scene, there was "seasonal creep" and the release dates became earlier and earlier - in some parts of the country by the 60s, they were on the shelves in January. (See some articles at my BOCK BEER page and an interesting 1940s P. BALLANTINE & SONS memo about marketing bock as a limited seasonal release.)

In addition, even after Repeal the popularity of bocks came in waves in many regions of the country (the mid-West's bock market was pretty steady).
There was one after WWII (when most brewers stopped making bock due to shortages/rationing) late 40s-early 50s, and there were a final one in the late '70s-early '80s in the northeast.

Schaefer re-introduced their bock in the late 1970s (released in December!) and Falstaff canned Ballantine Bock around the same era, so sometime between 1973-1980.

 

Yes, California is a re-creation of an old beer, so of course Cluster would be appropriate.

 

I don't know if it's because I grew up drinking some of those "old beers," but the California Lager really struck a flavorful chord with me. Maybe old isn't necessarily bad?

 

To me, the short lived Olympia 95% Malt was gooder than any Oly I had in the 70s and 80s.

 

What a trove of info. Thanks again, added your brilliant page to my favorites as well!

 

Back in my post college ski bum days I had a buddy who dated a girl who was originally from Montana. When they would go visit he would always bring back a case of Rainier. Always enjoyed it. Remember bringing it up the chairlift at Mt. Snow in a backpack in the morning and drinking it in the on the deck of the North-face Lodge at Lunch......Man those where great times....would love to have a few right now......

 

Sounds like one I missed, but I was a sucker for Coors' Winter Special* (beer? lager? whatever it was called -- I miss that stuff), so it goes to show that you can't always judge a brewery by its flagship.

*Winterfest!

 

Yeah, for the '80s, that was a pretty interesting beer (a Coors product that I made an exception for). Looks like it was first released in '86 (so, post-Killian's) but not much other info in this circa mid-90s Coors promo piece:


I see where Coors' "micro inside a macro" unit, A. C. Golden, under it's "Colorado Native" line makes a seasonal beer labeled Winterfest but at 7% seems too alcoholic to be the same recipe, but the current description here on BA implies it once was:

 

Tasted different every year to me.

 

Yuengling claims to have been brewing Lord Chesterfield since 1829. That would be your Grandpa's Grandpa's Grandpa brew, though actual history on the beer and if the current version in any way approximates older versions is quite scarce here on the interwebs. I have found images of Lord Chesterfield labels that list copyright 1934, so they were putting it out soon after prohibition ended.

 

As noted in post #43(following up on info in #42) above:
That's not what they claimed in 1934.
Obviously, whatever ales Yuengling brewed in the beginning, they would not have been the classic carbonated, clear, hoppy "cream/sparkling" ale that LCA was after Repeal.

Yeah, they used that label - complete with that copyright date - into, at least, the late 1980s (when they briefly switched their T/A bottles from stubbies to "heritage" style before going with the now industry standard longnecks). It was a much nicer label.


And the same image was used on the rectangular label on those T/A stubbies...

 

Interesting stuff. There doesn't seem to be much info on what kinds of beer Yuengling was making pre-prohibition. My guess is that either they made some kind of hoppy ale that was sort of similar in character to LCA, or it's just made-up marketing.

 

Yeah, they brewed a lot of different ales and lagers in the 90 or so years in the Pre-Pro period:

Besides the above, there was "Pale Ale", an "Export" and a "Bock" - and probably many more.

After Repeal in the 1930s, they also had an "Old Oxford Ale" - sometimes labeled "Cream Ale" that appears to have been more popular at the time than the "Lord Chesterfield Ale".

 

National Bohemian or Natty Bo still big in MD.

 

That's a good grandpa brew for sure. Widely available, if not ubiquitous, here.

 

Genny Cream all day in western New York....still in glass 16 ozers if you’re so inclined.

 

"Still big" is relative, of course - as it is with every Pabst-owned brand*.

In the late-50s > early-60s, the beers from the National Brewing Co. (so, along with National Bohemian, also National Premium and Colt 45) accounted for over 1/3 of the entire Maryland beer market, according to FTC statistics.

(I've seen newspaper men quoted as claiming it was over 50% - maybe they meant Baltimore only, or just faulty memories. Although, combine National's market share with the other big Baltimore brewery of the period, Gunther, and they controlled just about 60% of Maryland's market in 1957).

That'd likely meant close to 1M bbl by the mid-1960s. When Pabst began an attempt to revive the brand in 2011, offering draught, etc., they said the current MD sales of NB was around 600,000 cs., so about 43.5k bbl.
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* At the dawn of the "craft era" in 1977 today's Pabst-owned brands, from about 10 different brewing companies, accounted for about 45% of the US beer market.
#1 AB had a 23% market share.