Bygone beers

Hmmm... Newcastle being something of an outlier, there...

I drove through the Ohio valley back around 1976, armed with a list of beers to look out for - Hudepohl and Schoenling's Little Kings Cream Ale obviously on the list, as was Royal Amber (brewed by Heileman only at their Wiedemann brewery in Newport, IIRC). Scored a six/eight pack or quarts of all three (and possible one of Schoenling's lagers, too) but I've always wondered how I found out about the "superpremium" local beer, Royal Amber, to even look for it...

Then, just a few days ago @dennis3951 and had a discussion about music critic Christgau's 1975 article on beer, and there was my answer:

Just about his highest rated domestic beer.

 

You forgot one that I think was also from the Cincy area - Burger Beer. My grandpa used to have a case of returnables sitting in the kitchen, and that is where I got my first taste of beer, probably when I was 6-7 years old. I'd pull out an empty one and drink the last few drops that he left in there.

 

Yeah, Burger might be before his time - they closed around 1973 and Hudepohl bought the brand. The new Christian Moerlein company that owns the rights to most of the classic Cincinnati brands revived Bürger Beer in recent years (complete with the umlaut - not sure the original Burger Brewing Co. used it, at least in the post-Repeal era).

 

Sure, you might have been in your prime, but Burger obviously wasn't - - seeing as they closed up shop.

Checking the barrelage, tho', they were still selling in the 1/2M bbl range that Hudepohl was in (late '60s-early '70s), thus making both twice the size of Schoenling. Would have to do some further research in why Burger threw in the bar towel.

Well, Ballantine was a Newark, NJ brewery (the brand moving to Falstaff's Naragansett brewery that same year) but once did have a large presence in Ohio, which was a somewhat big ale market, sort of the western most part of the surviving US ale-drinking region that stretched from New England through Upstate New York, dipping into PA and NJ. Carling Red Cap was brewed at Carling's Michigan brewery at some point, tho' in the northeast we got it from their MA or MD breweries.

I was surprised to learn that Rheingold, near death in the mid-70s, marketed their great hoppy bottled/canned version of McSorley's Cream Ale* (it had long been a draught-only) in Ohio when first released, specifically targeting young/college age drinkers, no less.

* If one's experience with McSorley's dates from the Heileman, Stroh and even more insipid Pabst eras (and whatever product they serve at the NYC bar in those years), well, you don't know what you missed... See the McSorley's entry (page down about half way) on my US DRY HOPPED beers page.

 

Yeah, well, that sort of deal can be divided into two groups - there certainly were the brewing companies that aggressively were buying up brands and breweries - Heileman, perhaps, the most successful (... up until they weren't) but Carling, Falstaff, Associated, Hamm and a few others tried to growth into a national brewery that way.

And then deals like Hudepohl buying Burger. Probably just seen at the time as a way to make up for lost market share and keep their brewery running closer to capacity. Lots of similar deals in the big brewing cities of the northeast and mid-West that saw their markets being taken over by the national brands. Schaefer/Piels, Rheingold/Ruppert, C. Schmidt/Ortlieb, Narragansett/Haffenreffer, Schmidt/Duquense, Stroh/Goebel.

Finally, in Cinci in the mid-80s, Hudepohl-Schoenling --- the list is near endless.

 

Back when I was a (very young) kid in Columbus, my dad drove a delivery truck for THE Franklin Brewing Co. I vaguely remember him talking about Ben Brew and the "beer truck," but the only real connection I had with the brewery itself was a couple of cone-top cans he saved along with his first pay envelope containing the princely sum of $0.02 (after deductions).


(Image from https://www.steelcanvas.com)

 

Years ago, I almost rented an apartment in the Home Brewery building in RVA, former site of Richbrau, the first canned beer in America.

There are a lot of bygone beers that I lament not having tried, but the two I'd have like to have the most are the Ballantine's Burton Ale and late 1940's Stroh's, when it was still all-malt. Would feel like a victory lap over the ****s.

 

Richmond is where the first canned beers were sold (January 24, 1935) but it was beer from Kreuger Brewing Co.

“Then, in 1935, the Kreuger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey, joined with the American Can Company to test-market canned beer. Richmond was chosen as the test market for the first-ever cans of beer: Krueger’s Cream Ale. By the end of the year, 36 breweries throughout the US were producing beer in cans. By contrast, Home Brewing Company, still pushing to get their beer into bottles, would fail to offer Richbrau in cans until 1952.”

https://rvamag.com/eatdrink/richmond-beeristoric-a-history-of-beer-brewing-in-rva.html

Cheers!

 

The first "commercially-available" canned beer in the US is generally considered to be Krueger Beer and Cream Ale, out of Newark, NJ which they did originally market it in the DelMarVa region (thought to be far enough away from Krueger's primary NY-NJ-NE market in case things went wrong).

Never came across any reference to Stroh's Bohemian being all-malt in the post-Repeal era - their labels in the 30's read "Brewed only from Choicest Materials" (which was sort of one of the subtle ways brewers at the time admitted to using adjuncts) but most of Stroh's advertising in that period concentrated on being "Fire-Brewed" - so more on process and not many specifics about ingredients. Of course, the absence of mentioning an adjunct does not prove anything one way or another. If you've got a reliable citation, would be happy to change the page(s) noted below.

By the late 50's they advertised their use of rice as their adjunct which, IIRC, changed by the mid-60s to corn. (See my RICE ADJUNCT page for some Stroh's references - in fact, it's one of the first examples).

Stroh's Bock Beer, into the 1980s, on the other hand, was one of the very few all-malt beers brewed in the US. That one's covered in my US ALL MALT BEERS page, 'bout 3/4 of the way down, left side - look for the Stroh's Bock label..

 

Hundreds of so-called "OLIVE DRAB beer cans" in lots of private collections, too. A quick Gogglin' of the term turns up lots of examples - such as this one (on someone's Whirlpool? )

 

Catamount Brewing is who I miss. One of the first in VT. Had a great lineup of brews but could not make it.

I believe they sold to harpoon

 

New Albion Ale was an original and pioneering beer. I drank a few back in the day. In fact, on this day in 1579 Sir Francis Drake arrived in Northern California naming the region New Albion and claiming English sovereignty.

 

Yup, corn is mentioned in the below video (e.g., at the 4:00 mark).

Cheers!

 

A short paragraph in American Brewers' Review from 1914 describes the machinery of Stroh's newly completed brewhouse, including "malt and rice hoppers". Seems safe to assume that rice went into their Bohemian brand, if not all their brands of beer.


Speaking of Stroh's I found this ad to be interesting, supposedly from 1910. It describes a price increase due to the high cost of imported materials used in the beer (Bohemian hops one assumes). It is noted that a special beer will be made and sold at the old price. Makes me wonder what sort of beer that was if it was going to be a substitute for Bohemian and if they were going to keep the costs down, did they replace Bohemian hops with Bavarian hops perhaps?