Beer Nostalgia with a Parent

I introduced my dad to duvel 10 years ago and he absolutely loved it and I was thrilled because he was a coors light drinker so that beer will always be apart of us ..he passed away last year..I will be buying a 4pak for Thanksgiving in his honor

 

Funny thing is I'm drinking a hopsmack by toppling Goliath and my 4 year old takes a smell of.it and says dad is this orange juice? Lol I gave him a sip and he likes it lol I can't wait to remind him of all the great beer he actually tried when he's older

 

Back in the day 16 Oz Carling Black Label returnable bottles.

 

Wow. Your dad lived a charmed beer life. I was lucky enough to find a single surviving six pack of king size Ballantine Ale cans from Newark in about 1970. Fantastic brew. By my calculation your dad would have had access to that great beer from Repeal to about 1969, when Ballantine closed. That's over 35 years of good beer. What did he drink after 1970? (I regularly drank Falstaff's Ballantine Ale in the early 70s, but it didn't compare.)

 

P. Ballantine & Sons closed in March, 1972 as noted by the UPI headline below (thought the post-Repeal owners, led by the Baudenhausen brothers, did sell out to a NY investment firm in '69).


Tho' the above does get a couple of things wrong just in that small 'snip' - while the brewing company was 132 years old, the brewery itself dated from 1856-57, built by the Schalk Brothers, early US lager beer brewers. Ballantine, then exclusively an ale brewer, bought it in the 1879. Ballantine would close the ale brewery at their original location on the Passaic River in the mid-1910s. And, of course, the Falstaff (Narragansett) brewery in Rhode Island was not in Providence, but in nearby Cranston.

 

Yeah, some of my favorite family photos feature beer. Mom, pregnant with me, in front of an Albany-area bar with the same name as my father, "Genesee Beer and Ale" and "Fitzgerald" neons in the window. Dad and my grandmother in some park in north Jersey, a can Krueger Beer in her hand. Me (approx. 3) and Mom on some beach, her drinking a can of Schaefer. In the 50s, Schaefer Beer was their chosen brand - makes sense since coming from upstate NY (Schaefer had a brewery in Albany, formerly Beverwyck) to the metro NY/NJ area. OTOH there is a pre-school birthday party pic of me with cans of Rheingold in the kitchen.

And countless pics of my ol' man and a nearby bottle Ballantine XXX Ale - his long time favorite from the '60s to the 00s. He once told me he had his first one the same night he saw Hitchcock's Psycho. Previously, he'd been somewhat prejudiced against the brewery since, after moving to NJ in early '50s, it was one of many local Newark-area companies in which he couldn't gain employment after practically "begging" them. He used to mention that after Ballantine closed and some now-pensionless older guys (i.e., his age) from the brewery worked at our plant.

When he and I worked together on the night shift (5:30 pm - 4 am ) in the 70s, he'd always have a case of Ballantine returnables (bought at a rare NJ retailer with a PA-style drive-thru for case sales) in his hatchback next to the cooler full of ice. Even after we stopped commuting together I'd always have a key to get in and sit and have an ale (or two...) during breaks and at dinner time.

The best beer I even had? One scorching summer, when heat on the line was often over 100° - even at night. I was new on a back-breaking (literally - the previous two workers were out on medical with back problems) job, made even hotter by its location near some ovens. Sweat bands lasted at most an hour. I see the old man comin' with a paper cup (can't remember now if it was the soda machines, the coffee machines or both that sold their product in paper cups) with a paper towel over it. "That's strange...what's he got there?" I thought. He left it on my work bench.

I took a sip = lukewarm-ish Ballantine XXX Ale. (< there's no Emoji for "absolute bliss", is there?)

 

Bell’s Amber Ale.

My Dad and I turned 58 and 40 this year. He drank either Bud light, Labatt Blue light, or Molson Golden for as long as I could remember. After college, I took a job in the DC area where I was exposed to craft beer. I would take some different stuff home every time I went to visit. After several “how can you drink that” and “wtf is that” conversations, he tried the Amber Ale and really enjoyed it. The next time I came home for a visit, I went to put my weekend offerings away and found a partially drank 12-pack of it in his fridge. That beer triggered something with him, because his taste and enthusiasm for craft beer has expanded since. Around 8 years ago, he even got into home brewing. The home brewers club he belongs to meets every Friday, and those guys make some great stuff!

I moved away in 2003, and my Dad is my still my best buddy. Every time I’ve been home to visit, we always wind up in his garage sharing beer, catching up, hanging out with friends, talking about brew recipes, strategizing for the upcoming deer season...this list goes on. We’ve even brewed a batch of porter or two.

Those long nights in the garage are what I enjoy the most and really look forward to, and I’m sure he’d tell you the same. Those nights are when I hug more people than usual, and when I laugh the hardest. I no longer have to take brews with me when I head home to visit. Just like when I was growing up, Dad’s got my back.

 

My dad wasn’t a huge beer drinker. He’d typically pick up a case of whatever was on sale (Hamm’s, Old Style, Old Milwaukee, Stroh’s) and it’d last a couple months. Every now and then he’d get a sixer of Boston Lager or some import. And we always had a few different options in the cooler during BBQs and get togethers. That said, I’ve had numerous experiences with him:

- Small sips of beer as a kid. Let me have my first can after Jr High so I’d know how it affected me in a safer environment than a HS party.
- Witnessed the first time I was drunk. Hockey tournament in HS, roomed with a senior, bathtub full of Busch, 1am ruckus, he was the asst coach who came to investigate.
- Sharing Pete’s Wicked, Guinness, Sam Adams, and the like when my folks visited me in college.
- Going to numerous brewpubs and taprooms over the years. He always enjoys it but it’s just not something he’d do on his own.
- GI stout fest for a few years, went on a tour at the Fulton St brewery, and we share a bottle of BCBS or Prop every year.

My folks are getting up there in age and they’ve been pretty diligent about isolating, so this year has been tough. I’ve set some stuff aside for when we can safely get together again, just hoping that it actually happens.

 

Thanks for the correction. Even more time for the dad to enjoy Ballantine Ale. We probably found the six pack of Newark Ballantine in '73. We lived in San Diego, where we had never seen the Newark original. We found the ale in a liquor store on a foray into the Los Angeles area, I think to attend a Bill Monroe appearance at the Palomino in Feb. 73. https://www.facebook.com/2752972392...headliner-bill-monroe-febru/1535569743186299/

 

Hey, coincidentally, the same city where I was served my last Newark-brewed Ballantine XXX Ale!

Three years after yours.

Still have the proof, too.

 

My first legal beer with my dad was Schmidt’s on tap with a California Burger.

 

I still have green tavern-tall Ballantine returnable quart bottles that I used for homebrew in the late 70s. A few still have the Falstaff Cranston labels. I also have my Grandfather's prohibition-era cast iron crown capper that he used for fruit wines during prohibition.