Premium beer back in the day?

I thought I was styling with Lowenbrau in the early 80s.

 

Those $9.29 (1980) cases would be $30.78 today. Not too bad, really, and maybe even cheaper than some all-malt, Craft Pilsners today.

 

I was probably making about $11/hr at my union job, so after taxes it took about a hour to make enough for a case of beer.

A few years later, after a Reagan-era layoff, a year and a half of unemployment + extensions and finally a new job - at a different Fortune 500 company - I was probably making around $6/hr as a short-term (3 month) temp. So, a hour got me a 12 pack of something popular-priced, I guess.

 

How widely distributed was Anchor Steam then? Was it just in the bay area?

Cheers!

 

I remember thinking Michelob was the classiest of beers, but that was well before my time. For those of you with discerning palates drinking in the ‘70s was Michelob all that special? Or just branding?

 

Grew up in Chicago, started drinking beer in early 80's. Old Style dominated Chicago market then. Budweiser was generally considered a step up. Michelob, Special Export, and Augsburger pretty much were considered premium beers. Coors still had a mystique about it as it was not available anywhere in the midwest. My father was the OG beer snob and usually stuck to Heineken and this really unknown beer from California called Anchor Steam.

 

Anchor draft and bottles appeared in San Diego in the early 70s, so was probably available throughout Ca, depending on Steam Beer finding distributors. I liked Anchor very much then, but it was a bit expensive to become a regular, considering my meager income. My "super premium" choice was Ballantine Ale (Falstaff version). My roommate and I would regularly split a quart of the ale in the evening. We were also fans of Andeker, but it was a shade more expensive than Ballantine Ale, so wasn't a regular choice. We once did a vertical blind tasting (Michelob, Bud, Busch Bavarian). We ranked them #1 Busch, #2 Bud, and #3 Mich so Michelob wasn't on the shopping list. Blame AB or our taste buds, I guess.

 

See my comment above recounting a blind tasting of AB beers in the early 70s.

 

I started back in the 60s and Michelob was considered special when compared to what else was available. Coors was thought special because it was hard to get.

 

As an addendum to Patkorn's reply re: northern CA availability, according to a 1980 Brewers Digest article on the new Anchor brewery (based, in part, on an interview with Maytag):

* Wisdom was the importer of Mexican brands like Tecate, Bohemia (Ale), Indio, Chihuahua and Carta Blanca, as well as UK's Watneys and smaller brands from Australia, NZ, Germany and Denmark.

At the time, Anchor expected to have a barrelage of 20k for the year - thus already larger than the eventual "microbrewery" definition limit of under 10-12-15k bbl that would come along a few years later. Maytag tells BD he hoped to gradually grow to 35-40k, possibly as high as 50k "...in the far distant future. This will remain a small brewery."

 

When I was splurging on the “good stuff” way back then my choice was always Molson Golden. Ah the good old days.

 

No idea. I remember my Grandparents drinking it and seeing it in the store. But I was more concerned with riding my bmx bike and listening to The Tubes and trying to get to 2nd base with girls back then.

 

In the 70s may be the last time that I had a Michelob. I never could find a taste in it that was any better than the common beers that I was drinking, so why spend the extra money if there was no benefit?

 

It was available in Highland Park, New Jersey in 1974.

 

For those of you who were Michelob drinkers, did you notice a difference in the taste of Michelob when in 2007 it became an all malt beer?

Cheers!

 

Back then, I'd read/heard somewhere that some in the industry felt the bottled/canned version released circa 1960 of what had been an all-malt, draught-only Michelob from Anheuser-Busch was somewhat a failure. It was a pretty nice beer I thought (especially on tap) that is until - well, as I've told the story several times on these forums:

Was not impressed. I remember saying, "Uh, so they took out the rice ... but didn't replace it with more barley malt?" Also, the hopping was nowhere near what I recalled but, of course, that was nearly 30 years of personal palate shift as far as hop bitterness and flavor go.

 

Ever since I saw this post that silly "Pabst is here at popular prices" jingle has been in my head. Thanks a lot!

 

Maybe that means it'll leave my head! Sorry but...

Here, try this. Sing along now:
Here's to good friends tonight is kind of special...
(The previous earworm I had, thanks to this thread).

 

Michelob and Lowenbrau were the premiums for the most part. The cool kids drank Heinekin and Moosehead, Fosters oil cans were a big deal - hardly premium. I had a liking for St. Pauli - please forgive me... Coors Banquet because it had to be smuggled in to MA in those days. So I guess that's an idea of what was considered "premium", but they were more or less for mass consumption. And there was Guiness. I'm talking mid seventies and I will admit that my beer sophistication level was pretty much finding something with alcohol that I could afford and drink in ridiculous volumes.

If you looked, you could find Samuel Smith's Tadcaster Porter and Oatmeal Stout. Harp Lager was around. Bass Ale could be found pretty easily, and I am sure there were others in a similar vein, but finding great beer was not something I was doing back then...

 

While not dealing with the 70s, as per a 1968 edition of Svensk bryggeritidskrift, the journal of the Swedish brewers' association, and a visit by members of the association to the US and various breweries there in that same year (among which Anheuser Busch's brewery in Houston), Michelob was brewed to 12.6% original gravity, while Budweiser was brewed to 12% and Busch to 11.6%. If we assume a degree of attenuation (apparent) of 75% we get (approximately) 5.09%, 4.81%, and 4.64% abv respectively. Which seem like reasonable and realistic numbers to me as far as approximations go (maybe the Michelob abv could be slightly lower to keep it from entering Malt Liquor territory in some markets?), but the only hard numbers I've got is of course the OGs.

Of course things most likely gradually changed over the course of the 70s along with the broader market and continually shifting US brewing industry standards. But with the exception of Busch, I'd say both Budweiser and Michelob, going by OG alone, were built to have some backbone to them by the late 1960s compared to the overall market. The hopping rate and IBUs are of course a different topic. If Budweiser was below 20 IBUs as seems likely going by some of jesskidden's material, I guess Michelob might have been at or a notch above 20 IBUs to account for the higher gravity? That would be my guess at least, still keeping things on the mild side. The x-factor would be the hop flavor of Michelob compared to Budweiser and Busch, going by jesskidden's recollections it seems like it would have been more prominent in Michelob by the 1970s, which makes sense in my book as a way to make a super premium beer stand out. After all it remains a common means of making higher priced beers, in a portfolio of beers, stand out in flavor.