Premium beer back in the day?

Interesting. Yeah, seems to have been test-marketed starting in 1991 (so, about a decade and half after Natural Light) and sold in the "popular-price" segment - when first released, Natural Light was typically priced the same or even slightly higher than premium-priced Budweiser. Yeah, NP appears to have disappeared sometime in the mid/late 90s - don't think it ever made in the northeast.

 

I'm guessing AB felt they needed a complementary Natural beer to compete against the new Keystone duo of beers.

 

Good Lord! I sold all of those brands in the early 80s. I really did not like the petrol stinky nature of Moosehead. I would've always rather had a Michelob. But the beer sold and I did learn about marketing and packaging in the process. It served me well and kept me balanced about judging people's taste preferences.

 

It wasn't so bad if you knew the right people, which we did - until the Department of Liquor Control caught up with 'em, anyway.

 

Or a super-duper premium.

 

I lived in Burlington, VT back then and we would visit Montreal often. I thought I drank it in the US, but maybe my memory isn't so good fifty years later.
Cheers!

 

Guinness was a crazy outlier in my younger days. Mackeson XXX, too. Normally smart people would swear that stouts were nearly as strong as hard liquor and had more calories than a huge dessert.

Maybe they were just able to see into the future because now both of those things are true

Either way, I only recall seeing them at specialty stores and Irish/English pubs at the time. Oddly, I don't recall the same sort of urban legends applying to beers like Turbo Dog, Pete's Wicked, Newcastle, etc. It was very specifically a stout thing.

 

We travelled from Albany,NY to Quebec after a night of partying to get Bradors at the border…. What a dumb idea!

 

But you lived to tell about it!

Cheers!

 

Makes a good story but that hungover long ass drive for literally 5 minutes at the border,,, and we were poor so we bought 2 cases,,, and gas (between 4 guys)

 

That must have been pre-9/11. In 2008 my wife and I returned from our vacation in Quebec City and it took us over an hour to make it through the border. Outrageous long lines and they grilled you when you got chance to speak to a US customs and border person. It took up less than 1 minute to enter Canada.

Cheers!

 

Thanks for that write-up. Great history there. Yeah Andeker might have still been made but I don't recall seeing it in northern MN at the time....

 

Loved Mackeson..never see it anymore..does anyone remember Watney Cream Stout circa late 90's maybe? Early 2000's?

 

That was a very tasty beer!

It was contract brewed in Canada, I believe, and different from the English draught product.

 

Oh, I know the deal - the years umm... decades all start to blend together and such memories can be based on where one lived and what one drank (as opposed to what was available). The only reason I know about Moosehead is the topic has come up before, esp. in regard to popular Canadian beers in the US in the 60s and 70s. (I always kinda hate to ruin people's memories but I do it anyway - I don't want to see someone lose a bet. Yeah, that's why I do it. And I find out stuff I didn't know - like @Domingo and AB Natural Pilsner.)

As for faulty beer memories, it's often happened to me. 'Bout a decade ago (maybe here on the BA forums, maybe in so-called "real life"?) I was mentioning how even though Heileman was a top 5 US brewer I never had any of their classic mid-west brands portfolio, other than drinking a lot of Special Export during a 6 week stint working in St. Paul. Sure, some of the Carling-National brands were still marketed in the northeast in the '70s but not many of their other brands. Then, coincidentally, a friend send me a bunch of old photos from my time living in the Finger Lakes in the mid-80s. There I was, in two different pictures, drinking bottles of Sterling.

Brador's a funny one, alright. It was a popular cross-border "self-imported" beer - so much so that Molson did start bringing it in via their own Martlet Importers. (Even advertised on TV in the Boston area). That probably killed the brand's popularity, since it could be bought at any old store, same price as the other Molson brands at the time, and sans any cool beer-run tales about getting it through customs...


Can't tell if that US label had the classic "Liqueur de Malt" terminology like the bi-lingual Canadian label. (Caligione later would Anglicize it and use it for DFH's malt liquor in the 40 oz. bottle, I guess?).

Though the brand wound up owned by ABInBev (via 2001 purchase of Whitbread by Interbrew), in the US it is brewed - apparently under license? - by Florida Brewing Co. https://www.floridabeer.com/our-beers/mackeson/

 

I also grew up in Ohio back in the day and when I started drinking beer in the mid 60's and Stroh's was the best. Carling Black Label was the next best and Michelob was out of my financial reach. Wow, how things have changed.

 

I thought Carling's low price beers in the late 60s and 70s could be pretty good. I thought their Heidelberg (Carling Tacoma, WA brewery) was the pick of the locals in that region, and the Alt Dark was good too. A locker room photo of the Portland Timber (mostly English) soccer team showed them drinking Heidelberg, but they complained that it was gassy. I never saw Black Label or Red Cap when living in Oregon then. My brother in law was a Stroh fan in the Chicago area in the 60s.

 

Actually, their big "popular-priced" competitor brands in the early 90s were Miller's Milwaukee's Best (6th best selling beer in the US, at 6.6M bbl.) and Stroh's Old Milwaukee (at #8, 5.6M bbl - #4 Stroh's best selling beer and only one in the US Top Ten). Of course, AB's own Busch outsold both at #5 and nearly 10 million barrels. Things have sure changed in the "below-premium" US beer segment in the last 30 years, that is for certain.

 

Late 90s it was mostly the big name European imports- Heineken, Stella if you were super fancy, Lowenbrau, Beck's, Amstel. Guinness if you wanted to really stand out. For folks that were into microbrewers, as we called them back then, Sam Adam's, Sierra Nevada, and Pete's Wicked were the only ones that I can recall being able to find almost anywhere.