Beer Nostalgia with a Parent

Nice - the classic "Bumper".

I have a few (as well as a shell for that size bottle), along with some now-unlabeled Narragansett Imperial Quarts and ½ gallon "picnics" but none fit well under any of my cappers, so I used them infrequently. My primary homebrew large bottle was the steinie quart (I had them from Pabst and Ballantine Beer, the most commonly found in region in the time) - it was a perfect BYOB size.

Can't say I can recall the Ale Bumper bottles on store shelves or coolers - I've wondered if they limited the marketing area or just abandoned the bottle for T/A's near the end (when I was of legal age).

 

I purchased the tall quarts of Ale from Mastic Beer on Long Island. I have a reusable case (shell) that they came in. The Cranston bottles had no neck label ("bumper" is new to me).

 

I can remember when I was five years old , sitting in the kitchen of our Offutt Air Force Base housing in Omaha. My dad is eating crackers , Limburger cheese , anchovies and drinking a falstaff beer from the bottle . A cool bottle of beer on a hot summer day. Just sitting, talking . Not a fan of either Limburger or anchovies and he joined AA when I was 8. He never drank once he joined AA, a program that worked very well for him. He used his medical training plus his personal experience to help set up some of the first drug and alcohol rehab programs in Illinois and nationally with BCBS. I drink beer and am always very aware of how much I am drinking and how much those around me are drinking .

 

It’s a bit dusty in here, reading this thread … By chance I was flipping through some old photos just today and shuffled past one of my dad and I sitting together over cans of Bud. If I’d been drinking the nectar of the gods it could not have been better. I distinctly remember the occasion and how much I cherished it even at the time, when my dad was in poor health. He’s gone now almost 19 years.

 

A real salute to your dad for that great work!

 

Yeah, as far I've found, it's a relatively obscure term* for a large bottle, possibly originally from the UK (?). P. Ballantine & Sons used it for their quarts cans in the 1930s as well as on the same shaped brown bottles for Ballantine Beer. Not sure when Ballantine dropped using it.

(Some PA "case law" articles used it referring to 12 X 32 cases of quart beer bottles, too, as did some soda pop manufacturers.)

 

My folks had one of those cassette tape answering machines. It malfunctioned and accidentally recorded him on the phone speaking to a young person and doing a 12 step call. Convincing that individual to stop drinking and that he would pick upThat person and take them to their first AA meeting. I digitized and save that and will listen to it occasionally. The number of lives that he touched on a direct basis and through his business work are countless. His misfortune as an alcoholic was a lesson to me.

Drink responsibly

 

I think the first shared-beer moment with my now...what, 77 year old Dad was over a Heineken decades ago. I was all of 14, he's French, and he really didn't care about the drinking age.
I remember drinking that first beer with him, split the bottle, and I thought "people enjoy this?"

But even then, I knew I'd remember that sunset over the Shenandoah Valley with a misty Blue Ridge Mountains in the background.

He's not doing all that well these days; has some on-going kidney issues (stones), and he's a bit on the depressed end of the spectrum after a long, active life. He struggled after retirement, but I can always lift his spirit by talking to him about those early days, and also our shared glasses of wine in France.

Cheers...

 

As a kid back in the mid 1970's I was an avid beer can collector. Being way to young to drink, I would drag my dad to a local beer store that carried beers from all over the country and world. He would let me pick out the cans I didn't have and he would drink them, or sometime drain poor them. I'm sure some were quite old. I no longer collect cans, but now I do the drinking. He turns 85 in January and I've converted him into an IPA fan.

 

We liked Rheingold and drank it until it disappeared completely. We also liked Red Cap Ale.

 

Without knowing anything about beer as a child I watched my dad drink Heineken then transition to red stripe because of his co workers were from some islands and then to Guinness because of them as well I am told a story that they’d keep Guinness on the counter to room temp. Crack an egg raw in it and stir it up and chug it. He went from Guinness to Boston lager and now he loves Oktoberfest styles and almost all lagers.

my best memories are of the Heineken

 

To add to my story.

in north jersey the green Heineken bottles were at every BBQ I can remember. Grandpa had neon signs in the basement. Exit 117-120 on the GSP for reference to north jersey. Mothers side is very Italian family but raised by American Indians. everybody drank it. My father told me that when I was 5 years old he went in the other room and I grabbed his beer off the table and crushed it. That green bottle has so many memories to it.

 

My dad passed away almost 5 years ago. He was a Bud man, but quit drinking right around the time I was in middle school (he'd have been right about the same age I am now). When he was alive he noticed my craft beer habit/hobby and just asked "What's wrong with Budweiser, Rich?".. I just replied "... I've had Budweiser."

 

As the group says: if you can drink moderately, may it ever be so

 

One memory which sticks out to me is a visit to my parents after they had visited me a few months earlier. My dad normally buys the cheapest beers possible to serve at family functions. Me on the other hand, whenever my parents visit, I buy what's considered a super premium brand in Sweden. I figure I'll be a good host and buy a respectable beer (which I've overheard my mother liking). Fast foward and I go home to visit them and my dad asks me if I want a beer and I say yes. He offers me the same beer I had served them during their visit and he says to me "this is your fault" in a somber tone. From then on my parents always keep some of that beer on hand. My dad can no longer stick to buying just the cheap stuff.

 

Back in the day Heineken was THE premier beer. I enjoy one every now and then as well.

 

My dad was mostly a Schlitz guy although he'd try anything on a whim like Heineken. He was mostly a hard liquor guy who made outstanding Bloody Marys that tasted like barbecue sauce as the hammer got dropped. He also inexplicably liked Cutty Sark.

The one thing I remember that ties into BA is one day he came home with a sixer of some Oktoberfest in the early or mid 60s. I don't think it was an import but rather a special release by some domestic macrobrewery. I remember it tasting intriguingly different from any beer I'd previously had. He died in 1981 so was way before craft beer and as I drink something like BCBS I think he'd enjoy it a lot.

Good thread.

 

When I first started drinking craft beer during college (called micro brews back then), my father would tease me, referring to it as "pancake syrup." To me he was a dyed in the wool Bud (read Natural Light) drinker and always had been. When I finally convinced my father to try a SNPA many years ago he remarked how much it reminded him of Ballantine Ale, a beer that he explained many of his generation had enjoyed, but had eventually laid aside for the likes of Budweiser. I could tell at that moment that he and I had bridged a gap of sorts, be it only a small one.

I lost my father a year and a half ago, but have that memory, among many others. So when asked why I always stock SNPA at the house, I will say it is because I like it, which I do, but really it is because of that memory of a conversation about beer where my father and I found common ground and learned a small something about the other.