Most “Historical-Tasting” AAL?

Thanks for the info, Jack. My local shops “beer space” for displaying/selling beer has steadily shrunk the past 6 years. Now the space is filled with hard seltzer, hard tea, cider. So, obviously many beer skus had to be dropped. Wonderful for the seltzer advocate, not so much for a BA.

 

And they kept Lone Star and brewing it from their Fort Worth brewery?(Miller)
I bought a 6pack today and other than appreciating the rebus under the cap, a favourite thing of mine to do with the bottles of Ballantine XXX back in the day, I am puzzled; it must be a profitable seller?

 

Yeah, and recently re-introduced the other (once) big Texas brand they own, Pearl Beer, too, another non-MC-brewed Pabst brand, it's brewed at the Oasis Texas Brewing Company in Austin.

 

That's the xXx? 3.8% abv? I'm sure that will be a raging success.

Oh,and I remember not liking it in the 70s when I lived in California.

 

Do wanna-be cowboys read the label for alcohol content or do they just pick a beer that looks cool with their outfit?


Pearl Light by the late 1970s (which likely quickly began outselling the flagship Pearl Beer) was one of the lower abv light beers, at 3.475% and only 68 calories.

 

Is he trying to fart? Sorry. I couldn't resist.

 

Nah, probably just can't believe he paid $110 for a @#$% cowboy shirt (and now it's on sale for only eighty-five bucks).

 

I was thinking that he just found out that his sweet turquoise rings had fake turquoise in them. Now he'll never get invited to the rodeo!

But at least he's got genuine Pearl!

*cowboy looks at camera, takes a sip, smiles handsome cowboy smile*

 

White pants on a cowboy? Probably *is* his first rodeo!

I know I tried Lone Star many years ago, but never seen Pearl. If it's anything like LS, it's not on my ISO list.

 

You know, we shouldn't really stereotype such people, just 'cause he wears a cowboy hat and shirt and drinks Pearl doesn't mean he can't take fashion advice from Grace Slick.

 

It's not the (stereotype) brand, it's the post Memorial Day color!

 

I came across some more references to schenkbier which I thought provided some good insight into the workings of the US beer market of the 1860s-1870s from a German/German American perspective.


March 1865, Baltimore Maryland.

Interesting to see them take pre-orders for the lager beer for the summer while delivering schenkbier in orders ranging from 100 to single barrels.


May 1866, Nashville Tennessee

Here we see a brewery offering both kinds of beer in May, the traditional start of lager beer season in Bavaria, schenk and lager, from Kentucky to Tennessee.

November 1866, Baltimore Maryland

Here is a brewery owner who has constructed a new lager beer brewery and wants to sell his weissbier brewery, and who suggests that the cellar is possible to use for the brewing of schenkbier in the winter time. Suggesting a greater degree of complexity in a lager beer brewery visavi a brewery brewing merely schenkbier.

February 1869, Columbus Ohio

An interesting ad I thought in advertising to prospective business partners that the brewery was set up to brew both schenk and lager beer. I imagine that the information about being able to brew lager beer indicated a greater degree of sophistication and more capital invested in cellars.


January 1872, Baltimore, Maryland

Finally there's a story about a brewery which had been rebuilt after suffering several fires while under the same ownership. Brehm's brewery, built on the side of a hill, had an underground cellar containing the fermenting cellar, with a schenkbier cellar on the same level as the fermenting cellar, while the lager beer cellar was located below this level as a separate cellar.

Having separate schenk/winter beer and lager/sommer beer cellars was standard practise in Bavaria up until the mid 1800s, the schenkbier cellar could be dug less deep into the ground since the beer would be brewed and stored and tapped in the colder winter months. The summer beer cellar, or lager beer cellar, had to be dug deeper into the ground since the beer would be stored over the summer months and endure warmer temperatures for longer periods of time. Ice cellars from the 1840s and onwards and ice machines and artificial refridgeration from the 1870s and onwards made the distinction obsolete, and it was also by this time (the 1870s) that the differences between Bavarian lager and schenkbier started to become less pronounced aside from a continued difference in original gravity.

 

Yeah, I remember seeing a picture of Willie and Kristofferson drinking Pearls somewhere and REALLY wanted to like them. I tried real hard to, but they weren't very good. I remember my then girlfriend (who had Hill Country connections) and I betting a case of Pearl against a case of Iron City, with my good friend and his girlfriend (who was from the Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley), on the Super Bowl in what I think must have been '76. Steelers won, but everybody in the bet kind of lost. Although he married that Sewickley girl and they're still married, while I...didn't marry the Hill Country girl

Oasis is a pretty competent brewery IMO, I'd like to try the new Pearl.

 

Here too, no reason why, and it certainly wasn’t cheap. I’d like to see it again.

 

Quotation #1: Somehow, you missed this. Or maybe it slipped from your memory. The backbone of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild's summer event, a|k|a the Seven Generations Ahead Micro Brew Review in Oak Park, IL. in August, is | was the ReplicAle Project, in which ICBG member breweries do exactly this. They are given a bunch of the same hop variety and instructed to brew a beer with them. They're permitted one unspecified ingredient. To taste these beers, it behooves you to pay for the additional hour extended for its tasting.
Quotations #2 & #3: Be hasty in criticizing automated brewing. I recall 8-13 years ago when no less than Randy Mosher was promoting what he termed "black box brewing": Putting ingredients in at the beginning of a production line, and having fresh craft beer produced at the end thereof.
To rebound to the topic title; I perceive there is not going to be a satisfactory answer for a majority of respondents, whether they are registered on Beer Advocate | Untapped or not. You can check back on the beers I have purchased recently and find them vacillating amongst the spectrum: From Revolution Deth by Cherries to Maplewood Pulaski Pils to Leinenkugel's Snowdrift Winter Porter to Point Special Lager to Simpler Times Pilsner.
If assemblages are ever again allowed, you could request a look at my 2017-19 Illinois Summer Beers Passports for all the brewpubs & taprooms I visited.

 

Is it weird that I read this thread title and immediately pictured Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson sitting around sipping beers and discussion their flavor profiles? Guess I misinterpreted the definition of “historical tasting”

 

Going by the original gravity and abv today's Pilsner Urquell does not appear to be different from that of circa anno 1900 or that of Bohemian lager beer in general of the late 1800s. In some other respects one wonders if it still remains unchanged however. Some food for thought. First up is a short article by Franz Schönfeld from 1895:

The note about yeast flavor, yeast aroma and the possible addition of yeast to the beer reminded me of Karl Michel's writings in his book Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Bierbrauerei, dealing with beer exports in the 1860s:

Fast forwarding to the year 1955 and a tasting carried out by the Swedish alcohol monopoly:
"Pilsner Urquell. Light bodied, dry, somewhat yeasty bouquet. Light colored."


Of interest here might be the oft noted use of several strains of yeast up until the last few decades when a single strain was chosen as the yeast used.

Concerning the hopping of the Pilsener beer as per Technisches Lexikon für Gewerbe und Industrie from 1876 for light Bohemian beers 200 grams of hops are used per hectoliter, for stronger 12% beers (Pilsner beer) 460-660 grams of hops per hectoliter are used.

JC Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg, visited Pilsen in what is believed to have been around the year 1874 as part of a larger cross European trip and in a letter he wrote about his Pilsen visit:

13% wort would be Export strenght in Pilsen. 100 pounds could either be Vienna pounds (560 grams) or German zollpfund (500 grams), if we're conservative we can take it to mean zollpfund (the German weight used in the northern German customs area), for 100 eimer, at 61 liters each for a Vienna eimer, that comes out to 819 grams per hectoliter.

Scroll forward to the end of the century and Thausing has this to say about Bohemian lager beers:


So 420-500 grams per HL for a standard 12.5% Bohemian lager.

Below are numbers calculated from a Swedish brewery's year books concerning the yearly production and average hop use per hectoliter for their Pilsner beer (hops used divided by production volume). Pilsner beer was introduced to Sweden in the late 1870s so the numbers bring us quite close to the introduction of Pilsner beer in Sweden.

Finally we have a more modern number from a morebeer article:

So 460-660 grams per HL for 12% Pilsner beer as per an Austrian Hungarian 1876 technical lexicon, 819 grams per HL for 13% export strenght Pilsner lager in the mid 1870s as per Jacobsen, 600-700 grams per HL Pilsner as used by a Swedish brewery in the the early 1880s, 420-500 grams per HL as per Thausing by the turn of the century for circa 12% Bohemian lager beer and similar numbers from the Swedish brewery in the same time period, then in modern times 350 grams of whole Saaz hops per HL for Pilsner Urquell (which might have changed further since then, who knows).

Now, either the reputation of Pilsner beer as being strongly hoppy and bitter was established on the basis of the flavor of today's Pilsner Urquell and its hopping rate, or something happened along the way with the hopping and the flavor of the beer (similar to what happened to Bavarian beer, American beer, Swedish beer and countless other countries' beers in the course of the last century and a half). I personally suspect the latter.

 

The conversation probably went like this, "This tastes like crap, want to dig into the cider and whiskey?"

 

So, you don't think either cared for local Philadelphia beers like Hare's Porter (said to be a favorite of one Geo. Washington) or the ale brewed by Robert Smith (late of Burton-on-Trent)?

And rum, lots of rum - thanks to the so-called Triangular Trade that brought lots of molasses to Colonial America and, really, what else are you gonna do with a lot of molasses? Only so much shoofly pie one can handle.

 

Maybe Franklin and Jefferson would have said that since they were refined gentlemen, but not the cowboys out west. Their stomachs were probably made of rawhide.