Most Nostalgic Beer

Schlitz; because my father would give me sips when we were camping.
Haffenreffer; first beer I really enjoyed (back in the late 70's, and a bit underage). Loved the puzzles in the cap.
Genny Cream Ale; only beer served at a local pub we frequented in the early 80's.
Sam Adams BL; hooked on craft as soon as it hit the market in '84.

 

Sculpin .. My first craft beer/IPA ever and it's what made me fall in love with micro/craft brewery industry

 

Dales Pale Ale -- My first craft beer

 

I still have hope that Pabst or Miller will someday resurrect Meister Brau. It was a cheap staple in my earliest drinking days. I truly miss that glorious piss

 

karl strauss amber lager, sam adams summer, and petes wicked/ strawberry blonde

 

racer 5 was my 1st big ipa at that time.

I grew up on stone here in san diego

 

Ballantine Ale. My first taste of ale, 1980s, along with Bass. Both gone in their original form.

 

Pete's Wicked Ale (original recipe)....Natty Light (college years, quantity over quality)....Dogfish 60/90

 

Miller unloaded their "Meister Brau" trademark via an auction back in 2010. Unlike the old "National Premium" brand auctioned at the same time, nothing's happened with Meister Brau. It was apparently bought by a trademark owner/broker type outfit, Red Sky (which seems to also own the old Pabst>Heileman "Red, White & Blue" brand), but "Meister Brau" recently renewed by a Trademark Law Firm - Gioconda.

I'd imagine current Pabst management figures they already have enough old brands - usually estimated at around 75, but they only market around half of them. If anything, they've been unloading/licensing a few - Narragansett, Haffenreffer, Augsburger - since picking up most of the Heileman-Stroh collection in '99.

 

do you happen to have a link/list of those brands. I only saw 26 brands on Pabst's site. I'm guessing the 26 brands are still being produced while the other 49+/- brands are just owned by Pabst and not in production?

 

The "75" figures dates from a Pabst article/interview w/CEO Kotecki in 2007 - so, two owners ago. At the time, they claimed to be marketing 37 of them. From that current Pabst Portfolio page (recently updated I see- adding "Old Tankard", "Small Town" and "Tsingtao"[!] since the last time I looked) it is missing both Piels and Ballantine XXX Ale.

It is unclear if that "75" included different beers under the same brand name - like the many "light" versions, or Rainier Beer and Ale, McSorley's Ale and Dark (or whatever it's called these days), Ballantine Lager/XXX Ale*/IPA, etc.

Several old Pabst brands are probably on the "owned but not brewed" list - Big Cat Malt Liquor, Andeker, Maxx, etc, and, likely, many old S&P brands - Falstaff, Lucky Lager, Brew 102, Hanley, Munich, etc. Lucky/General alone owned dozens of old CA and west coast brands.

Then there could be obsolete Stroh/Schaefer/Schlitz brands (Goebel, Gunther, Signature, Encore, Erlanger) and many ex-Heileman brands.

Heileman, though, did sell/spin-off numerous brands as they were, first, growing and then collapsing in the 70s-90s - to Cold Spring (that's where they got Gluek), and to Heileman short-lived spin-offs Minnesota (Grain Belt) and Evansville (Sterling, Weidemann, Falls City, Cook, Drewry, etc.) And some of the latter wound up being brewed at Pittsburgh after the Evansville failure - forget who owned them by then.

Some old brands, it turns out, are often still owned by the original owners but have been licensed to other breweries for decades. I recall reading about Stroh having to renew the Piels contract in the 1990s (3 decades after Piels sold out to Drewry USA) and that's apparently how the short-lived, family-owned "Private Stock Brewing Co./Haffenreffer Co." got the Haffenreffer brand back a few years ago, even though it had been brewed by other companies (Narragansett-Falstaff-Pabst) since the 1960s.

So.... yeah, confusing and, ultimately, "Who really knows ? " (Pabst themselves probably don't know, given all the errors they've made on their own websites about the history of their brands). I guess a rainy day spent on the Trademark Search website would turn up some answers.

 

Miller High Life when i was 18 because i was broke and a 24 pack of cans was only $9.99.Plenty of good times with the champagne of beers!

 

slayed many of these in the late 70's!
in Wisconsin.

 

Watched "Spotlight" last night, and EVERYONE in the movie is drinking Harpoon IPA. I probably haven't had one of those since late-90's/early 2000's. Seeing them made me nostalgic for my college days.

 

I'm just curious but was the difference? My uncle worked in PA on a construction project back in the late 70s, and came back to WA St raving about Rolling Rock, and was peeved that he couldn't buy it here. It finally showed in stores here in the late 90's and early 00's and when we tried it he said it definitely wasn't the same beer he tried back in 78-79 but never got into detail as to why.

 

I think by the late 90's the people who owned Rolling Rock Brewing had had enough and were phasing out. The brand had become a "trendy" beer (because of the name?, bottle design? small brewery?), but by then, it had become a thin version of its former self. I probably stopped drinking it in the mid 90s. When Budweiser bought the brand in 2006 and moved the operation to New Jersey, IMO it hit rock bottom. I bought one at a bar a few months ago hoping to catch that old flavor, but it wasn't there at all.

 

The founding Tito family sold Latrobe Brewing Co./Rolling Rock in 1985 to the Sundor Corp. (makers of Sunny D orange drink- if only they'd held on into the "Shandy" era!). Sundor sold it to Labatt in 1987. Labatt was bought by Interbrew (pre-InBev) in 1995. Latrobe was selling in the 400k bbl. range in the mid-1980s and was a million barrel brewery by the 1990s.

InBev claimed they had no interest in the middle range of the US beer market when they sold off the company (brewery to City, Rolling Rock brand to AB) but some say the financial info they gained from AB doing the deal helped them with their eventual take-over of AB two years later.

 

I have the same feeling about Olympia Beer. It used to be brewed about fifty miles away from me, and I even had family that worked for the brewery so it was always in the house. I recently tried the supposed old recipe and it seemed that the only thing old about it was the retro cans. It just seemed more weighty, with meat on the bone than the gold colored water they brew now.

I look at the rating its given here at BA and while I totally agree with it, at the same time I keep thinking if you only tried a snubby of Oly back in the day you're rating would have been much higher.

 

Ommegang Rouge, my first sour/flanders red. I feel the nostalgia every time I have Cuvée Des Jacobins Rouge.

 

You'd be hard pressed to find any US light lager from a large brewery (and Olympia was a large brewery by the late 1970s, when they owned both Lone Star and Hamm, sold 6 million bbl of beer a year and were 7th largest brewer in the US) that is the same beer as it was 40 or 50 years ago. According to ex-Oly ass't brewer Larry Sidor (later with Deschutes and now with his own Crux) when he started in the mid-70s, Olympia was 22 IBUs, by the mid-90s (owned by Pabst, but still brewed in Tumwater) it was at 8-10 IBUs.