Olde Frothingslosh

Split your lungs with blood and thunder
When you see the white whale
Break your backs and crack your oars men
If you wish to prevail

 

The beer with the foam on the bottom!

 

I recall that there were threads talking about that beer a while ago:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...ot-become-can-collectors.632514/#post-6859000

https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...-collector-are-you.135966/page-6#post-3276459

 

I'm threatening to post a pic of a bottle of nude beer. Still sporting her scratch off top. And still pg rated.

 

As long as it's not the Frothingslosh lady (or her sister or any other 'fluffy' lady) you have my permission.

 

I remember Frothingslosh from my earliest beer drinking days in the 70s when I was a teenager working at a lawn tool shop. The owner occasionally would bring beer into the shop and let us have a couple. Although it was usually Pabst, Olde Frothingslosh made an appearance a few times. I do not remember whether it was any good, but as a teen, I probably liked it simply because it was free beer.

 

I read once that it was Pittsburgh's Tech Beer, a secondary brand behind their flagship Iron City, in the OF cans. That sort of surprised me, because Pittsburgh at that time had a ton of brands, seemingly most kept alive by beer can collectors, and I just assumed they, including Tech, were all being filled with Iron City. I recall seeing Tech around but just thought it sounded like a modern generic-y brand. Turns out it had a interesting history that stretched back into the pre-Pro era.

 

FWIW, I do remember drinking this beer in the late 70’s, primarily trying to empty cans for “traders“. Tech beer apparently didn’t declare itself as a lager or an ale, but Olde Frothingslosh definitely billed itself as an ale.
It wasn't terrible, but not a great beer, certainly, and had a weird thin foam with bubbles of variable size….I came to associate with cheap or lower quality ingredients / beers.

 

I remember Tech beer from the 70s. It was looked at as an inexpensive cheap beer by many back then. I always thought it was a Fort Pitt product. I did not know the story of the beer and Andrew Carnegie. Interesting.

 

US regulations for products labeled "Ale" are not very strict and do not require the use of top fermenting yeast. The regulation was changed, by request of brewers, to this by 1938.

Today, the "fermented at comparatively high temperature" is just about the only requirement - see Chapter 4 of the Beverage Alcohol Manual - and probably not particularly well overseen by the TTB.

Many US ales of the pre-craft were so-called "Bastard Ales" (not to be confused with the Stone product) - feremented with the brewer's house lager yeast.

Ft. Pitt made some technical products but not Tech Beer.

 

Brewers couldn't use (probably still can't) the word "lager" or "pilsner" without an official descriptor (beer, ale,stout,malt liquor, or maybe a few others). Tech is called "beer". In those days the word beer was understood to mean "lager beer".

 

Well, I don't have the ATF rules from the 60s -70s period being discussed , but the current
Malt Beverage BAM CHAPTER 4 CLASS AND TYPE DESIGNATION
says both are sufficient:

But, yeah, it would be rare to find a US beer label that used just "Lager" rather than "Lager Beer"; maybe Lucky Lager's 1930s -1950s comes closest:

And, conversely, it would have been even more difficult to find a top-fermented beer labeled just "____ BEER".

Yeah, definitely. But technically a top-fermented or other non-lagered "Beer" could be so labeled since the BAM defines that only as:

 

I was assuming that the labeling "beer" was required, and it may not have been so. I looked at a few old Lucky Lager labels, and they did seem to wedge in "beer" somewhere, below as "Age Dated Beer".
https://www.si.edu/object/lucky-lager-beer-bottle:nmah_1297771
We never thought of "Lucky" as a classy drink, but at least the Walter Landor label design has made it to the Smithsonian. Some recent Canadian label versions aren't as nice, but are based of the classic label.