Premium beer back in the day?

Growing up in MN, almost anything coming down from Canada was considered way cool & a very rare treat.
We were all drinking "premium beer" whenever someone brought back Molson, Labatt's, Moosehead, & even Old Vienna/OV after a fishing trip up Nort. Good day, eh!

 

I'm sorry I cant describe something that I drank 50 years ago except to say it beat a Bud

 

I was able to find what Michael Jackson thought of this beer (see post #57 above). Sure reads a lot better than Bud.

Cheers!

 

In college in the late 80's Michelob, Lowenbrau, Stroh Signature. Of course the Canadian big hitters were up there and those Oil Cans of Fosters. I think I remember an uncle drinking a Michelob Dark?

As a kid in Milwaukee there were Andeker signs all over the place but I never tried it and it must have been off the market by the time I was drinking...would have loved to try that one...

Does anyone have any thoughts on how Andeker compared to Mich and Lowenbrau in those days? Pabst product vs Busch product vs Miller product I think....

 

Augsburger Dark and Augsburger Bock were the precursors to craft beers in southern Wisconsin in the early 80's...a notch better than premium Special Export and Michelob.

 

Instead of 40 year old memories, how 'bout a contemporary beer writer's impressions?


--- M. Jackson, The Pocket Guide to Beer, 1982.

Pretty sure Andeker was around still in the late 1980s into the 1990s but Pabst was constantly changing the label, the bottle, the distribution region, the recipe... it was easy to miss.

 

Andeker through the 70s was excellent, to me better than any other major product I tried. I think they reformulated it about '80 to be less good (so you might have missed the best version). Pabst also brewed a decent bock, a good draft dark, good Old Tankard Ale. Blue Ribbon was OK in a pinch; RWB or Eastside, not so much. Better lineup, I think, than AB, Miller, or Schlitz products. Lowenbrau (as other German lagers) in the 70s was imported and fine.

 

I can't believe that Budweiser was once considered a premium beer. After reading all these posts about Michelob I now have a craving for it as I do remember having it in the early 90's and liking it better than Bud, but just realized after googling it that it is no longer made. Only Michelob Ultra exists, which I don't care for. What a tease!

 

Sorry but me and the late great Michael Jackson will have to agree to disagree aboot Erlanger.

 

Personal taste counts. I forgive you.

 

I worked with a guy who only drank Michelob. When it changed in 2007, he said that it was nasty and switched to Bud.

 

There is a reason that at competitions like GABF they have a team of judges. Just one person's palate (e.g., Michael Jackson) should not be the defining palate.

Cheers!

 

Any time a brewery makes a change (in this instance from being an adjunct lager to all malt) they run the risk of alienating long time customers. I suppose in this instance AB didn't really lose a customer since he started drinking Bud instead (he had a preference for adjunct lagers).

Cheers!

 

Yeah, me, too - for a number of other beers. As for Erlanger: Circa 1980, I had recently gotten a very old bottled beer at a bar (I think it was Ballantine Ale) and then gotten an even nastier reaction from the bar when I complained. Annoyed, I called up the distributor - which in that era was almost always an act that would result in more frustration. ("Consumer-friendly" beer distributors were not - the retailer was their customer.) I left a message -with a real person, IIRC, not an automated answering machine - and the rep actually called me back.

He agreed that the date on the beer was well past Falstaff's recommendations and he was going to drop off a case of beer (!) in return. We continued to chat about the industry and the topic shifted to Schlitz, their primary brand. Schlitz was, of course, in bad shape (long #2 they'd fallen to the #4 US brewery, from 25M bbl to 15M bbl between 1976-1980). He said, "Oh, we just got in their new super-premium Erlanger."
"Oh, yeah? I've read about it. All-malt recipe."
"Say, would you like a case of that?"
"Sure."

I often mark that as the event that led me to the opinion that the use of adjuncts was not the primary problem with many US beers. Being all-malt was the main aspect in Schlitz's ad campaign for Erlanger - although the beer was also brewed with Hallertau Hops "hand-selected in Bavaria by a Schlitz brewmaster", but was not particularly hoppy compared to other US S-P's (Huber's Augsburger was my choice) or European imports.

So, I guess I then agreed with Michael when his book came out a few years later - Disappointingly unmemorable. Maybe it's unfair, since I DO remember the story of my free case of Erlanger!

Randy Sprecher, who worked at Pabst before starting his own Milwaukee brewery, would disagree with your chronology:

Jackson's review likely is based on this beer, since labels/ads before and after the early 80s often said "grains", rather than specifying barley malt - typical wording for adjunct usage.

As you know but others might not, Andeker, like Michelob, was once an all-malt, draught-only product until the 1960s, when both breweries began bottling the beers and changed the recipes to malt + adjunct.

 

Schlitz
Lowenbrau
Rheingold
Schaefer
Schmidt's
High Life

 

There was a non-light "Natural"? From AB? AB created what was originally called Anheuser-Busch Natural Light in 1977, to compete against the growing light beers (primarily Miller & Schlitz but numerous others from regional brewers) without cannibalizing their primary brands* at the time - Budweiser, Michelob and the then still regional Busch Bavarian.


Wait! Rheingold did slightly re-brand their Knickerbocker Beer a few years early!

* It didn't work, due to that long brand name - "Anheuser-Busch Natural Light". Lots of retailers simply called the beer "Bud(weiser) Light" or, in BB distribution areas, "Busch Light". "Natty Light" apparently came later, which must have annoyed Carling-National/Heileman, brewers of National Bohemian, fondly known as "Natty Boh".

 

Moosehead Ale purchased in Canada? Moosehead Lager wasn't exported to the US until the late 1970s - a creation of the large US importer, All Brands (Pilsner Urquell, Foster's, Carlsberg, Whitbread, Dos Equis in the eastern US) which wanted a Molson-competitor in their portfolio and went to Moosehead and had them brew a lager and put it in a Heineken/Molson-type green bottle. In Canada, Moosehead Brewing Co's flagship beer was an Ale (they also had a "Special Ale") which came in the standard brown stubby like their other beers.

They were pretty successful - the #4 Imported beer brand in the US by the early '80s, behind only Heineken, Molson and Beck's by some accounts, w/7% share of the Import market (Heineken had about 34% at the time, B.C. - Before Corona).

 

Yup, there was a "normal" Natural. They even called it Natural Pilsner for a bit, but I mainly remember the version that was simply called Natural. I can't recall seeing it after 1995'ish. The local AB distributor when I was in college had their logo on the door of the place.