Why do you drink PBR?

I think PBR taste like crap. I have no reason why it became popular all of a sudden. When I was a kid we all drank Natural Light. Ahhhh, now that was a beer....

 

Because my taste buds were burned off in 'Nam.. Or I'm a hipster with bad taste (pretty much redundant).

 

The other day I was at a bowling center I ordered a pitcher and remember why I don't drink it.

 

You wouldn't understand...

 

I had a party one night a couple years ago and a friend brought some over. The night was winding down, and that was the last thing left. I took one sip, said, "what the fuck is this?" and threw it over my shoulder. Haven't touched it since then.

 

Liked the Reingold Chug a Mugs, I think Mickeys is the only one you still uses that style. Too bad on that one it's nice for BMC stuff.

 

Drank a 30 rack of PBR in Vegas with my gf and ended up blowing all our money ($50) on roullette and getting in a fight with her over a McDonald's dollar menu McDouble (from under the effiel tower). That's how you drink fucking PBR!

 

Where can you get it that cheap? If the store is in my neck of the woods, I'm there.

 

Answer: Blue Velvet's Frank Booth:

 

HEB in San Antonio, TX

 

I would be willing to bet that Rheingold Extra Dry of circa 1960 was a tasty beer. If somebody brewed a genuine Rheingold Extra Dry 1960 Formula beer I would buy that beer.

For those interested in beer history here is an article entitled The Bushwick Pilsners: A Look at Hoppier Days:http://morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissues/issue2.1/jankowski.html

Cheers!

 

Jack, that article may give people a clue as to why so many people stick with a bmc beer rather than move over to craft. Do you think the yeast strain in bmc beers and the customer's familiarity with it has anything to do with this? I have often thought that this kind of brand loyalty was hard to define outside of the idea that this beer produced the desired effect cheaply and was cheap enough to maintain said effect for the duration of a time frame. This might shed a little more light with regard to brand loyalty to beers that most of us would consider sub par.

"A new yeast strain was introduced, but many loyal drinkers were dissatisfied with the product."

 

Maria, some good questions. I don’t have a definite answer but I will opine on a few topics. I should first caveat that I am not a food science behaviorist.

I think that for many beer drinkers they prefer to drink a beer that is ‘familiar’ to them. When it comes to BMC/AAL beers, a typical beer drinker will establish for themselves a favorite beer like Bud, or Coors or … Those beer drinkers will tell you that the other beers are ‘inferior’ and that is why they don’t drink them. For example a Bud drinker will solely drink Bud and refuse a Miller High Life of Coors if openly offered to them. How much of these is truly due to their ability to taste an ‘aspect’ of that beer vs. just being psychological? Boy, I have no idea. I have read a BA post that he is a bartender at a bar and he will sometimes not switch out the Bud keg when it kicks and instead pour a non-Bud AAL for the Bud drinkers. He claims that nobody ever has noticed this. Now, maybe at this point the customers are ‘loose as a goose’ and therefore don’t notice?

There have been multiple stories where breweries have made changes and lost their core customers so there must be some folks (a lot of folks?) who are able to recognize when their ‘familiar’ beer is different. Perhaps this is due to the level/amount of change? An example was Pabst Blue Ribbon in the late 60’s and early 70’s where they made a series of brewing changes to save money. Over that timeframe/process they lost a lot of their core customers. At the 11th hour they went back to brewing like they did before the numerous changes but it was too late for that business. Their customers became Bud, Miller, or whatever customers instead.

There has been a more recent story where AB InBev decided to brew Beck’s for the US customers in St’ Louis, MO. There was (is?) a backlash from their customer base since they stated the beer tastes different (cheaper?). I have no idea what Beck’s US beer consumption volume is today.

Cheers!

Jack

 

You seem to confusing the histories of two former Milwaukee-based #1 national brewers - Pabst with Schlitz (the one that made Milwaukee famous, after all ). It was Schlitz that in the mid-70s>early 80s period changed their recipe and brewing process, even putting out several defective batches from some of its breweries (though the word-of-mouth and rumors were probably had a bigger negative effect than the actual "bad beer").

There were some other internal corporate and financial problems that led to the collapse, but Schlitz fell from the #2 brewer in US with about 15% of the US market and a barrelage of24m in '76, to #3 (behind Miller) with 8% of the market and brewing "only" 14 million barrels in '81 (still an impressive amount of beer, only reached by a handful of US breweries).

By '82, Schlitz had closed their flagship Milwaukee brewery, sold their newest brewery in upstate NY (Baldwinsville, outside Syracuse) to arch-rival Anheuser-Busch*, and finally selling the remains of the company's brands and breweries to Stroh, which then became a national brewery and #3 in the US - leapfrogging Pabst, Heileman and Coors.

​

* A-B kinda twisted the knife a bit when they purchased the "under-utilized" 2 year old Schlitz brewery for $100 million, when they announced the brewery would close for a year and they would spend an additional $100 million to upgrade the plant due to "...major differences between the Anheuser Busch and Schlitz brewing processes..." ​

Pabst's history, if anything, is even sadder - perhaps because its ghost survives as a "virtual" brewer...

 

Thanks for posting that link.
Rheingold in the 60's was tasty but no more so then Schaefer, Ballantine, Budweiser, Schlitz ect.. They all tasted good by the standards of the time but they also all tasted the same. I would buy a 6 pack of 60's recipe Rheingold if someone brewed it. Doing a side by side with Coors and Budweiser would be interesting. I would done that with 60's Schlitz that's brewed now but have never seen it for sale.

 

Yup, I meant Schlitz. Whoops!

Cheers!

 

Yeah, I've seen that. Nice explanation of the "new" (at the time) Rheingold company but other than that, its history of both the Rheingold brand and US brewing history is full of errors (and since I'm a bit bored this morning... just a few examples).

Miller and Coors were hardly the large "national" breweries during Rheingold's stated heyday. Nor was Rheingold, or the other major NYC area Top 10 breweries Schaefer and Ballantine "smaller, local" brands. In fact, all three were larger than both Coors and Miller into the 1960's. (Liebmann/Rheingold would even own breweries on the west coast -one in LA another in SF, in CA during the 50s). Pabst and Schlitz made up the the rest of the "Big 3" major national competition during that period- and all three nationals would have NYC metro breweries by the post-WWII era - AB building a new brewery in Newark, Pabst buying Hoffman in Newark and Schlitz buying the Ehret brewery in Brooklyn itself.

Pepsi sold the brewery to local coffee manufacturer, the Chock Full of Nuts Corp. in 1974 (local newspaper columnists joked at the time they should rename the beer "Chock Full of Hops") in order to keep the Brooklyn brewery opened (Rheingold also owned and ran breweries in New Bedford, MA and Orange, NJ at the time). The Brooklyn brewery was eventually closed a couple years later, in 1976.

Both the New Bedford (ex-Dawson's*) and the Orange (ex-Trommers) breweries remained open after Brooklyn closed, but both would be shuttered by 1978, when CFoN/ Rheingold finally threw in the towel.

(* Where my favorite Rheingold came from. We used to buy it in 16 oz. deposit bottles packed in plastic bags with pullstrings and kept them "almost cold" in a nearby stream as we built a cabin in Maine.)

At that time, C. Schmidt's and Sons bought the brand along with the Rheingold-owned Jacob Ruppert / Knickerbocker and continued to brew and market the beers in the PA-NJ-NY region. (The other Phila. brewery, Ortlieb, took over Rheingold's McSorley's brand, and, for some odd reason, the ex-Philly brand, Esslinger, wound up at The Lion in Wilkes-Barre).

Schmidt's closed in '87, and Heileman bought the brands and continued to brew and market Rheingold, Knickerbocker and McSorley's into the 90's (mostly out of their ex-Carling brewery in Baltimore). The brand was hardly "dormant" for those two decades.

Stroh owned the trademark because they bought Heileman in '95 (not sure if they had continued to brew/market Rheingold before selling it). Owades, while he did work for Rheingold in the 1950-60's as a VP and "Technical Director" - where his claim to fame was creating one of the first "light beers", Gablinger's - he was hardly the "original brew master" of the beer.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933, of course, and it would take over two decades, not "almost immediately", for the number of US breweries to fall from 700 to below 300 in the mid-1950s.

Simplifies and leaves out the fact that "union drivers" (and, obviously, not the ones who worked directly for the breweries) couldn't distribute any beer without local distributors signing contracts with those breweries.
Ruppert would not close until 1965- over 15 years after the strike. By the late 50's they were still a 1.5 million barrel brewer - #4 in the NYC-NJ metro area (after Ballantine, Schaefer and Rheingold). Ruppert was "landlocked" in upper Manhattan, with an outdated pre-Pro brewery. They planned to build a new brewery in nearby Putnam County, buying land but never able to get an adequate supply of brewing water. The company abandoned the idea and sold their brands to NYC rival Liebmann (Rheingold).

Labatt bought Latrobe in 1987.

The Pabst Blue Ribbon brand was first marketed in 1898 – originally known as Pabst Select, which was introduced in 1882. Amusingly, earlier in the paper he writes “Pabst (founded in 1866 by Phillip Best)”.

Krueger was the first US brewery to can it’s beers.

In the early 2000’s, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s sales had been on a steady downward spiral over 20 years. In 1981 (a few year before the brewery would be bought by both Heileman and then S&P) PBR sales were 9.9 m bbl (down from a peak of 15m bbl in the late 70s). By the early 2000’s it had fallen below 1m bbl. In 2002 (the last full year before the paper was written), the entire Pabst company (which by then included the brands of Stroh, Heileman, Olympia, Falstaff, Pearl and many others) only sold 8.8 million barrels.

 

This has nothing to do with beer. When the Liebmanns sold to Pepsi they got into automobiles. Importing and selling Volkswangens. They still own Douglas Motors in Summit.

 

If I'm ever going to go get drunk, I'll start with stuff I really like (Scotch, a nice IPA, maybe a good porter or stout) and once I get to the point where I don't care anymore, I drink PBR tallboys at $2 a pop if I'm running around downtown.

Otherwise, I never drink it.

 

Its usually the cheapest beer at bars and gets me drunk. I almost always go Narragansett over it though.