Why do you drink PBR?

Nostalgia - grew up in Milwaukee. In fact, I visited the (closed) brewery this summer and the small shop/museum and tasting room while back for a wedding. PBR is also the first beer I ever had, my dad let me have a 7 ouncer when I got him to buy the 8 pack so I could add it to my beer can collection. And frankly, it's "just a beer". PBR, Hamm's, and Tecate are three non-craft beers I don't have a problem with drinking. And maybe High Life. Oh hell, I drink Lone Star sometimes when I have to go to Texas. But Bud? Never.

 

When I started out drinking in the bar back in the early 80's in Duluth, MN there was Bud and PBR. My older brother drank PBR so I followed his lead. It was pretty much 50% BUD, 50% PBR back then until the local distributor fired the PBR salesman named "Dewbug". After that it was about 85% BUD. I'll have a PBR occasionally for nostalgia but it doesn't quite taste the same for me anymore. Paying $1.10 back then (90 cents in Superior Ws) for a cold Blue Ribbon seemed pretty cool for a 17 year old...

 

awesome description

 

I don't drink it often but I bought a 32 ounce or 40 whatever they are around here and enjoyed very much. Don't know if they are from different breweries but the 12 ounce cans are not as good.

 

Am I wrong, or is PBR nothing more than corporate offices these days, and their beer is contract brewed in other breweries around the country? I am under the impression that PBR has been reduced to a marketing company the pretends to make their own beer.

I don't drink it. Really, if I can't get what I want at a restaurant, I just have water or iced tea. If I can't get what I want at a bar, then I'm in the wrong bar.

 

you MIGHT be over thinking this

 

Love it that PBR...ice cold fishing , jacking the 4x , or pissing out the fire. If I wear my gun while washing the truck or basically likeall the time, does that make me a hipster too?

 

Yes, the Pabst Brewing (sic) Co. became what they themselves called a "virtual brewer" in the early 2000's, after closing their last two breweries, the former Pearl plant in San Antonio (the by-then corporate owner of Pabst, the S&P Corp/Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, also owned Pearl, Falstaff and General) and the ex-Schaefer/Stroh plant outside Allentown, PA, which they'd only owned since '99, when Stroh folded.

All the other Pabst and other S&P-owned breweries - well over a dozen - had been closed before then, throwing 1,000s out of work, also cutting off the pensions of many retirees by using some technicality, legal wording slight-of-hand (which makes the phoney image of PBR as "the workingman's beer" cruelly ironic).

Pabst, now owned by the Metropoolos family since 2010, owns the rights to something like 45 different classic local and regional beer brands (inc. former Top 10 brands like Schlitz, Falstaff, Stroh, Ballantine, Schaefer, Lucky, Olympia, Lone Star, Pearl, Old Style, etc) but only markets about half of them. Many of them acquired when Stroh (which by then also owned and brewed the large Heileman collection) shutdown, and Pabst bought most of the brands of those two former Top Five breweries. Miller also picked up some of those S/H brands, as well as some Pabst brands (Hamm's and Olde English 800) at that time.

Most of the Pabst portfolio is brewed at MillerCoors plants, but a few minor and specialty brands are or have been brewed by City breweries (La Crosse and Latrobe), The Lion, F. X. Matt and Cold Spring.

 

I drink 6 a year on my dads birthday.He would have been 83 on his last one.

 

And they also just bought and brought back the Twinkie brand. I feel a thread coming on...."why do you eat Twinkies?".

It is interesting the one of the few legacy brands they didn't snap up was Rheingold, which is owned by a business one town over from the Metropoolos'.

 

PBR has the best price/taste ration among AALs. If you go cheaper (in my area at least) the beers get to the point where I am just tolerating them instead of enjoying them.

 

Stroh sold Rheingold (the chronology of which went Liebmann/Rheingold > C. Schmidt's & Sons > Heileman > Stroh) in the mid-90s a few years before closing shop, so Pabst didn't get a chance at it.

IIRC, among those "new" owners of Rheingold was a relative of the original Liebmann family. Since then it's bounced around and there has been several more attempts to revive it as a (pseudo-) local NYC brand, contract-brewed by F. X. Matt and The Lion. Last I read (but never saw it on the shelves), it was being brewed in Mexico (!) --- a long way from Brooklyn and Orange, NJ.

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There are some unique individuals who take sarcasm to whole new realms of intricacy and subtlety. Two of them (probably more) are members of this site. I will warn you that I am one of them, and leave it to you to figure who is the other. I never seem to master the insight into cultural phenomena, nor observation skills, nor ability to properly use the word "ululate" that the other confirmed practitioner has, though.

 

I didn't vote. I drink it because I like it

 

Pabst is like a cool breeze on a hot day.

 

I have seen it on shelves in one store in Bethel CT in what I think was two incarnation attempts by different owners. The first time was about 10 or 12 years ago in clear long necks, most recently three years ago in 30 packs. I still have a couple cans pushed in the back in the garage fridge.

 

Man, PBR brings back memories for me...

Used to go 3-4 nights a week in college to a local pizza place in Orlando that did a special of a New York style slice (~1.5 feet long as I remember it, lol) and a pint of PBR (on draft!) for something nuts, like $2.10. And this was in 2005-2007.

I'll drink it if there's nothing else, lol. Probably been about 3-4 years since I actually picked some up for home consumption.

 

I don't drink it. I prefer Narraganset, High Life or Schlitz Gusto (which I can never find anymore)

 

I really hope you're talking about Savage's Ale House. This is where I got hooked on PBR. Monday's used to be $0.50 days too, so pounding them was even better. I made my class schedule around my Monday night Savage's trip.

 

Last two times I drank PBR it gave me a stomach ache. I'm talking like one serving here guys.