“The beer that made Milwaukee famous!”
Schlitz, of course.
“The King of Beers!”
Budweiser, who else?
“Brewed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.”
That would be National Bohemian.
“What’ll you have?”
Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“The champagne of bottled beers.”
Miller High Life
Well do Boomers remember the jingles about the great beers from our youth.
The first sip of beer I ever had was from a frosty bottle of Schlitz my daddy was drinking at a pavilion at Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. My parents always said if I wanted to drink, do it at home, around them. No need to sneak off and drink. So I took a sip of his beer. The taste was overwhelmingly of hops. I believe I burped for an hour after that, with just one sip.
But Schlitz was a great beer, number one on the market at the time.
In college I drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. There were two types of beers at the bars back then, premium and regular. The premium beers were 30 cents a can and the regulars were a quarter. Pabst was a regular beer, a little cheaper, and that’s why I drank it. Miller, Schlitz and Bud were among the premium beers, a nickel more, but not appreciably better.
Beer was largely local in distribution in the 50’s and 60’s. Carlings Black Label was a popular brew in West Virginia while Iron City was a staple in Pennsylvania. Other beers from our past include Schmidt’s, Schaefer’s, Ballantine, Piels, Blatz, Rheingold, Lone Star and Hamm’s. We didn’t have “light” beers back then and we didn’t have pop-tops on the cans. The cans, by the way, weren’t crushable aluminum. They were heavy gauge steel, coated with tin and difficult to penetrate. To pop a beer, we used “church keys”- openers that punctured the top of a can with one end of the tool and popped off a bottle top with the other. They were a nickel apiece at the stores. Those Boomers who forgot their church keys or didn’t buy one when they bought a six-pack became adept at opening a bottle on the hinge of the car door.
In the 70’s, beer morphed totally into a pawn of advertising. Whichever company spent the most and had the catchiest ads stayed at the top of the leaderboard. The brand of beer you drank became a status symbol. The big spenders, Miller and Budweiser, soared to the top.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, new brands of beer like Rolling Rock, Coors, and Natural Light hit the shelves. It was also about this time that “The Beast” made an appearance. “The Beast” being Milwaukee’s Best, probably the worst beer ever brewed. But it was cheap.
Being an established Boomer, set in my ways, I am not a fan of the new craft beers. They are quite expensive and highly overrated in my opinion. I think the best beer on the market today is the beer I drank in college – Pabst. Throughout the years, PBR never changed. The beer still has a little kick from the hops and is not watered down. Interestingly, the sales of Pabst are increasing today despite little or no money spent on corporate advertising. Apparently, lots of people still value the taste of a good beer.
What’ll you have? Make mine a Pabst.