The end of an era???

It looks like one more ‘old school’ beer may be going away…

PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon for you kids, is in a lawsuit with Miller/Coors over continuation to brew PBR. Apparently Miller/Coors has been brewing PBR for a number of years (I quit drinking a long time ago, so haven’t bought beer for years, and didn’t know that).

Full article, HERE from Time.

PBR, like Fallstaff, Jax, Schlitz, and Primo (Hawaii) weren’t ‘good’ beers, but they were cheap, and cheap was good when we were 18 or so. PBR is about the only one left, and I do remember it was a ‘favorite’ during Vietnam, because the cans were steel, and made great ‘repair’ material for patching bullet holes in helicopters…

We eventually graduated, if you will, to long neck Lone Star, and the occasional Coors when somebody could get it…

Which reminds me of a funny story, back in the 70’s, Coors wasn’t sold east of the Mississippi, or west of the left coast. The USSS had just been caught smuggling Coors from California back to DC on Air Force One, and it’d been written up in all the papers. BUT, if you went to the Coastie Club at Barber’s Point, they had Coors, funny that… We were transiting back to Hawaii through Moffett Field one time, and as we taxied out, we saw a flat bed semi pull up behind a Coastie C-130, it was loaded with pre-palletized cases of Coors!!! And there were four or five of the big pallets ready to be loaded!!!

Went by the Coastie ramp the next day, and sure enough, that BUNO airplane was sitting in the parking area. And the club had Coors that night (I think you were limited to 2 cans per person).

Can’t say the Coasties didn’t take care of their troops… 🙂

Comments

The end of an era??? — 40 Comments

  1. Like you, my drinking days are far behind me, but it DOES tug at me a bit to hear that Pabst Blue Ribbon might become a thing of the past.
    I grew up in middle Georgia, where it had the rep as redneck beer, for some reason. There was a country song called “Red Necks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” It was the first beer I ever bought illicitly (age 14, I think), and I knew nothing of beer, how to drink it, or how to serve it, so I kept it at room temperature in a drawer until time my cousin and I opened a can. Tasted frappen awful. I was the leader, drinking maybe two ounces, before we poured it out and walked away.
    It was cheaper than the other beers, and so that’s what we drank when the drinking DID get serious in high school. ‘Gimme anuther PBR’ would come the cry from the front seat, and whoever was sitting in the back seat by the cooler was expected to reply forthwith.
    When I worked as a cashier at the best local BBQ joint, the Pig ‘n Whistle, the carhops would order ‘Gimme a pig and a Blue in a bag’ for customers who didn’t want the hassle of a paper plate.
    So, bye-bye, Blue, you good dog, you!

  2. When Coors finally appeared in my corner of Texas, it was stored in refrigerated warehouse, and delivered in refrigerated trucks. I bought a six pack, went to my father’s house, and celebrated with a beer he hadn’t tasted for decades. It was as good as before, and he relished the taste.

    After a few years, they stopped the refrigerated effort, and the taste of the beer suffered. I stopped buying it, and eventually settled with a beer that tasted as close to Schlitz as I could find.

    Pabst was never my favorite, but was good enough to wet the whistle, when offered. While it was bilge water, like most cheaper beers, when warm, ice cold, with ice crystals sure brought a pleasant buzz on a hot summer evening.

  3. PBR. Nasty stuff. I did drink a fair amount of it back in my youth when price and quantity and alcohol content were more important to me. I prefer quality beer now. I recall that Coors availability ended at the Kansas-Missouri line. Go into any Kansas liquor store near the border and you’d find cases of Coors stacked on the floor and a large percentage of the cars in the parking lot sported Missouri tags. Occasionally tags from further east were seen.

  4. We would trade a pallet of of Coors even up for a pallet of Strohs.
    Packed them in the front of a trailer, followed by several skids of explosives from the home office in Utah.

    I did like the little cans of PBR. We used one as an angel on our Christmas tree. The rest was a mix of Iron City, Gunther and Genny Cream Ale cans.

    • Old Frothingshlosh, the pale, stale ale with foam on the bottom… Haven’t thought of Iron City since WVU a gazillion years ago.

  5. Eh, the only canned beer I’ve had in recent years has been from one of the local breweries, and that’s because it’s too damned expensive for them to bottle at the moment.

  6. My first beer (at 15) was a Schlitz and it almost swore me off beer forever. Then a few weeks later I was given a Bud, and the love of beer started. PBR, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, to name a few cheep beers, never taste as good as a Bud. I also love Lone Star but it is hard to find here in GA. I also had a trucker friend who would smuggle Cooers to our racing friends. I could not get a taste for it. Most most others are pretty good, though. Mostly, if it’s cold, I’ll drink it.

    • I also had a long haul trucker friend back in the early ’70s who I talked into bringing me a case of Coors on his return trip from out West. Yeah, all the buddies and I bought into the Coors mystique. We were all sorely disappointed……….

  7. Having acquired a taste for Coors out west in the AF I once imported a half ton of Coors (bought in Baxter Springs,KS) back to VA and had a very well attended COORS party. I still drink the stuff (in moderation).

  8. down in my neck of the woods Coors wasn’t available back then either. Anyone headed to Colorado was inundated with orders for Coors. WE were usually limited to a case since only so much could fit in a car/truck/van

  9. PBR was clearly panther piss, and it made its fortune selling to the military on contract. I doubt that it will be missed by any but the oldest die-hard veteran. Schlitz is still sold in ‘inner city areas’ extensively… The same class of people favor screw top wine like Old Thunderbird and Ripple. I’ve seen sailors drinking short dogs of Ripple, but not many. Marines like it, though. ;^)

    • There is a high-end wine store in POrtland, OR that has a not-for-sale bottle of 1957 Thunderbird in their climate-controlled display.
      Wonder what 20- or 25-year old Night Train would be like…

  10. For personal reasons I never drank Coors. That said, the beer went downhill after the family sold out.

    There was some people who drank it for medicinal purposes. Something about the hops being grown exclusively in the San Luis Valley helped many with arthritis.

  11. For my parents and grandpa growing up in Lawrence, MA, it was Cold Springs (the old name of what is now Belchertown, MA) and Dawson’s, and the Holihan brothers’ Black Horse Ale. All gone now…

  12. I gave up drinking a long time ago too — but when I was young… sigh… you missed one, though — where I grew up the cheap beer was Hamm’s (from the land of sky blue waters) with an Indian princess (!!) on the can… as I recall, in a canoe on a lake.

    Also there was a Coors brewery in, I think North Carolina. But Coors is brewed with “Rocky Mountain spring water” or something like that. Problem. Which was solved with, first, they never said how much RMSW was used in relation to anything else — but to keep it legal, that brewery got a unit train load of Rocky Mountain spring water from Colorado every week…

    • I was in St. Paul, MN at a meeting and one of the bars still had the Hamms bear standing outside the door, with the sign. I didn’t look to see if they had any of the beer, but I remember the commercials. 🙂

  13. Being from east of the Mississippi, I had barely heard of Coors until I joined the Navy in 1972. Then, all I heard about from those sailors from the West was how great Coors was and everything else tasted like piss water compared to it. (…which, of course, always begs the questions: “How would you know? Have you been drinking piss water?”)

    Then, a few years into my tour, I was finally stationed on the west coast. At last, I got my first taste of Coors. All I could say was “Meh? All that excitement and anticipation for this?”.

    Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t all that special either. Just an average brew as far as I was concerned. It still is. I liked Olympia beer – another west coast brew – just as well.

  14. When stationed at Kwajalein, my dad passed over Primo (I think only the lowest enlisted and the Hawaiian construction crew drank Primo) and he drank Olympia beer. Which is the first beer I remember tasting. Not bad. Of course, they’re owned by Miller-Coors, so no doubt they’ll be axed soon.

    Of course, once he retired, he always bought the ‘case special’ at the Officer package store, which alternated between PBR and Black Label.

    I also remember the Coors panic, and when I finally tasted it, thought it was about 2/3rds as good as good old Oly.

    ‘Course, nowadays, I think anything lighter than Spaten Optimator is weak beer.

  15. I recall reading about some frat boys who’d bought a few cases of Coors who where stopped by State cops. The Coors was unloaded, and then run over and flattened.

    Been a long time since I had a beer, and longer since I had a Coors, and never had a PBR. I remember having a Bud Lite around ’77–fizzy water with a hint of flavor.

  16. In the mean time: Everyone ever stationed in Germany is just shaking their head and laughing.

  17. All- Good additions, and I missed Hamms, hadn’t thought of that one, since I was never up north. Stretch- This was when we were kids, before we knew what good beer was…

    Posted from my iPhone.

  18. Whatever. Thanks so much for responding to my correction of your false post on BZ

  19. Back when I still drank beer (Gout, not religion) I remember reading a book my Father In Law had about craft beers and beer culture. It had been published at the very beginning of the American Beer Snob phenomenon and had a rather even handed take on the whole thing. The author’s position was that, with the single exception of Germany (whose beer laws held a damn high standard), most bad European beers simply never got imported to the US. We had an unreasonable respect for European beers because we never drank their equivalents of Budweiser or Pabst Blue Ribbon. Bud and PBR were low level but drinkable Pilsners. The equivalent Italian, Dutch, French or, (god forbid!) British beers would be stopped at the border for lack of a certificate for importation of donkey piss.

    If you read a little about the Beer revolution in the UK, you will see that, at least then, this was perfectly true. The Big Brit Brewers had a lock on most peoples’ locals, and (to quote from a nine folksong called ‘Early One Evening’) were mostly flogging “Quaint Old English Reddi-Brew, that’s advertised on telly by a famous rugby scrum! No dirty barrels were, we sell hygienic beer, safely paralyzed inside an allu-min-yum drum”. It was gawdawful, and it took dedicated men an awful lot of effort to bring back some hint of excellence.

  20. Coors, Coors Light and [anything] Light are suitable as the the first rinse for my homebrewing equipment, before sanitizing. My two cents on them. May as well have a shot of dirt-cheap vodka and follow it with a bottle of cold water. No flavor and no taste. I’ll stick with red ales, bitters, and IPA made to the old-time recipes.

    Stroh’s is one I used to like a lot, until the recipe got changes it they killed its soul. Back in the days you could get a Stroh’s Dark beer, which tasted really good. Had a taste like a mid-grade porter, but not too harsh.

    Every so often, the home brewing magazines or websites report that a missing Beer Sea Scroll is found, generally one or more volumes of written by the master brewer to document recipes and produced batches of a long-closed brewery’s product. An old Ballantine recipes, pre- or just post-WWII, surfaced. It looks like a good ale with body and flavor, unlike the dreck that did them in. It makes you sad to see what the accountants forced on us.

    • I homebrewed that Ballantine XXX recipe and it’s very tasty. The only quibble I have is that it calls for dry hopping with Cascade hops which weren’t around at that time. I think that Ballantine really used an extracted hop oil at the final stage before bottling for aroma. Not really feasible for us home brewers, so dry hopping it is…………

  21. I spent Jan 69 to Jun 70 at Clark AFB in the PI, listening to the cowboys complain about missing their Coors, when I finally got to try it it was nothing. 70 to 73 in california I drank budwieser. If I remember correctly you could get a 6 pack of bud for a buck at the base gas station. There was some beer, maybe “Derby” that was 69 or 79 cents for a 6 pack it was nasty. After california, soda pop, “a mans got to know his limitations”

  22. So like none of those are real beers. You need to go seek out some good craft beers. Yum. People just keep reinventing our history by erasing it. Statues. Beers. Jeesh.

  23. Yup, back in the 70’s cheap was the operative word for beer. Falstaff, Gennesee Cream Ale, Rolling Rock, Iron City, Molsons, Labatts – all awful but cheap when on sale. I miss 25c beers and 25c per gallon gas (when there was a gas war on in Rochester NY near to the U).

  24. All- Thanks, and yes, we were cheap bastids back in the day Fargo- Quality wasn’t the question, affordability was… Re the PI, Painted label San Miguel… sigh…

    Posted from my iPhone.

  25. Well, Stretch, I have worked for a German company for over 30 years and I have been to Germany few times.

    I am not laughing.

    Why? Because, just like everywhere else, there are both good and not-so-good German* beers.

    We’re not talking about the *best* beer here, we were talking about the cheap affordable – and most importantly – obtainable beers of our youth.

    No, I am not a beer snob. The best beer is whichever one you prefer. I don’t care.

    And I wholeheartedly agree with Ed. The best I have ever had was always after a long, hot job. It really doesn’t matter what brand.

    * – …and don’t get me started on the myth that the Germans are the worlds premier engineers.

    • German Engineering Philosophy: Why make it simple and efficient when it can be complex and wonderful?

  26. Anyone drinking any commercial grade American beer for the flavor is doing it wrong. It never recovered from Prohibition.

  27. When I was a student pilot on Jetstreams at Multi Engine Training Squadron, RAF Finningley, our European training sorties usually involved loading the plane with cases of Warsteiner at the NAAFI (UK equivalent to the BX) which fit neatly in the aisle, 3 cases forward if the main spar, 4 aft,then another layer over that the full width of the plane, topped off with a cargo net….we thought we were the cat’s meow, until we got to Lyneham in C-130s….oh the swag we used to bring back from overseas trips, especially at Christmas….