Ten years ago, some junior poli-sci major at Reed College in Portland, OR, slapped a dollar bill on the bar at the Lutz Tavern and raised his middle finger to the whole corporate/yuppie beer establishment.
It’s not just PBR. Rheingold, National Bohemian, Utica Club, Ballantine, Narragansett—they’re all names from the ‘50s that have attracted new fans a half-century past the brands’ prime.
Heineken? Budweiser? Microbrews? Bleep that shit—Pabst Blue Ribbon, man!
PBR at the Lutz (Ed Geis)
And, thus, one of the most perplexing trends in American consumerism was born: Retro beer.
Perplexing, not because an anonymous 20-year-old kid with a fake ID settled on a bland-tasting, nearly extinct industrial lager. That part’s actually easy to explain: Until the late ‘90s, the specialty at the Lutz—regarded as ground zero for PBR’s rebirth—had always been Blitz. When that brand was killed off after the shutdown of Portland’s old Blitz-Weinhard brewery, the bar simply replaced it with the next cheapest thing, Pabst.
The true puzzle is why this trend has lasted so long.
We’ve seen other fads—dry beer, ice beer, low-carb, malternatives—come and go; retro beer, though, seems as permanent as a tattoo. And not just PBR. Rheingold, National Bohemian, Utica Club, Ballantine, Narragansett—they’re all names from the ‘50s that have attracted new fans a half-century past the brands’ prime. It’s such an appealing phenomenon, it’s even spawned neo-retros, like North Coast’s Acme label and Full Sail’s Session Lager.
“I always thought it was just a hipster kind of fashion statement,” said Dave Wilby, whose Philadelphia craft beer oasis, the Dawson Street Pub, gave in and started serving PBR in 16-ouncers about 8 years ago. “It was something to go along with the trucker hat.”
Retro is fashion, yes, but it is also anti-fashion. It is the repudiation of mainstream advertising and the affirmation of nostalgic tripe. It is counter-cultural defiance and the sentimental bond between son and father. It is a bold statement of individuality and just another consumer product that defines one’s character.
One sip tells you it’s all about the can, not the contents.
Indeed, before it caught fire, Pabst was widely mocked as one of the worst beers in America—the sort of insipid excretion that Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko famously said tasted like it had been “run through a horse.”
Though it had been one of America’s top-selling brands since the 1800s, Pabst was on life support by the end of the 20th century, suffering through 23 consecutive years of declining sales. There was no advertising. Distributors didn’t bother to pay their bills. Its longtime Milwaukee brewery had been shut down. The company was owned by a charitable foundation in California and managed out of offices in San Antonio, and its beer was brewed by Miller on a contract basis. People saw the familiar Blue Ribbon logo and wondered, “Who drinks that stuff?”
Bike messengers, indie rock fans, sound techs, snow boarders—and they weren’t just drinking PBR, they were loving it.
