It’s a very mediocre beer, but many hipsters regard it as their signature cultural brew. How do this happen?
In a word; hipsters. PBR has never had a huge ad campaign trying to sell how superawesomefun it was and how it would get you laid. They make a cheap, serviceable American style lager that’s unpretentious.
Hipsters love that shit. PBR didn’t even know why they suddenly got popular, and in response didn’t do a damn thing about it.
They are doing a lot with it now. The bar I sometimes work at occasionally has evenings sponsored by PBR - all the acts are hired by PBR, they discount the wholesale cost of the beer which the bar sells for $2 a bottle. And it brings out every hipster in the area.
It’s cheap and blue-collar.
Therefore, it was all hipsters could afford.
But rather than just drink it for what it was, they adopted it ironically.
Hence the spike in sales, as the mass of lemmings who look down on lemmings for being lemmings all did the exact same thing for unique reasons just like everybody else.
Schaefer could have been PBR but for time and place.
It hit a tipping point.
It was probably on sale as some hipster bar and it grew from there.
And range of distribution, no? I’ve never seen it in stores or in bars. Also, Schaefer has been owned by Pabst since 1999.
Also for this reason!
I think that the movie blue velvet had a lot to do with getting to that tipping point
I was in college just before PBR became ‘hip’, and it was sort of the default beer for drinking games and other activities where the taste didn’t really matter, simply because you could get a case of it for cheaper then anything else, and while it tasted terrible, it tasted slightly less terrible then other similarly cheap beers. I imagine a lot of soon-to-be-hipsters were in school during the same period and kept drinking it out of a mixture of nostalgia and inertia.
During the 90s rockabilly/alt.country resurgence among the hipster crowd, PBR became the popular drink of choice with the “redneck underground” at least partly because of its historical association with redneck culture, as memorialized in this song.
When I was in college (early 80s), the cheapest beer at every convenience store was Red, White & Blue, and drinking it marked one as a loser. The second-cheapest was PBR, which missed (by a hair) the stigma of its sister brand. Drinking it meant “I’m broke, but not totally without pride.”
That role was filled by Old German, a product of The Pittsburgh Brewing Company, where I went to school. Part of its charm was that every can was a gamble. Old German was whatever they had left over. Any given can might contain Iron City, IC Lite, IC Golden Lager, something they’d brewed under contract for someone else, or (for all I know) all those things mixed together. It went, in those far off days, for less than $2 a six. It did preserve enough of one’s dignity, though, to allow looking down on Red, White, & Blue drinkers.
Oh my God that sounds awesome! It’s like Russian Roulette in reverse!
Red, White and Blue, Old German, Stag, 905 – back in the days of regional breweries there were a lot of cheap beers available in one place or another. But one of the cheapest beers available just about anywhere was good ol’ PBR, and it became the cheap, college beer as early as the '70s, if not the 60’s. Back in those days no one drank it ironically, we drank it because it was cheap!
Around here it seems the hipster thing to drink is “Natty Light”(?)
PBR is a quality beer that sells for $44 a bottle.
In China:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2010/07/why-is-pbr-44-per-bottle-in-china/19307/
I have no idea how it happened, but I like to think that there is this guy who lives in New York somewhere (he moves every few years to whatever neighborhood will be up and coming next year). He wears vintage clothes and bad hats and shoes, and he’s got the kind of charisma you can’t fake. He’s like “the most interesting man in the world” but for 20-somethings. He’s dirt-ass poor, but cool and creative, and he’s just… visible. So every time some trend comes along that makes me roll my eyes, I blame him. I haven’t named him yet.
PBR is hip? Since when?
We drank it in college in the 70s, mostly because it was cheap, but also because it came with its own built-in drinking game: we would try to yank off the little blue-ribbon label (this was on the bottles, not the cans) and get ALL of the blue circle to come off with the dangling part of the ribbon. It took quite a knack to get it right.
How did PBR become so hip? It’s a pretty obscure reason–you’ve probably never heard of it. 
Honestly? While Old Style is my cheap beer of choice, PBR does fine. For cheap watered down American lagers, it’s better (IMHO) than any of the typical mass market brews: Miller, Budweiser, and Coors. The fact that it usually sells for less than any of those is a bonus. I enjoy it without any irony whatsoever.
Point taken, but “Schaefer” just isn’t as fun to order when you’re drinking ironically. Maybe it’s too melodic a sound, or something. I could see Milwaukee’s Best, or Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Black Label or Mickey’s Big Mouth or Schlitz, but not Schaefer.
Olympia’s right on the edge. Couldn’t say either way.