I know of few places outside central/western Pennsylvania where Yuengling is the “go-to” beer.
I’m sure it’s popular with the college set because, at least inside their primary distribution area, it’s dirt cheap. I can get it for $16.99/case in Maryland, the same price as a 30-pack of bottom-shelf brands like Natural Light, Keystone, or Beast, and it tastes a whole lot better than any of that crap.
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This is the real answer; people judge each other by the beer that they drink, just like they do by the clothes we wear, cars we drive, jobs we hold, neighborhoods we live in, etc… And along with that, things like beer carry a lot of class and/or race based baggage, as well as a lot of regional pride.
So if you’re a Texas country boy, there is probably some expectation that you’re drinking Lone Star, Pearl or something from Shiner, while if you’re a hip young professional living in Houston, Dallas or Austin, the expectation is that you’re probably drinking something local and craft; Karbach or Community or Live Oak, maybe. If you’re poor, it’s probably Miller Lite or Bud Light, or something even cheaper if you can’t afford those.
Strangely, beers from elsewhere carry a certain cachet that may or may not be warranted; think of Coors and “Smokey and the Bandit”; it’s nothing special, but at the time, it wasn’t available any further east than Texas, so it was valuable enough to be a major plot point in the movie. Similarly in college, I kept hearing about how awesome Yuengling was from a handful of Easterners in our dorm, and when I finally had it, I was underwhelmed. (sort of the “In 'n Out Effect” of beer) It was good, but nothing remarkable. Or for that matter, why you see Europeans drinking “Bud” in clubs in lieu of the (IMO) much better local/regional/continental beers.
I like Sam Adams. I buy their spring variety pack. But it tastes so different that I find myself missing the taste of traditional American beer.
So, I always have bud or Michelob in the fridge and a Sam Adams.
“Yuengling”? Never even heard of it.
Thank you, Jake. Sam Adams is probably the first brand of beer I drank that made me think “dang, that beer has some real taste”. Eye-opening in both a figurative and literal sense. I don’t like all of Sam’s beers, but I do like an awful lot of them. Jim Koch deserves a ton of credit for nurturing and developing the craft beer industry.
You are right that SA has their own breweries, and they also contract out brewing. It’s done all the time by brewers, both big and small, who use the system to brew more beer and maximize utilization of facilities. When Sam Adams creates and writes down a recipe, and has another brewery make the beer strictly according to the recipe, what is the problem?
As for the OP, I’m old enough to have seen brands go up, down and back up again, like PBR, Yuengling and Natty Boh. Seems to me that Coors has done the opposite, down, up and back down again. Each generation, within a given locale, seems to boost some brands at the expense of others.
Ah, fair enough! I just misread your intention with the word. FWIW, Highland Gaelic is indeed quite good.
Sam Adams didn’t start until 1984. Fritz Maytag started the turnaround of Anchor in 1969.
The Revolutionary Anchor Steam Beer
Yeah, I’m well aware that Sam Adams was not the first craft brewery. There were others around the country before. I like lots of different craft beers, and SA is but one of them. But I’ll give Koch lots of credit for growth in the entire industry, and for introducing new styles to beer drinkers. I don’t recall Anchor beer being available on the east coast until relatively recently - long after SA was nationwide - but I could be wrong.
It’s not as big of a deal for US-brewed beer; there’s not much difference in my mind between Boston Beer Company contracting out to say… a Pabst brewery with some spare capacity, vs. them having a second brewery in Cincinnati. Neither is in Boston, and the beer is likely indistinguishable.
But where it gets sketchy is when brewing companies do stuff like brew foreign “imports” locally to avoid duties and tariffs, etc… So you’re buying say… Beck’s, thinking it’s made in Bremen, when in fact, it’s actually made in the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis. Or Bass Ale from Baldwinsville, NY. Or Foster’s Lager from Fort Worth, TX. Or Kirin Ichiban from Williamsburg, VA. Or weirder, Guinness Extra Stout from Canada.
There have been successful class-action suits about this practice.
So what? The industry was still in its infancy in 1984. It was practically non-existent. Are you arguing that Jim Koch has not played an enormous role in the development of modern craft brewing in the US? Because you’ll have a very hard time defending that argument if you want to get into it.
There was no beer drinkers in my family , my dad drank whiskey or vodka , it was a Russian thing . I never drank , I saw what it did to my dad .
Sam Adams will always have a place in my heart. For me and many of my peers (we were born in the mid-70s, here in Chicago where the beer scene may not have been as well developed as elsewhere), Sam Adams’ products were our introduction to a different class of beer. It was the first beer I had (the Boston Lager) that tasted good to me. To this day, that beer is my favorite lager. I like Anchor’s offerings quite a lot, too ,but they weren’t well known here in the early-to-mid 90s. Sam Adams, in my recollection, turned the tide for craft beer.
Not so weird–brewers have been brewing “imports” under license from the original brewer for years. Here in Canada, Guinness has been brewed under license from the Irish brewery and sold for as long as I can remember. Beyond that, all Budweiser is brewed by Labatt under license from Annheuser-Busch of St. Louis. All Coors Light is brewed by Molson under license from Coors of Colorado. And so on: at various times, Canadian brewers have brewed Peroni (Italy), Kirin (Japan), Lowenbrau (Germany), and Foster’s (Australia), among others; always under license, and always according to the original recipe.
If you want to know where your beer was brewed, just read the label–it will tell you that your can of Budweiser was brewed in London, Ontario; or Edmonton, Alberta; or Halifax, Nova Scotia, etc. It may be small print, but it will be there.
Not sure where any lawsuits would come from–did the packaging of the “foreign import” brands not indicate where the beer was brewed? Did the advertising imply that the foreign brand was imported, when it was brewed domestically? If so, I can see where they might succeed. But if it was made clear to consumers on the packaging that this particular case of, say, Beck’s, was brewed in St. Louis, then I cannot see how a lawsuit could have succeeded.
It always seemed to me that while Anchor influenced other brewers, it was Sam Adams and other beers that really made it popular to the consumer. And I say that as a partisan who will support west coast beer over wikkid retahhded Sam Adams. In other words, they both had a huge influence in different sectors, but Boston just became more profitable.
In 1988 many west coast breweries started, e.g. Rogue, North Coast, Deschutes.
Yes, it either was not clear or omitted.
If you accept Wikipedia’s take, well, it is NOT unequivocally false.
Quote: Initially, Koch rented excess capacity and brewed the beer at the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, best known for their Iron City brand of beer. As sales increased Koch developed other contract arrangements at various brewing facilities with excess capacity, ranging from Stroh breweries, Portland’s original Blitz-Weinhard brewery (shuttered in 1999), Cincinnati’s Hudepohl-Schoenling brewery (eventually purchased by the Boston Beer Company in early 1997), and industry giant SABMiller. The Boston Beer Company also has a small R&D brewery located in Boston (Jamaica Plain), Massachusetts, where public tours and beer tastings are offered. The brewery occupies part of the premises of the old Haffenreffer Brewery.[14][15]
I doubt if any beer enthusiast will argue that Jim Koch isn’t a beer god. Ditto for Ken Grossman and IMHO Fritz Maytag is the least well known of the beer gods. YMMV.
I also think that back in the early 80’s, it was much more regional. If there was something that wasn’t American piss water, it was local. Me, I lived in Northern California, so it was Anchor Brewing, Sierra Nevada, and for a few years as college kids we hoovered Henry Weinhards. Today, I find it hard to believe I liked Hanks so much, but maybe it’s age, maybe back then Henry’s did really small commercial batches that tasted better. Who fucking knows? Certainly, I don’t want to go back to the beer desert that was 1980 in California.
Back then, I think part of the regionalism is that you didn’t have a chance to try other regional beers unless you visited. So, you hear just how fuckin’ great Sam Adams is, and then you actually try one, and a) it’s much better than American piss water and b) may or may not be superlative versus your regional beer.
I distinctly remember after living in Shanghai for a few years, that the expat supermarket got in a container of Sam Adams. I had been drinking heavily riced light lager like Tsingtao (please note, only drink the Tsingtao that is brewed in Qingdao China, the rest including the stuff brewed in Canada is coon piss) for years. Man, at that time, the Sam Adams Boston Lager tasted like manna from heaven.
I also remember hearing about how great Shiner Bock was. I finally got to try one in New Orleans. It was fine (especially compared with American piss water) but nothing I’d fly halfway across the country for.
So, old geezer hat on, those of us that came of beer drinking age in the 70’s and 80’s, were inordinately influenced by the only decent regional beers available to us regardless of today’s reality. Peace.
Correct. They did that by actually selling beer. Maytag (heir to the Maytag washing machine manufacturer) bought controlling interest in Anchor Brewery (established in 1896) in 1965 and by 1969 had production up to 800 BBLs per year. By 1971, he had grown the business to 2100 BBLs per year. These are the cited numbers from Wikipedia. This is a guy with an inherited bankroll, who one day decided “Fuck it, I’m going to buy a brewery.”
Koch built Boston Beer Company from whole cloth in 1984. His goal was to reach 5000 BBLs per year within five years. By 1988 his production was at 36,000 BBLs per year. This is a guy whose great-great-grandfather and every eldest son in the generations to follow became a master brewer. He’s got a JD from Harvard Law, an MBA from Harvard Business and a lucrative consulting job who one day decided “Fuck it, I’m going to build a brewery.”
I’m honestly not trying to shit on Fritz Maytag and I think Anchor Brewery puts out a fine product. But which of these stories do you think had a greater influence on the thousands of startup breweries that exist today as successful businesses? Also, do you think Boston Beer Company would have been born in the absence of Anchor? I’m pretty sure it would have.
Jim Koch’s dream was to take a pay cut in order to pursue his passion to create better beer than what the mass market offered. If you truly believe that Anchor puts out a significantly superior product to BBC, you are entitled to your opinion. I think they are (at a minimum) very close in quality and BBC offers a much wider selection and rotation of product. In case it’s not screamingly obvious, I have an enormous amount of respect for the man for many reasons. Not the least of which is a stated “Fuck You” rule in a billion dollar company.
It IS unequivocally false, because you are citing history but you stated facts in present tense that Boston Beer Company is a 100% contact brewer. That is false and always has been false.
BBC started as brewery in Boston. Jim Koch bought a facility capable of production for 5000 BBLs per year, which was his business plan. That brewery very quickly became an R&D and local production brewery because the company exceeded sales goals from day one. They were seven times over five year production goals in four years. They depended on contract brewing for production runs for over 10 years until IPO to finance the production capability for the massive demand they created. And as others have mentioned, contract brewing is not a shameful sin in the beer world.
Don’t be disingenuous. What you were stating as fact was essentially ancient history and I will repeat the statement that labeling BBC as a marketing firm is about as unfair an accusation as you can make.
Actually, he bought the brewery because he liked the beer(when it was actually drinkable, quality was erratic at the time) and was told it was about to close.
He had to learn how to brew and completely renovated the brewery and all the equipment.
I fail to see how production numbers relate to either influence or beer quality.
There’s also the fact that New Albion and Sierra Nevada came well before Boston Beer Co.
Are you kidding? Production volume has nothing to do with quality, but a lot to do with influence. By starting and growing a craft brewery, and distributing the product widely enough for people across the country to experience a high quality craft beer, SA had tremendous influence on both home brewers and craft brewers throughout the US. I agree that regional microbreweries are an important component in the beer world, but local and regional breweries, by their very nature, didn’t have the influence that SA did.
The other big influence I see from Boston Brewing is their tremendous variety of styles and seasonal offerings. Most breweries before Sams might have one or two or three styles, and maybe a couple of seasonal beers. I don’t recall seeing variety packs before Sams started offering them. Again, they might not have been the absolute first (I don’t know), but they were very influential in establishing variety cases that held a significant variety of beers.
I took a beer making class at a community college, and started home brewing beer in 1994. I can tell you that just about every home brewer in that class named Sam Adams as being very important in their beer appreciation and education, as well as their desire to be home brewers. Sure, other craft breweries were mentioned and greatly appreciated, but Jim Koch, Boston Brewing and Sam Adams were names that held great esteem.
I’m getting the impression that there is an east coast vs. west coast divide on this subject. Anchor, Sierra Nevada, New Albion and many microbreweries started on the west coast, but weren’t available on the east coast for many, many years. The east coast had many traditional style pilsner and lager breweries, but not many craft breweries until later. Sam Adams was among the first to appear on our shelves, and one of the first to appear nationwide.