I’m surprised. I see people buying many of these in the store.
I’ll drink a Milwaukee’s Best Premium from time to time. I can get it here for $3.89 for a six pack of pints. Since they changed the recipe a few years ago it hasn’t been too shabby. It goes back a long way originally from Gettelman Brewing Company.
I dump about a 12-pack of Budweiser every night, via my bladder.
That’s all? Come to Wisconsin. We’ll teach you how to drink like a big boy.
I’ve never been a big beer drinker, but I drank keystone ice in college. Mostly because a 32 ounce bottle was $0.99.
Theres so many other better tasting cheap beers out therre.
I always thought most ice beers all tasted similarly terrible that it didn’t matter what brand it was. But I thought Mickey’s Ice (one of the brands they are discontinuing) was a notch above. Especially when it came in the glass hand grenade bottle with the puzzle on the cap.
That was the whole appeal, I think. Those puzzles got easier as the night went on. I think. Or maybe it was just somebody shouting, “Raspberry Pizza, Mother-Fucker!”. Seemed legit.
I’m not familiar with the brands in question but given the broad taste profile similarities of a lot of mass-market beer (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), I can see how it might not make sense to have 11 separate brands all essentially being “Cheap Drinkin’ Beer” or something similar.
Except all of them are different among themselves.
The one that surprises me most is the High Life Light. At one time High Life was Millers signature brand. Today it’s a bargain brand as is the light version.
Who knew they still brewed Henry Weinhards. Its been ages since I saw it here in LA. It was originally marketed as a premium brand.
That’s the one that jumped out at me. I drank so much of it in high school. It originally started in Oregon, so it was widely available in Washington State in the 1970s and 80s before it got the national marketing push. Like you, I’m frankly astonished it was even still being bottled.
It all has to do with where they decide to distribute it.
One of my favorite cheap beers, Stag, isn’t available within 250 miles from here. The only place I ever see it is in southern Illinois and the St Louis area. If they stopped making it it could be years before I’d find out. Weird thing is, if you looked at the label you might think it’s made in Milwaukee because Pabst has their corporate address on it. But it’s not made here it’s made down in Belleville.
For years you couldn’t get Narragansett beer here. Then for a while you could, then you couldn’t again. I hate when they do stuff like that.
Back in my drinking days, Hank’s was definitely my favorite. It was also the only American beer a friend of mine from Pilsen considered drinkable, and he liked Hank’s.
Of course, the reason many of us called it “Hank’s” was the ending line in one of the commercials: “Just don’t call it ‘Hank’s’”.
It’s always interesting how beer gets distributed, while all 11 of those variants have been sold in stores around here at one time or another, I haven’t seen any of them in years. Most of them are variants of more popular brands that are still around. Hamm’s for example reappeared on shelves around here 6-7 years ago, and I hadn’t seen a Hamm’s in these parts since literally the early 1980s. The Hamm’s Special Light reared its head a few years after, but was quickly pulled from shelves in the region.
They must do some kind of market research to determine what gets distributed where. But sometimes I think they rely on old data. Populace demographics and tastes change over time. And people can’t decide they like something or not if it’s not available to try.
What else I wonder about is how they decide what kind of packaging they’ll offer for certain areas. Like I was in one place and they had Red Dog beer in 40 ounce bottles. But I never see it in anything but cans here. We can get Blatz in cans in six pack, 12 packs, 15 packs, or 24 packs. But if you want it in glass bottles it only comes in 24 bottle cases, no other configuration.
And here I am still cursing Pabst for discontinuing Olympia Beer. It was easily the best of the post-Prohibition cheap-ass pale lager brews, even if they weren’t brewing it here and “It’s the Water” was no longer true.
I wish I liked a cheap beer. I just bought two four packs of a craft double IPA for $40 ($5 a pint).
For $40, you could have gotten two 30 packs of Special Ex cans and had still have enough left to buy a bottle of your fancy pants beer.
For $40, you could have gotten (years ago) 40 12-packs of Buckhorn Beer and had 40 cents left over. Not that you’d want to.
Damn. Well, I buy Nikolai Vodka instead of Belvedere.
I’d hold on to that name for when cannabis is legal in every state. It is the perfect name for a brew with some THC in it.
Are the Henry Weinhard batches still numbered?