I was gonna say - at least 50% of the hipsters I know are beer snobs to the max. They express their countercultureness by disdaining such plebeian beverages as PBR.
Is Rainier available anywhere outside of the NW?
My dad drank it when I was quite young and we lived in a trailer park.
I’ve been accused of hipsterdom by some, and won’t turn down PBR. Beer’s just an alochol delivery mechanism to me, and it’s cheapish and inoffensive, so I’ll drink it if it’s offered or available.
I seriously wonder if this isn’t actually a big part of what made it popular with hipsters.
(For those who don’t know, it’s a line from Blue Velvet.)
Schlitz reformulated their beer, so it might actually be pretty good now. I haven’t been able to find it in California yet.
PBR is still crap American lager, but with a cachet, like Coors used to have back in the day.
It brings to my mind that old country song “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” Do the hipsters embrace that as an anthem, or have they not heard of it? Could you clear them from the bar by getting it on the jukebox? Or do they blast it all night?
PBR’s nice and generic, and I think that’s why it’s liked. It’s not overmarketed and doesn’t claim to be anything but “beer.”
It’s probably my third favorite cheap domestic, after Old Style and Mickey’s. PBR’s good for cooking with, too.
Are they drinking it ironically? Hipsters enjoy everything ironically, right? Or is drinking good booze not cool anymore?
I honestly read this as hipsters and peanut butter and jelly.
Which they probably also do.
Yeah, that’s how it started. Back when hipsters started wearing work shirts and affecting blue collar looks, PBR was the ironic beer of choice. Before that, it was big with the rockabilly crowd (again because of it’s blue collar associations). Now the blue collar look is a bit passe, but the blue collar beer remains the hipster choice.
Pabst Blue Ribbon? Your hipsters are out of touch. Living just a couple miles from Williamsburg, hipster capital of the East Coast, I can tell you that PBR is, like, *so *passé. What’s cool now is looking down on the poseurs drinking PBR; if money’s an issue, just drink Bud Light. It’s more honest.
Cute article from David Brooks:
This is something I hate about Brooks. He can go along being perfectly reasonable then, outta [del]left[/del] right field, he comes up with zingers like, “Palin is a good choice,” or, “one-upsmanship is forever.” One-upsmanship only lasts until someone one-ups you, and there’s always a kid who comes to town, calling you out with a Zambian banana beer or Aleut throat singers and thinks he can one-up you, and eventually one will.
I think he means the *value *of one-upsmanship, or one-upsmanship as a concept, though I could be wrong.
How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Dude, you don’t KNOW?
Yeah, a couple of years ago, at least, the ironic low end beer for hipsters in the PNW was Rainier ‘green death’. Has the PNW gone to PBR, too?
I could never stomach the Rainier Ale (green death) but I think that the original Rainier (in the 16 oz. returnable bottle) tastes light years better than Bud, Coors or Miller, and (though its no longer sold in Utah) was always around half the price of the major brands…
Pabst, Rainier, Olde Style, Strohs----all very drinkable (if unremarkable) American lagers, that are perfect for warm summer evenings spent outside, in the company of good friends. (hipster or not)
Speaking of PBR, urban legend has it that, while come states (like MN) allow only 3.2 beer to be sold in grocery stores, Pabst refuses to brew a 3.2 version and instead elects to pay a yearly fine for mislabeling their regular stuff.
Any truth to that?
It’s probably “cool” because it was the ultra-cheap beer on the shelves when we were kids that NOBODY drank. I remember looking at it everytime we walked down that aisle in the grocery store and I think it was the exact same case throughout my whole childhood. We even joked about it in school sometimes, accusing other people’s dad’s of drinking “Pabst” (we didn’t call it “PBR”.) When I was in my late teens (late '90s) it occurred to me that my generation would surely start drinking it “ironically” soon. Sure enough around 2000 a really “cool” kid who moved away after high school (he was a few years older than me) came back to town and stayed over at my house one night, and he brought a case of PBR. I thought it was really cool, and choked it down, but I had one of the worst hangovers of my life the next day after only 5 or 6 of them. I haven’t touched it since and probably won’t. The only appeal was how absurdly cheap it was and that’s gone.
I will say that if it’s still really popular to hipsters, they’re pretty far behind the times, because it’s been passe to me for 9 years 
:p.
It is sold here in Utah, (in gas stations, grocery stores, etc) and if it was indeed stronger than 3.2, there is no way the wise and decent people at the UDABC would permit its sale to the degenerates who indulge in the sheer wanton depravity that beer drinking represents…