by the Night Writer

Kevin at Return to Manliness had a great contribution to last week’s Manival about the simple pleasures of Cheap Yard Beer; that is, cheap beer you pound down in the back yard while putting up a garage or maybe grilling some brontosaurus ribs. While I’m not much of a beer-drinker these days, and when I do imbibe I favor the heavier ales, his list brought back a lot of warm memories of cold cans of beer, especially the brands my father liked.

When I was a little nipper (pre-elementary school) my dad was in the Air Force and it seems to me a lot of those base-housing backyards featured the familiar shield of Falstaff beer. These were the formative years when I learned what a “church key” was. While Falstaff was a relatively well-distributed beer, a lot of “yard beers” are regional brews favored by loyal locals and offered at bargain prices. When my dad got out of the service and we settled in Indianapolis, he was partial to Weidemann’s. He usually bought this in dark brown, barrel-shaped bottles with a short neck, but for awhile he bought it in miniature keg small enough to lay on its side in a refrigerator with a thumb-tap in one end. Here’s where I learned how to pour a fine glass of beer down the side of a glass, ending with just a half-inch of so of foamy head (don’t worry, Mom, these were all for Dad. Mostly.)

When we later moved to Missouri one of my dad’s friends was the local Stag beer distributor, and dark gold cans of Stag were the standard in the little beer refrigerator behind my father’s basement bar. I was in high school then, so of course my friends and I derided the old men who drank that, though we’d take it if we could get it. I mean, it’s not as if we had the luxury of being more discriminating; beggars can’t be connoisseurs, you know. In fact, one of my (underage) cousins got busted one time for having a case of Olympia (“Oly’s”) in his car and had to pay a “real beer” fine for something that barely qualified as beer. I think he would have been less embarrassed if he had been caught shop-lifting a case of tampons (which were said to be great for cleaning the heads of your 8-track tape player).

When we graduated from high school a lot of my class chartered a bus to take us, immediately after the graduation ceremony, on our “Senior Trip” to Daytona Beach. Missouri was a “21” state so we told the bus driver to wake us up as soon as we got to an “18” state. That turned out to be somewhere in Georgia when the bus stopped to refuel. We had to fuel some foolishness, so a couple of my buddies and I collected beer money from our classmates and headed into the convenience store to stock up. There, in a big cooler case for our taking, were various nectars of the gods (no Stag). We were about to buy several six-packs of something or other when Darrell pointed out that that beer was in 12-ounce cans and cost about $3, while immediately next to it were 16 oz. cans of Old Milwaukee for $1.79 a six-pack. Well, we were high school graduates so we could do the math; we could get a lot more beer for our money by loading up on the Old Milwaukee.

It was swill, of course, which we soon discovered even with our unsophisticated palates. The thing was, we couldn’t just be throwing away beer, or beer money, so our strategy changed so that when we’d pull into our hotel for the night we would go buy a couple of cases of better beer and ice that down in the bathtub of one of the rooms, along with the Old Milwaukee. We’d drink the better stuff until it was gone (and we were nearly gone) and then start in on the Old Milwaukee. Still, there would always be a lot of cans of OM left in the morning and someone had to be delegated to load it on the bus so it could be transported to the next place. I think it was somewhere on the homeward leg when the last can of Old Milwaukee was either consumed or thrown out the window of the bus. We could have cheered, but we probably just belched. The other memorable part of the trip (given the amount of brain cells that died it’s a wonder we remembered anything) was that we started the trip with 4 eight-track tapes to be played on the bus sound system. Within the first three hours, three of the tapes broke. The sole survivor was the “Frampton Comes Alive” double-album, which then was played non-stop. Every. Single. Hour. Of. Every. Single. Day. (Do you…feeeeel like I do?) At one point I begged my friends to buy a new tape of anything — Johnny Cash, Montovani — anything! All funds were being reserved for beer and as we still had a few days left in the trip, there would be no money allocated for non-essentials. To this day, Old Milwaukee and Peter Frampton will both make me gag, though fortunately both are pretty rare these days.

One of my favorite beer memories, however, is of when I was in college when a couple of friends and I decided to drive up to St. Louis to see this new movie that was stirring up a lot of talk; something called “Star Wars.” On the way we stopped at a store and bought a 12-pack of Stroh’s and a foot-long length of summer sausage. We drank the beer and bit chunks out of the sausage as we drove along (don’t try this at home, kids) and it was a great combination. Whenever I see a Stroh’s sign today I always remember that trip. The movie was pretty good, too.

Between Kevin’s post that I referred to at the beginning of this story and my own experiences, a lot of classic, regional brews have been recalled. As I was writing this I started to wonder what happened to some of these; for example, Pabst Blue Ribbon. I did a web search and discovered that PBR is still going strong. In fact, it has become the home and distributor of a lot of these old brands. Visiting the Pabst Brewing website I found many of these “vintage” beers huddled together. Beers like Schaefer, Blatz, Colt 45, Old Style, Schmidt, Stag, Schlitz, Lone Star, Falstaff, Pearl, Rainier and Stroh’s — even Old Milwaukee and Olympia — have found a home there, and preferably it’s a cool, dark and dry one!

Update:

Mr. Dilettante has a more, um, sober, take on a similar topic. (And yeah, Mark, I caught the Wang Chung reference…which may also be appropriate.)