Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer

Earlier this week the United States and her sister to the north, Canada, managed to avoid a cataclysmic trade war when the two nations grudgingly came to an agreement on revisions to the all-important NAFTA treaty.  In celebration of this news we’re talking about a beer that, while making up only about 4% of the Canadian domestic market, is still favored by Willie Nelson and Michael J. Fox, the beer used to toast the successful testing of the renowned Canada arm that adorned Space Shuttle for decades, a beer identified with fishermen and loggers in the great Canadian northeast.  

Its story begins in 1867 with the founding of Army & Navy Brewery in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.  The founder, John Oland, died only three years later, and thus the brewery was renamed after his wife and fellow English émigré, Susannah. Delicious beers were brewed by S. Oland & Sons in Dartmouth until 1928 when the founder’s grandson moved the brewery to St. John and changed its name to New Brunswick Brewery.  This name in turn stuck until just after the Second World War when it was once more renamed, this time losing the regional appellation and acquiring one that referred to upper body anatomy of a ruminant mammal.

First imported to the United States in 1978, the brand was so exceptionally successful that the brewers had to radically expand its brewing capacity by 1985, the year it launched in the United Kingdom and became the fourth most consumed import beer in the United States.  

Today’s beer is the largest brewery wholly owned by Canadian interests, a beer made by a company that survived the infamous Halifax explosion, a beer embroiled in a notorious ax murder, and a beer at the center of Guy Ritchie-esque heists.

That’s right folks, today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Moosehead Lager. 

http://www.pickledeggsandcoldbeer.com

Earlier this week the United States and her sister to the north, Canada, managed to avoid a cataclysmic trade war when the two nations grudgingly came to an agreement on revisions to the all-important NAFTA treaty.  In celebration of this news we’re talking about a beer that, while making up only about 4% of the Canadian domestic market, is still favored by Willie Nelson and Michael J. Fox, the beer used to toast the successful testing of the renowned Canada arm that adorned Space Shuttle for decades, a beer identified with fishermen and loggers in the great Canadian northeast.Its story begins in 1867 with the founding of Army & Navy Brewery in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.  The founder, John Oland, died only three years later, and thus the brewery was renamed after his wife and fellow English émigré, Susannah. Delicious beers were brewed by S. Oland & Sons in Dartmouth until 1928 when the founder’s grandson moved the brewery to St. John and changed its name to New Brunswick Brewery.  This name in turn stuck until just after the Second World War when it was once more renamed, this time losing the regional appellation and acquiring one that referred to upper body anatomy of a ruminant mammal.First imported to the United States in 1978, the brand was so exceptionally successful that the brewers had to radically expand its brewing capacity by 1985, the year it launched in the United Kingdom and became the fourth most consumed import beer in the United States.Today’s beer is the largest brewery wholly owned by Canadian interests, a beer made by a company that survived the infamous Halifax explosion, a beer embroiled in a notorious ax murder, and a beer at the center of Guy Ritchie-esque heists.That’s right folks, today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Moosehead Lager. 

http://www.pickledeggsandcoldbeer.com

In 1810 Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildberg – the occasion was marked with a folk festival centered around horseraces, games, music, and tremendous quantities of beer and food.  Apparently everyone really enjoyed themselves so the folks of Munich decided to make it an annual event and with each year the festival grew and grew, outlasting the reign of Ludwig, forced off the throne during the German revolution, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany.   It is a tradition that has survived depressions, wars, and horrors unimaginable, a tradition that represents so much of what is good about the German people, a festival celebrating harvest and change and community.  It is a festival in which the casual observer will hear the song “Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit,” every twenty minutes. 

Today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Oktoberfest.

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First brewed in 1849 by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, today’s beer, remained with Schlitz until 1982 when it was acquired by Stroh Brewing of Detroit, who in turn managed it until 2000 when it was acquired by that little giant of breweries, Pabst.  Today representing itself with World War II-style pin-up girls on their cans, this beer is perhaps best known for being shilled by the fiction, but hormone-provoking, Swedish bikini team.  This is a beer that Will Ferrell loves so much he filmed free, unscripted ads for them focused on the Quad-Cities region of Iowa and Illinois (Davenport, Betterdorf, Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline - don’t worry, we had to look it up too – and why are there five cities?).  This is the beer that Consumer Reports described as the best mass-marketed beer based on the evaluation by 17 beer scholars (including several with PhDs in fermentation science) from a slate of 69 beers.

Today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about the only beer I regularly buy in a drug store. Today, folks, we’re talking about Old Milwaukee.

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The ancient Greeks argued there were three fundamental types of ethical government, distinguished by the number of people allowed to participate in the legislative process – democracies, aristocracies, and monarchies.  They argued that for each of these forms of government there was a parallel, but fundamentally exploitative negative equivalent – mob rule, oligarchy, and tyranny.  Today we’re going to determine whether one beer, one of the most financially successful in the history of beverage, is a properly called the King of Beers – or the Tyrant of Tipples.

 That’s right, today on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Budweiser.

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Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico there was fermentation: corn was transmuted into tesgüano, agave into pulque, and honey into tepache.  Soon after the conquest the first Mexican brewery was founded in 1542 by Don Alonso Herrera, but the modern genre generically known as “Mexican beer” largely emerges after 1821 and the Mexican War of Independence, the product of German and Austrian immigrants combining their techniques with Mexican ingredients.  The popularity of the beer in America’s sibling to the south particularly grew during the reign of the Austrian Maximilian I, the brother of Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria-Hungary.  Put on the throne of the Second Mexican Empire by the French Napoleon III in 1864, Maximilian ruled only briefly before he was removed from the same in 1867 by Mexican Republicans – or more accurately, a firing squad – but his courtiers influenced the Mexican alcohol market permanently.

In 1884 a German gentleman by the name of Wilhelm Hasse immigrated to Veracruz where, thirteen years later he would found his own brewery.  His brewery soon produced Siglo XX, a nod to the emerging 20th Century, but eventually his brew would come to be known by the two Xs themselves, its memorialization forgotten by most consumers. 

In fact, most consumers today, at least in the US and Canada, are more likely to identify the beer with as the higher end of Mexican beer in taco joints and with an American of Jewish Russian heritage whose career was built on his work in television Westerns and action flicks, a man most folks know as the most interesting man in the world, a man whose ad campaign single-handedly doubled sales of Dos Equis in the United States between 2006 and 2011, and tripled it in Canada in a single year, 2008.

Hoy, en Huevos Encurtidos y Cerveza Fría, estamos hablando de Dos Equis Lager Especial.

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First brewed in 1844 by German immigrants in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today’s beer has long claimed that it was awarded the title “America’s Best” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, launching it into international fame – the fact that there seems to be no evidence to back this claim being of no matter (so it is with legend).  Originally called Best Select, this beer would be sold in bottles tied with blue silk ribbons around the neck from 1882 to 1916, when the demands of the war economy forced the ribbon to migrate to the label alone.  

Surviving Prohibition through manufacturing cheese, soda, and malt extracts, (products whose facilities were sold in 1933 to Kraft) today's brewery shot off the block in 1933 when beer-making was again legal and by 1977 it was the third best-selling beer in the United States, peaking at 18 million barrels a year.  The 1980s left the brewery in the cold, unable to compete with emerging international superpowers and rapidly declining sales and frequent turnovers in ownership led to the unthinkable in 1996 – the headquarters had left Milwaukee for San Antonio, Texas, where they would stay until moving in 2011 to Los Angeles. By 2001 sales had fallen below one million barrels and things looked very dour indeed for the brewery until the dawn of a new type of human being – the hipster.  

The value of the company increased until 2010 when it was purchased by C. Dean Metropoloulos, owner of Hostess brands, for a quarter of a billion dollars (US).  The next year a crowdfunding campaign raised $200 million before a US Securities & Exchange decision to halted effort, ending an attempt to bring the company back to its roots.  In 2014 TSG Consumer Partners, led by Eugene Kashper, purchase the brewer and its labels, moving the home of the owners not to Russia, as many news sources originally reported, but San Francisco (corporate headquarters, however, remained with the brewing facilities in Los Angeles).  In 2015, in a gesture towards the brewery’s roots, it opened a new facility, the Pabst Milwaukee Brewery and Taproom. Built in the frame of a former Methodist church, the brewpub offers  not only its best-known concoction, but long discontinued brews of yesteryear. 

Today on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer we’re considering the beer that first perfected marketing without marketing, the brand that supports not only sports teams but fine artists, the beer that brings together the blue-collar throng with the popped collar crowd, a beer whose family of products are entirely contract-brewed. 

That’s right – today we’re talking about Pabst Blue Ribbon.

[Note: We had some engineer and sound issues with this episode - the quality just isn't where we would like it, and you have our apologies - that said it is a fun one, and we didn't want to lose it, so we put our back into it and did some work and got this imperfect, but still great ep.  Thanks for your patience as we keep learning the engineering process]

The most imported beer in the modern United States is not German, though it is a German-style pilsner.  It is not Spanish, though for most of its history it was owned by a Spanish emigrant who left his home village, Cerezales del Condado, hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure development upon his death.  It is a beer that has been made into gummi candies, a beer that has been the object vast conspiracies on behalf of international beer super-giant Heineken, and a product at the center of discussions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  It is a beer associated with beaches and boxing, a beer accused of accelerating climate change, and a beer that Forbes recently ranked the #74th most valuable brand of any product or service on earth.

Hoy, en Huevos Encurtidos y Cerveza Fría, estamos hablando de Corona.

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It’s Miller Time. 

Today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Miller High Life.  

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For our first ever special episode we're reviewing the legendary Vermont beer Heady Topper, a double IPA from Waterbury, Vermont rated #4 in the world by BeerAdvocate and called the best beer in America by the Chicago Tribune.  Made possible by a special excursion by friend of the show Smilin' Mike Mason, we delve into the antithesis of the cheap beer.  FYI, normally our shows come in at the equivalent of about PG-13, but this one has some potty language; bear that in mind if you're listening with whippersnappers or folks with sensitive dispositions.  Cheers!

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