Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer

In 1868 a young Rhenish Prussian gentleman immigrates to the United States, working various odd jobs and gradually making his way across the American continent until 1873 when he establishes Golden Brewing in Golden, Colorado, brewing his beer with the cold waters of the Clear Creek Watershed.  While the corporate beast that was Golden Brewing has undergone enormous growth and transformation, including shedding its geonymic name for a patronymic one, and now brews in several locations, its signature beer is still exclusively made in its home city, relying on the traditional water source, even as its recipe and processing has continued to be modernized, including the addition of corn syrup as the adjunct.  Brewed in copper Huppmann kettles, fermented for 30-days using the horizontal box technique, cold-filtered with 19th Century style Enzinger filters, one has to conclude that this beer, even as it has achieved international prominence is still a labor of love for its mother company. 

That love shows through in the genuine love and loyalty of its advocates, and since it wasn’t available east of the Mississippi until 1976, that love made it the beer most frequently smuggled across state borders for much of the 20th Century, inspiring a host of pop culture icons, including a little movie called Smokey and the Bandit. 

This is the beer that inspired Clint Eastwood and Ray Charles to record a song called “Beers to You,” a song featured on the soundtrack of a movie about bare-knuckle boxing and an orangutan. 

Hell guys, the this is the beer that E.T. got drunk on. 

Today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about the official beer of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, a beer that donated $750,000 to wildland firefighters between 2014 and 2017, and a beer whose name was earned in the tents and bars of Colorado where zinc miners would toast their hard days’ work over food and music.  

Today we’re talking about Coors Banquet. 

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Founded in 1861, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company has experienced every imaginable trial and trouble in its long history – its story is reminiscent of virtually all those regional brewers that survived both Prohibition and the rise of macrobreweries.  There are a lot of ways I could introduce today’s beer, but none of them capture the sense of renaissance, optimism, and purpose that seems to drive it better than its own mission statement, and so I quote – its mission is to, “make Pittsburgh proud of its hometown brewery, build on [its] proud tradition of excellence, produce the best-tasting malt beverages in the country, reinvigorate and maintain an iconic brand, and create high-quality jobs and provide healthy returns to investors.”

Heartwarming, right?  Add to that their innovation in packaging designs and their linkage to iconic Pittsburgh sports teams and you’ve got yourself a full episode of Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer. 

That’s right guys, today we’re reviewing Iron City Beer.

In 1903, as the Qing Dynasty waned a group of German brewers on the Shandong Peninsula established the aptly named Germania-Brauerei, offering a taste of Europe in the midst of the German concessions in Northeast China. Soon, however, the Brewery would undergo a series of transformations mirroring those taking place in China and Shandong more generally.  The brewery would remain in German hands following the Chinese Revolution of 1911, but when the First World War came to a close the Germans would lose their concessions to Japan and the brewery would be forcibly sold to Dai-Nippon Brewing, the company that in 1949 would be split into the Asahi and Sapporo labels.  After the Second World War the brewery was briefly put under the administration of the Tsui family by the Nationalist government, at least until the fall of the Republic of China on the mainland that same year, when it was made into a state-owned enterprise by the fledgling People’s Republic of China.  And so the brewery remained for decades until the thawing of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms led eventually to its privatization and merger with three other breweries of the same metropolis.  Now sold in 62 nations, this beer, once brewed according to strict German Beer purity laws though now an adjunct lager, constitutes around 50% of the PRC’s total beer exports and is the second most consumed beer on Earth, its growth mirroring that of the economic development of China itself.

Today on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer we’re raising our glasses and shouting a hearty gānbēi (干杯).  That’s right folks, today we’re talking about Tsingtao.

http://www.pickledeggsandcoldbeer.com/2018/07/episode-4-tsingtao-with-callie-hietala.html

Originally intended as a beer for those who loved classic Bavarian-style pilsners, and once sold in bottles designed to look like beer steins, these days today’s beer is more likely to be found attired in blaze orange, camouflage, NASCAR emblems, or fishing-inspired images.  Despite its apparent market changes, it nonetheless remains a beer for the out-of-doors, once hanging its hat on the slogan, “clear and bright as mountain air,” today leaning on the shorter, but no less image-charged “head for the mountains.”   This is a beer that has caused men in their sixties to raise arms against one another, a beer that cheerfully revels in its own hooliganish reputation, a beer that maintains the best damn Twitter account of any big corporate entity in the United States. 

Today on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer we climb out of our deer stands, head back to our dorm rooms, and settle into our orange couch we bought for $50 at the flea market that one Saturday.  

Today we’re talking Busch beer.

It is the best-selling beer in the United States, the third best-selling on Earth, a yellow beverage that is so ubiquitous that the only thing as large as its presence on supermarket and convenience store shelves is its advertising presence.  The great cold war between multinational beer corporations rages on, in its fourth decade at least, as alliances and corporations grow ever larger, consolidating resources, developing intensive and extensive logistics systems, data analysis mechanisms, but the leading weapons are not intercontinental weapons or aircraft carriers, but inexpensive adjunct lagers that promise palatable low caloric costs with sufficiently high alcoholic content, packaged in an inoffensive form.   What is amazing is the scale and consistent quality of this undertaking – today’s beer alone generates around half a billion US dollars a year, in no small part because it is nearly always of the same essential quality no matter where or when one buys it – a miracle of technology and planning whose history mirrors that of modernization itself.  

Today on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer we raise our glasses and consider the imperial behest of arguably the greatest of corporate mascots of the 1980s, the late, the great, Spuds McKenzie.  

Today, we’re talking about Bud Light.

http://www.pickledeggsandcoldbeer.com/2018/07/episode-2-bud-light.html

Today, as we introduce the world to our scrappy little show, we find ourselves reviewing a beer that grew up with Generation-X, first market tested in 1985 and nationally distributed the following year.  This quadrupally cold-filtered American adjunct lager was originally marketed as a draft-quality beer built on the bones of Miller High Life; the Champagne of Beers on tap, but with superior portability.  Today, however, it sells itself as the anti-microbrew, hanging its hat on slogans like, “Its time for beer to quit acting like wine,” and “It’s time for a good-old macro-brew.”  And while it hearkens itself to a by-gone age when seemingly all-American macros were built and bottled in the bounteous bosom of the blue-collar upper Midwest, insisting that, “Its time to drink beer imported all the way from Milwaukee,” in fact few beers are less attached to a particular geographic location, having originally been brewed in North Carolina, but now brewed in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, California, Ohio, and yes, Milwaukee. 

Today, on Pickled Eggs & Cold Beer, we’re talking about Miller Genuine Draft.

http://www.pickledeggsandcoldbeer.com/2018/07/episode-1-miller-genuine-draft.html