PBR
January 5, 2011 by justin · 2 Comments
Shitty beer week continues with one of my favorite shitty beers, hipster favorite Pabst Blue Ribbon. The thing is, it tastes like every other shitty beer. In fact, the reason I like it better than most bad beers is that it lacks taste. So much in fact that I can actually stomach it.
Maybe hipsters clung to PBR like shit on a toailet brush (trying to stick with the theme folks) cause of Blue Velvet? “Heineken?!?! Fuck that shit! … PABST BLUE RIBBON!!!” – Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth”
Last year AnimalNewYork stated that, “Five years ago Pabst Blue Ribbon rose like a phoenix from the ashes to become the official beer of the sad modern “counter-culture,” effectively branding itself as the adult beverage of choice for urban 20 and 30-somethings seeking to shed their pansy-ass realities and earn some hard street cred by creating a facade of being one with white-trash folk. But do the cool kids realize that the folks at Pabst who make and market their beloved “anti-establishment” beer of choice are also savvy capitalists who’ve been quite effective at making massive profits off of their “non-conformist” asses through slick marketing?”
Their point is spot on. The thing missing though is that PBR has been a marketing ploy from day one.
It is all in the name. Pabst never won a blue ribbon. They never won a ribbon cause there was no ribbon being offered. The company has historically claimed its flagship beer was renamed Pabst Blue Ribbon following its win as “America’s Best” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Interestingly enough it is probably named after the fact that they used to tie a blue ribbon on the neck of the bottles. The image here is an invitation to the Chicago Fair, note the blue ribbon was already around.
Anyway, PBR sure does love their marketing and I have to give them a for marketing and a for the beer itself. So buck the system, drink real beer instead!
Note: I drank my PBR on draft at The Red Herring tonight and the lighting is as bad as the beer. Since I was not able to get a good shot I borrowed the images used from : http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/08/11/the-resurgence-of-pabst-blue-ribbon/ http://yestreasures.com/images/pabst.jpg and http://www.periodpaper.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/540x/3be94435fc5c39f0d7e641591902dff2/F/A/FAIR9_006_9.JPG
About justin
I admit, I’m one of those PBR loving hipsters. If I’m going to drink cheap beer, PBR is my cheap beer of choice. And yes, seeing Blue Velvet at an unacceptably early age (and also once on several hits of good acid…) probably had a definite influence on that choice. In fact the day Dennis Hopper died, my closest friends and I hauled ourselves down to our local dive bar and kicked back as many Pabst Blue Ribbons as we could stomach in his memory!!
PBR has been there for me though. Even when I’ve been broke and unemployed, I could scrape together enough change for a dollar draft of the stuff. PBR is Punk Rock Beer!!!!