America has discovered a new beer, one that seems right for a country
facing bad times.
Pabst Blue Ribbon, a forgotten if not forsaken brand, once the
solace of the beleaguered working man, and, regrettably, a beer often
associated with what people in polite company call "trash," has staged a
surprising comeback. The resurgence is mostly among young adults, led by
colleagues such as snowboarders and indie filmmakers.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times, or a remembrance of the way it was,
or a toast to blue-collar virtue. However you pour it, PBR is America's new
beer for a simple reason: It is not new at all.
Melissa Brown, a 28-year-old New York artist, recently served PBR at
the opening of her art show at the Bellwether Gallery, located in the
fashionable and hip Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. She explains her
choice by saying that "it's time to get back to the basics." Others seem to
agree. The owner of the gallery says that requests for PBR have become so
common it's now "the official gallery beer."
In Washington, the manager of Chief Ike's Mambo Room in Adams Morgan
wasn't finding success with sub-premium beers such as Schlitz and Tecate.
"We switched to Pabst a few months ago and it's going like hotcakes," he
says. At Whitey's in Arlington, suited-up young Republicans, faux cowboys
and dead-serious blue-collar drinkers line up faithfully for a weekly PBR
special. On a recent Thursday they exhausted the supply by 10 p.m.
In Park City, Utah, a group of professional and semi-professional
snowboarders -- the trendsetting type popular with fans and revered by
marketing agents -- have discovered Pabst. For the past few years, they've
congregated on Super Bowl Sunday and played their own game of tackle
football in PBR hats and jackets. They call it the Pabst Bowl.
Nationwide, grocery store sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon climbed 12
percent in the 52-week period ending in late November. Total sales have
increased five percent over the past year. "For us that's a really big
deal," says Pabst brand manager Neal Stewart. "That's one of the best
increases we've had since 1978."
The increase comes the way a populist trend should: from the ground
up. Pabst is Consumer Lite, a refreshing blend of economy and Americana,
without all the heavy marketing campaigns, the greasy reinvention, the paid
celebrity endorsements. It represents simpler times -- how nice in a world
of corporate scandals and missing persons, 24-hour news, terrorism and burst
economies.
Pabst sells its image of plainness -- its look of regular-guy
health, its artless presence among the racks of imports and million-dollar
household names -- in part because Pabst has no other choice.
Its advertising budget is pocket change, its production volume
historically low. Stewart says there has not been a PBR television campaign
in at least 10 years. Radio spots are limited to local endorsements, and
print ads are relegated to the bargain bin of weekly alternative papers.
All this is symptomatic of Pabst's decline since the late 1970s.
Industry conglomeration and the introduction of light beers in the 1980s cut
deep into Pabst's already deteriorating market share. In 1996, the Pabst
Brewing Co. ended 153 years in Milwaukee and relocated to the tequila-loving
town of San Antonio, where it occupied the aging Pearl Brewery for a few,
final years. Pabst finally closed its remaining plants, pouring its last
beer in 2001.
The Pabst product line, which includes almost the entire stable of
retiring American front-runners -- Stroh's, Schlitz, Old Style, Old
Milwaukee, Schaefer and Blatz -- is now produced under contract by Miller,
the last of the big Milwaukee brewers (but owned by South African
interests).
Today Pabst Brewing exists in little more than name only. It
maintains executive offices in San Antonio but continues to print on its PBR
cans and labels a post office box in Milwaukee -- perhaps misleadingly,
perhaps nostalgically.
When asked about the surge in PBR sales, Benj Steinman, president of
the industry journal Beer Marketer's Insights, immediately uttered the
buzzwords popular among pop-culture observers: "retro chic," a phrase hung
on a host of young adults who affect the style and attitude of the mythical
good ol' days: real or imagined working-class values clothed in polyester
button-downs, Chuck Taylor shoes, Levis and old T-shirts. Accordingly, PBR
sales have been concentrated in areas popular among the throwback
generation: the Pacific Northwest, New York and Midwestern urban centers
like St. Louis.
"You can see it moving westward, through the mountain areas,"
Stewart says. "This is attributed to the fact that a lot of snowboarders
have gotten into the brand. It's kind of the drink of choice among that
crowd."
Pabst has introduced official stocking caps, jackets that read "PBR
Snowboarding Team" and official high-end snowboards. In keeping with its
grass-roots philosophy, Pabst has sponsored snowboarding videos and sells
its PBR "wearables" at production cost.
While part of Pabst's appeal may be its low price, no more than
$2.50 a can (or bottle, where available) in bars, most name-brand domestics
are sold for not much more. Other sub-premium beers, such as Busch and
Natural Light, are priced comparably. Pabst caught on among some elusive
Gen-Xers for other reasons, namely because of what it isn't: mainstream.
The popularity of PBR is a lesson in reverse psychology. Young
adults have taken to the beer because it wasn't forced down their throats.
Like ugly clothes and extreme sports, Pabst's value lies in its expression
of individuality and choice, a rejection of consumer society by those who
feel manipulated by it. Pabst's selling point is its distinct unpopularity,
its unself-conscious existence among beers that reinvent themselves as
regularly as political candidates.
When sales started to increase among this demographic, Pabst
marketers did something almost unprecedented. They stayed out of the way.
"We want people to discover it," Stewart says. "We allow them to
find that it's on the premises, that it's making a comeback. Our marketing
is that we really facilitate what the market wants."
The flow of PBR has begun to spill over to the national scene. Kid
Rock, the new embodiment of low-class style (to put it kindly), is a noted
PBR man. He identifies with the beer in his self-adulating song "Forever" --
but gets paid to hawk Coors on nationally televised ads. In "The
Accountant," the 2002 Academy Award winner for Best Short Film, Pabst Blue
Ribbon is the emblem of authenticity for the title character, who's
determined to save the Southern way of life. And, long before Gen-Xers were
rejecting core bourgeois values, David Lynch in 1986 made PBR the beer of
choice for the drug-addled, underworld boss Frank (Dennis Hopper) in "Blue
Velvet." Frank's foil in the film, a clean-cut Kyle MacLachlan, drinks
Heineken, a yuppie import that is famously disparaged by Frank with a phrase
that is unrepeatable here.
Of course, no amount of hipster or counterculture endorsement is
going to resurrect Pabst to its former glory, or even bring it to levels
competitive with Coors, Miller and Anheuser-Busch.
Steinman classifies PBR as "sub-premium," a real category among beer
producers but one that also reflects the attitude of many American beer
drinkers, an attitude that is unlikely to change as the beer proliferates
among Establishment dropouts. And nothing is so tenuous as a youth fad,
particularly one embraced by the ever-vigilant American iconoclast, who is
likely to bail once he suspects corporate America has found him out, not to
mention the media. If PBR becomes too visible, too much of a commodity, then
it will lose its newfound support. (Note the brief and swiftly exploited
revival of swing music in the 1990s.)
As Steinman points out, a sprinkle of sales doesn't mean a watershed
is soon at hand. "The Pabst Brewing Company as a whole is still declining at
a substantial rate," he says. "Pabst Blue Ribbon is a small component at
this time. It's not their biggest brand." That distinction belongs to Old
Milwaukee, not exactly a contender either. And the ground Pabst has lost
since its heyday near the end of the 19th century will never be recovered.
In the 1890s Pabst produced the best-selling and most widely
distributed beer in the country. It was the first beer to be accepted by the
moneyed elite; sales were so brisk that Pabst purchased its own forest and
barrel factories just to meet the demand. Today, Pabst products constitute
about 4.2 percent of the domestic beer market, while Anheuser- Busch
commands about 48 percent.
For now, low-saturation marketing has paid off. Pabst projects an
image of casual earnestness. Buy it or don't buy it. Whatever. It is an
image shared with today's indie rock scene, indie film scene, skateboarding
scene, art and literary scenes. It is the image that, ironically, sells.
While most young consumers buy clothes and cars to make themselves
seem as affluent and desirable as possible, the materialism of many of
today's counterculture youth is just the opposite. It is meant to reflect
the economics of "reality," of working-class thriftiness, of the notion of
America at its best, at its most optimistic, at its blue-collar prime. Of
course, this is not America. This is Americana -- and an appetite for what
was good when things are going bad.