tell me about your regional brewery that's pushing 100 years (or more) and is known for their lager

stuff like:

-narragansett (rhode island)
-yuengling (pa)
-utica club (ny)
-genesee (ny)
-old style (chicago... or is it?)
-hamm's (chicago)

do you like it? is it underrated? do you know a fun fact about them? are they still independent or does a anheuser-busch inbev own them?

right now my favorite is utica club. a tasty beer, nicely designed can and they'll keep telling you they were the first beer sold after prohibition ended.

https://i.postimg.cc/mD6k5KKX/306711-alt8.jpg

I’m in Minnesota for the holidays and Schell Brewery form New Ulm, MN is 160+ years old

I haven’t been there in decades but I remember that the brewery had a lovely landscaped ground and historic buildings.

I have a feeling that if any Germans showed up in this thread they could absolutely destroy it

We have Senate Lager in DC - the original Heurich brewery is long gone but it’s made with the old recipe, I like it well enough and the can is gorgeous

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/33521/497807/

germans are not allowed to post on this thread, fyi

our older stuff tends to be either porter/stout or a red ale as opposed to lager which iirc harp might be our native most notable historical effort at and whoch always smelled from the can to me of eggs so i dont have any fond associations of it were lager even my drink which it isnt

red ales allowed, smithwicks

porters and stouts, the obvious and beamish and murphys

hamm's is st. paul, minnesota, not chicago.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51570956489_1b253927a9_b.jpg

And Old Style was from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, although it was inexplicably popular in Chicago

that utica club can is gorgeous

xp yeah if i am not mistaken the oldest existing brewery in chicago is goose island, founded in 1988.

I sometimes see Genesee in some dive bar or other around town and I'm literally afraid to try it. God forbid I should come across a Ballantine product.

how come there weren't any chicago breweries historically? the wisconsin brewery lobby too powerful?

Hamm’s is no longer brewed in St. Paul though. It’s a Molson- Coors product now, brewed in Milwaukee.

xp it’s a good question, but the answer is that there were lots of breweries historically, and during the nineteenth century chicago was a hub not just for beer-making but for research and innovation that set the groundwork for mass refrigeration and transportation of beer etc. prohibition did in chicago what it did for a lot of american cities: it killed local breweries and made most american beer consumers dependent on the national brands from the ‘30s through the ‘70s when the craft revival started to take off

miller bought one of the last remaining historic brands, meister bräu, in the ‘70s, moved it to milwaukee and renamed it miller lite

i think anyway most of the remaining historic beer brands regardless of origin are nowadays just cheap crap with a marketing angle owned by “brand portfolios” and private equity

even tho i like drinking them sometimes

I used to be a fiend for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bohemian back when I lived in MD

Yuengling is great. The perfect pairing with pizza or a burger, in my opinion.

Humboldt County CA (birthplace of AtG) once had our own lager called Brown Derby... I drank a lot of it in high school as it was sold cheaply at Safeway/Von's... It the late 80's I think a quart was 99 cents. I once had my sister buy us 15 quarts for a dudes camping trip (she had a fake ID). There were also stubbies with rebus puzzles under the cap, which was a thing back then

It looks like they phased it out over thirty years ago, but some of us will remember.

An empty can went for $93K last year, a new record for a beer can:

https://www.barnebys.com/blog/93600-for-a-beer-can-a-rare-brown-derby-sets-a-new-record

too bad!

https://lostcoastoutpost.com/loco-media/cache/8a/07/8a071a8adde1b909bcd4df0118d4df89.webp

https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/aug/3/humboldt-history/

saw a guy at the airport with a schaefer hat, ween pin and twin peaks keychain on his backpack. tracks!

Grain Belt (1893) was produced outside of Minnesota for a while but Schell Brewing picked it up in 2002

if we're going to generously count revivals, Old Tavern was around in Iowa in 1908, pretty much died off during prohibition, had the name kicked around a bit, and now local brewer Confluence has brought it back

i’ll definitely allow revivals

The revived Grain Belt was my cheap beer of choice in my senior year of college in Minnesota in 1994/5. I think Summit owned the trademark made it then?

Glad to see Genesee in the OP. That was the local brew where I grew up, definitely one of the first beers I drank. At a cut-rate country club where I had a summer job doing dishes and busing tables when I was 16-17, the cooks let us kids have a cold one once we finished up late at night. Even then we all understood that Genny wasn't good, but it was cheap as hell. I think you could get a 12-pack for like 4 bucks? (If you could get someone to buy it for you, of course.) At a college bar I went to at Penn State, they served Genny 12 Horse Ale as like a specialty beer, which I thought was funny. 12 Horse is not terrible, at least.

They adapted well to the microbrew era. They opened their own brewpub next to their old brewery building in downtown Rochester, and they make actual microbrews there that they only sell at their brewpub and maybe some specialty shops. I bought a T-shirt last time I was there 5-6 years ago, I'm glad they're still around.

Not still locally owned, though. It's part of a subsidiary of some Costa Rican company that also is maybe part of Heineken?

oh I thought Genny was worker-owned?

It was for a bit, but they sold after 10 years or so.

After the '08 crash I think.

Spoetzl Brewery been operating since 1909, even managed to stay open during Prohibition. Best known for Shiner Bock but their OG 1909 beer is Shiner Premium, a lager. Shiner Light Blonde is my summer beer of choice!

(I guess that's redundant but the Bock is a dark lager and I was assuming the OP meant light one's)

Ones