Journal of the mental environment
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Cheap beer?
Why do hipsters drink PBR? Rob Walker takes a look at brands and meaning in the marketplace.
- Tue, 12 Aug 2008 3:08 pm — Posted by Lauren
- | 76 comments
Speaking of PBR and all the love it receives from hipsters, here is an interesting excerpt from New York Times Columnist Rob Walker’s new book, Buying In:
“The Blackspot sneaker that I mentioned earlier-the creation of the antibrander, Kalle Lasn, and his Adbusters crew-is premised on the belief that a logo (or antilogo) product can have real meaning for people who are sick of logos; it is premised on the belief that the marketplace of goods is a marketplace of ideas. The “hijacking” of PBR [Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer] shows how this really can happen, although its different from the Blackspot idea in two important ways.
The first is that while the meaning of the Blackspot as a sort of protest brand was created by Adbusters and announced to potential consumers, the meaning of PBR as a kind of protest brand did not come from its owners; it came from the grass roots, from consumers, from the bottom up.
And here is a second difference: On the side of every can of Pabst Blue Ribbon is a P.O box in Milwaukee. Pabst does trace its roots to a brewery foundered there in 1844. These days, however, Pabst Brewing Company is based in San Antonio. In 1985, the brewery was bought by Paul Kalmanovitz’s idea, a self-made beer and real estate baron. While other big brewers were spending to build national, image based brands, Kalmanovitz’s idea, apparently, was to buy up ailing ales, slash all associated costs, and let them “decline profitably.” Kalmanovitz died in 1987 (Pabst is owned by the charitable foundation he left behind), and his lieutenants ran the show for the next dozen or so years along the same lines. The current Pabst Brewing portfolio includes Schlitz, Carling Black Label, Falstaff, Olympia, and Stroh’s. It also owns a few regional stalwarts (Lone Star, Rainier, Old Style) and malt liquors (Colt 45, St. Ides). Its top seller, with about 1 percent of the U.S. beer market, is Old Milwaukee.
Along the way, Pabst shuttered its Milwaukee brewery, eliminating nearly 250 jobs and touching off a legal battle over pension obligations to former workers. This might explain another quirk of the Pabst resurgence-that it has radiated out from a part of the country that had no particular historic tie to the brand. “They really aliented people in Milwaukee,” Dennis E. Garrett, a marketing professor at Marquette University in that city, told me. In 2001, Pabst finalized an outsourcing deal with Miller, becoming a “virtual brewer”, as one executive put it at the time. Having virtually wiped out its blue-collar workforce, Pabst employed just 166 people, about half of them selling beer in the field and the rest in the home office. This, in other words, is exactly the kind of scenario that people like Lasn and books like No Logo were complaining about.
That is to say, PBR’s blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anticapitalist image-image attached to it by consumers-is a sham. You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding.”
From reading the hundreds of comments on the
Check out Rob’s book: Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
Comments
There’s a book in here somewhere about signs and signifiers, but I think Baudrillard already wrote it.
I think the most likely reason for drinking PRB is that the drink is common, you just can’t avoid it. It’s true, choosing for one specific drink does not define you, it all depends on the mood. As long as your drinking habit is a controlled habit everything should be fine.
Geremy, Alcohol Treatment Program consultant
I’m a hipster and I hate PBR. But I drink it anyway, mostly because I hate you. All of you. Because I’m a hipster. And that’s how I do.
I live in San Antonio so you think finding PBR would be easy, but think again. I’ve been wanting to try this beer ever since I visited my buddy in NC a few months back. He ordered one but they didn’t have it. Anyway, I tried it this weekend and loved it. This beer really takes me back to when I was a kid. My dad would let me fill his beer glass for him and I was allowed to take the last swallow that wouldn’t go into the glass. Dad always drank Schlitz or PBR since JAX had gone out of business by the time I was born.
For me, I just like the nostalgia of the PBR. From now on, it will forever take a place in my fridge with the MGD and Old Speckled Hen. And oh yeah, I tasted enough microbrews to know why they’ll never be macrobrews…yuck.
Beer, that is some BS...try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQOAl4Noyc
Budweiser makes me very very very sick. If I accidentally drink any, even a little bit, I have something beyond a hangover. No other beer ever does this to me in the same way. PBR is cheap. So is Schlitz, and Miller High Life. I live in Atlanta which is totally overrun with PBR drinking hipster culture (at least the part I live in). Having lived in two places that actually have longstanding good cheap beer traditions (the midwest and Germany) I know that shitty beer is just part of the general crappiness of American food and drink. Anywhere else in the world will make good cheap beer for you (Scandinavian countries excepted)
pbr? wtf. Who cares! I think that there are more important issues than doing an article on some beer. A nasty beer at that. I mean, if thats the only way we can distinguish ourselves as individuals or "stick it to the man" we are fuckin doomed. Please, no more articles on this crap. Its a waste of time.
I can't understand this trend, personally I'd rather drink water than these cheap macrobrews. I thought beer was gross for a long time because I didn't understand it, I had only had cheap beer. Now I drink much better beer. It's not about image, it's about quality. Why waste your money on mass-produced crap? The hipsters are drinking PBR for irony, almost mocking the blue-collar it (or its image) is associated with. Instead, beer should be appreciated and respected, not just associated with cheap drunkenness. It's like the different between drinking a decent merlot and drinking a jug of Carlo Rossi or two buck Chuck.
If you want to be a non-consumer, don't buy anything. If you want to be a smart consumer, buy quality.
if a person is so self conscious about what they drink or what they wear .....then i think its time for u to take up a sewing class or possibly start making your own brew/liquor in your backyard.....its not hard...just takes time ......
fun stuff ..... ask you mom or dad to help
this article is predicated on the idea that anybody cares what kind of beer hipsters drink. what is the point? what is a hipster? just a way to categorize people who do certain things or drink certain drinks. it's beer. beer.
Ad agencies seemingly randomly attempt to change products "images" in order to grab a larger market share.
Pabst started out as a blue-collar beer.
Then, in the '80s they decided to "up" their image buy hiring a real stockbroker as their spokesman. They gave out free beer to stockbrokers in exchange for answering a "survey." The stockbroker they found wasn't very successful, but he was funny. I ought to know, it was my dad. My bald, distinguished-looking, stockbroker father said silly things in the commercials like "I've been drinking this beer since I had hair." Which was true; but he drank it in college because it was cheap, not because it was good.
Ironically, though the ad campaign paid the down-payment for the house I grew up in, it was unsuccessful.
Stockbrokers didn't want PBR.
So it went back to it's blue collar market.
Now it's the protest beer.
Too funny.
Advertisers have now marketed it to people who think they're too smart to believe advertisements. If you actually think that a product preference by a particular group was generated by a "grass-roots" effort, then you don't understand whisper campaigns. It's one of the oldest tricks in an ad-man's arsenal.
And yes, for nostalgia, I have PBR in my fridge. But at least I know why it's there.
PBR goes way back. As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, my dad was a big Pabst drinker. Once a week we would drive to a liquor store in South Beloit and my dad would come home with a case of bottles, after returning the empties. The original recycling. Pabst signs adorned most bars and taps. The tap culture, where it wasn't uncommon for the bar owner to live upstairs from his bar. We ate Tombstone pizza, pickled herring and cheese, played cards and drank a lot of Pabst. I have fond memories of 25 cent drafts back in 1972 when I turned 18.
Marketing and branding have so permeated the culture now if you were born after 1980 you have never known any event, song, piece of clothing, drink or food has not been corpratized or sold to you. I feel sorry for sheep who worry about what others think so much that they let it influence what beer they drink, what they wear, drive, what phone they use.
It's so ironic. I guess the definition of a hipster is one who is hip without the perceived influence of corporate marketing, so people try to be hip by doing what the hipster does. They perceive it to be original beyond the corporate, but the hip soon becomes known thanks to internet, television, texing, blogs, all of you who participate are part of the plan whether you know it or not. You, who have made comments like the ones hear are all monitored, you help feed it by participating. It's all so transparent the corporations hire the young to watch, the hip soon becomes a trend and that trend is packaged, advertised and sold, until it is not hip any more, until the next illusion is perpetuated and it goes on and on.
Meanwhile young men die in war, people are starving, America going down the toilet while you argue the merits of Pabst. The hipster is one who is under the delusion that they are beyond marketing influences, thus they are being cool by not trying to be cool, corporations love the hipster because they are never fulfilled.
The only way to escape branding and these types of discussions is to brew your own beer. About 200 dollars in start up will produce beers for about thirty cents a piece. Local production of alcohol is the reason beer is so cheap in Germany. Course I'm from Canada, so I prefer weed but you can brew beer from that too... (Reference material to that is lacking right now due to the DEA's attack on PotTV.) Anyways my point is I drink my dad's beer who learned from my grandpa and someday my child will drink my beer. Can you say that?
PBR is popular in NYC because it is the only cheap beer at any decent bar. Even Budweiser is $5 a pint in most bars which is rediculous. Any where else in the country and you get a pint of Bud for $1.50!
Agreed, bars have high rents in new york... so they jack up the prices of beers to cover the rent. I buy the cheap beer, not because of some counter culture choice, but because I get more bang for the buck. This is America, after all.
Being someone who could probably be considered 'hipster', I drink cheap beer for all the same reasons, its cheap. When you don't have a job, which is something many hipsters think cool, its hard to drink expensive alcohol. PBR will always be there because its cheap no other reason.
i live in Australia where we don't have PBR.
The 'hipsters' are poor so drink the cheapest beer which only comes in a glass. When its in a glass there's no image associated with it. There's hardly a thing as a hipster beer.
If the hipsters aren't poor, they go for the good tasting beer. simple as that.
If the beer doesn't come on tap, its cheapest or best tasting. Nobody judges the beer you buy, unless its light beer.
That's how it is here, but maybe its different in the US.
So I'd like to say,
Dear Adbusters community: you say that (other) people - the hipsters - are obsessed with image. But I really think YOU are. Why do you have to attach your anti-consumer ideology to everything? Where people don't consider image at all, you see superficiality everywhere. Stop obsessing over it and get over it, you'll be happier when you do. This cynicism is idiotic.
Thank God I live in Oregon where microbrews run like the mighty Columbia.
They have a higher alcohol content (usually) and taste like something.
They're worth the extra for the extra oomph and satisfaction!
I'm English and moved to New York last year. When I got here I couldn't believe how expensive alcohol was at the bar- it's even more expensive than London in a lot of bars- even with the exchange rate being 2-1. I wanted to get at least a little drunk when I went out so I just asked for the cheapest beer at the bar, which happened to be cans or pints of PBR- 1-2 dollars a can 3-4 dollars a pint. After a few weeks I stopped asking the barman for the cheapest possible beer and started just asking for P.B.R. As a matter of fact I even started choosing which bar I went to on whether they sold PBR to save money. A year later I can afford to drink any beer (well within reason) but PBR's have become part of my drinking culture. Sounds stupid and yes it is just marketing but that's the drink I relate to and the one I will probably continue to buy, Brand loyalty achieved, simple as that.
real thugs drink malt liquor, thats the most bang for your buck, an ice cold 40. real broke ass people on the struggle grinding it out everyday with too many problems to worry about to subscribe to a counter-culture drink natty light/ice or keystones and smoke Pall Malls.
how about you all move to Berlin, where a good old 0.5 Liter Sterburg Export beer costs about 40 cents and doesn't taste flat. Let me know when you arrive, i'll buy.
I don't drink PBR, i don't like the taste. I usually drink Yuengling, which used to be a Pennsylvania brewed beer, but now owned by miller, is it still brewed here, the quality the same? i don't know, the websites details are up for interpretation. Am i supposed to research a beer, and what am i looking for even? all i want is to drink a good tasting beer that supports local brewers and helps the small business closest to me. unfortunetly these beers are quite pricey in pittsburgh, but the taste is worth it.
This post wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the fact that AdBusters sells an alternative shoe -- which in case you haven't heard NOW comes in beautiful RED!!! -- would it?
HAHAHAHHAA
"if you were in the liquor store, staring at a fridge that had Budweiser and PBR next to each other for exactly the same price, which would you choose?"........
The reason why I don't choose Budweiser over PBR:
Budweiser tastes like shit, and is owned by Cindy McCain.
Bud is now owned by inbev, a large Belgian company that also owns Stella Artois. Apparently, the Budwiser is still brewed by Americans in good old St. Louis. It was huge news, in case you hadnt heard.
we do not have this beer in belgium and it probably wouldn't sell either.
you can blame this article for single-handedly tanking PBR sales
I am a huge PBR fan. My loyalty does not lie in any "grassroots anti-consumer" image though. Pabst Blue Ribbon is a quality beer. It received a gold medal in 2006 American style premium beer category at the world beer cup. Now you tell me this beer is cheaper than most other beer, I chalk it up to just good taste.
Hey big PBR fan. You're a fucking idiot.
So, first time posting anything... just got registered online, late however, because YAHOO MAIL decided that my registration email for Adbusters was spam... coincidence... as for the P.B.R. "phenomenon"
This is all true. But a simple breakdown...
1. Yes, it is cheap. There are three main venues of sale for this particular beer... at the bar, at the store, or at a party. I've seen it for $2.oo a can, $5 a can, or $1 a glass (which was the only beer on tap. In the bar or party setting... there generally isn't a cheaper alternative, sometimes pbr is the only cheap beer, with budweiser ringing in a dollar or so more. However, in the stores... in ANY store I know of, miller high life or natural ice/light is much cheaper (however on a however, pbr used to be the same price before the hipster factor, I am positive of this fact).
2. I live outside of Charlottesville, Va. U.Va bratboy/sorrostitute central... which also happens to be near extremely rural Virginia. The bumpkins usually lean towards bud lite (also for brand "coolness" I'm sure) over pbr, so, the "blue collar" beer tag has changed hands. This may have been different in the 70's (hipsters love the kitschy 70s thing don't they?). So, not only is this beer attributed to hipsterdom, or blue collar culture, but I've seen mock pbr ads of sorrity/fratertinity parties/rushes/membership, with the greek letters in place of pbr, and using the blue ribbon text to fit their need with a few changes (I even saw one that "parodied" resivoir dogs, sick). Or the many facebook/myspace main profile photos shown as a pbr can or bottle, instead of the person's face. All too many times. So, theres deffinately proof that its getting marketed as kitsch, from hipster to fratboy... rather large gap it reaches across, no???
3. Come on, anyone... pbr is not good beer. its like light malt liquor. I'd much rather have a yuengling at a bar for a few cents more, or even a fucking budweiser... or maybe, decide not to drink so much that you have to pinch pennies on an activity you seem to take so much joy in? People only like it cause they think it makes em feel different...
4. I've seen solid, solid proof of all of this. Maybe I'm east coast biased, but, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Richmond, Greensboro, and Raleigh, all seem to exhibit the pbr subcultures... whether its frat boys, rednecks, or hipsters.
Thanks for pointing out the details in the article, I'm rather entertained...
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