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

https://i.postimg.cc/qMdtwp4c/IMG-1972.jpg

went to a thrift store where somebody had unloaded their collection of vintage beer cans

apparently they used to have twice as many before people picked through it!

needs a poll

i cannot recommend Ottakringer enough

Fox DeLuxe! That brewery (Chicago) was founded and run for years by my wife's dad's family.

Oh neat! I was actually just about to say, in response to the Chicago comments upthread, that horrible water quality may have kept the city from establishing an early dominance. Until 1900, when a major engineering project reversed the direction of the river (no lie!) all the sewage and industrial runoff of the metropolitan area was running into Lake Michigan, which was also the major source of potable water. I don't know for sure, but I would imagine this was an issue for brewing in the late 19th century. I'm also seeing online that some breweries were wiped out in the great fire of 1871, so there's that too.

The great Chicago shit-river-reversal is one of the crazier infrastructure stories in American history imo.

The same river the Dave Matthews Band dumped its sewage into, many important poop-related events there.

I live 30min south of Milwaukee so this isn't exactly local but I'll throw in Point.

https://www.pointbeer.com/

Other than that, RIP classic Leinenkugel's, ruined by Coors.

leinies was my dad’s cheap beer of choice when we lived in Minneapolis in the early ‘80s. i think they came in stubby bottles then?

There's a fun documentary about Ranier's 1970s ads (which I never saw, having grown up in Hamm's/Schlitz country):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5aLwrosiA

• yuengling is a solid affordable beer but its owners are big MAGA
• leinenkugel was my go-to in mpls in the 90s
• iron city, obviously. perhaps best paired with a shot of imperial whiskey, i.e. an 'imp and iron'
• rolling rock is only 87yo and sucks, but i do appreciate the references to the glass-lined tanks of old latrobe (it is now brewed in new jersey)
• barely available even when i lived in pennsylvania but i know a guy who absolutely swears by straub

I'm still sad about Anchor Steam being stuck in limbo

Yeah Iron City was the go-to local/state beer of choice when I was at Penn State. Rolling Rock was a last resort. There was one student bar of course called the Shandygaff that did a big "Bucket of Rocks" special every week with super cheap Rolling Rock, and me and my friends did that once and never again because we remembered that Rolling Rock is terrible.

(The Gaff is still there, but I see no Rolling Rock specials on the menu. It's all 24 ounce tall boys and "liquor pitchers.")

https://s1.img.bidsquare.com/item/xl/2133/21338069.jpeg

molson ex was my first legal beer in canada (at a peel pub of yore)

anchor steam was my first legal beer in the usa

I'm still sad about Anchor Steam being stuck in limbo

― mh, Sunday, May 10, 2026 9:15 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, but their beer sucked. idk what sam adams profit margins are these days but i'd like to think banking on manufacturing a high-end yet absolutely mid level product isn't going to last long in the world.

I think the only UK brewery to qualify would be Tennents in Glasgow.

I always liked Anchor Steam, thought it tasted unique. It was probably the first microbrew I tried, around '89/'90. They lost me around the time they changed their label.

Anchor Steam was a sort of beacon in the early craft-beer-revolution days, and when they started carrying it at our local co-op in the mid-'90s it was very exciting. I haven't had it in so long that I don't really remember what it tasted like, but I recall it fondly. I'm sure these days it would taste like just another rote craft brew.

barely available even when i lived in pennsylvania but i know a guy who absolutely swears by straub

― mookieproof, Sunday, May 10, 2026 9:13 PM (yesterday)

this is what i started the thread to find out about, must track down!

Shiner (Texas's version of this, though a dark lager) has been good when I've had it.

It's funny how "watery" was the dismissive descriptor for these kinds of lagers in the 80s/90s. Last summer (on a 95-degree day in Chicago) I had an Old Style for the first time in this century, and, after otherwise leaning toward heavier beers, the water-like qualities were what make it good!

Texas also has Lone Star, of course, though I think it's not as widely distributed.

Yuengling kinda sucks but I sure did drink a lot of it in my 20s! It is indeed a shame about their ownership

Shiner is delicious. I wish that bock style lager were a more common offering.

michelob amber bock miiiight still exist but maybe not in all markets? anheuser busch kind of collapsed that entire brand into selling as much michelob ultra as possible

I remember being on a band tour in the early 90s and we stopped to tour the Olympia Brewery in Tumwater WA and they had these odd green cans you could only buy at the brewery: Oly Dark!
Never seen them before or since. I asked the tour guide why we don't see it in stores, his answer: "Well, Americans don't really drink dark beer" which at that time was largely true. It was really good though

bocks are kind of seasonal around here. a local brewery does a bock festival in january, but the larger one would be schell brewery's bockfest in minnesota

you brave the cold so you can have some bock-style beers and there's a guy with a hot poker to optionally caramelize your beer a little bit

;_;

https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/wisconsin-brewing-company-schlitz

aww that's sad... had no idea it was discontinued. That was a 12 pack staple in the 90's, and a lot of places had it on tap. I've had my share, that's for sure

Bizarre to imagine anyone wanting to drink Lone Star outside of Texas

Live Oak was my jam when I used to SXSW back in ye olden days. No idea if they're 100 years old but they're at least 20-25?

my dad played the trombone in high school. we found his trombone when we were moving when he was 40ish and the only song he remembered how to play was the jingle from the schlitz commercial

when you're out of schlitz, you're out of beer

Live Oak showed up in the late 90s, but their pils and hefe are Austin staples... their brewery is also a great spot to have a few drinks in when the weather's nice (seating in a grove of... live oaks!)

Bizarre to imagine anyone wanting to drink Lone Star outside of Texas

it got endless product placement on Job Bob Briggs' "The Last Drive-In" show, so there are probably a lot of horror movie fans who would like to try it

my dad briefly lived in Houston in the late 50s and a neighbor lady would catch him on his way out: "Paul! Paul will you pick me up a six pack of warm Pearl? Thank you dear." (Apparently room temp beer was cheaper back then)

He said the woman's husband later shot and killed her

turn off your air conditioner on a hot summer day, close your eyes, and crack open an ice cold PBR... you have the experience of drinking a Lone Star.

RIP Schlitz, that was another college fave. Tall boys!

My friend Peter is devastated by the passing of Schlitz. He invented Schlabst, "Milwaukee's Black and Tan":

https://marquettewire.org/3947369/ae/schlabst/

Genesee has some excellent seasonal brews. Their Ruby Red Kolsch is on shelves now (wherever they distribute) and has that nice watery lager quality but with the acidic bite of grapefruit flavor which cuts into the grainy-ness of the lager well. It's a fantastic drink for a hot day. And cheap as hell.

Yuengling kinda sucks

WRONG

Goodbye, Schlitz. It was the 2nd best selling beer in America as late as 1976. Its downfall is one of the great brand implosions of our time.

Damn. I drank a lot of Schlitz in the early 2000s.

things you had thought had died long ago

I used to get Schlitz and Blatz confused because they sounded equally scatological when I was a kid.

I love all these though and will always buy whatever regional lager I can find - oly, rainier, blatz, leinies, strohs, old style, old mil, hamms, naragansett, grain belt, lone star, stag, whatever. I was both totally disappointed but not at all surprised when I asked the bartender at a biker bar in Daytona Beach FL what the their traditional shit beer was and all he had to offer was Natty Light.

I tried a Montucky for the first time the other night -- it's a new 'cheap' beer from Montana that's all over Portland as the cheap option at pizza-by-the-slice places and so not. Not good, alas.

When I've seen that on menus in Chicago, it's been at hip casual restaurants or cocktail bars where I feel like they're treating it like High Life (i.e., a go-to industry favorite), but it seems a little forced. Or maybe I've just never seen anyone actually drinking it.

montucky cold snacks? yeah, not great

Yeah, Cold Snacks, served as a tallboy. Was rooting for it, as a new cheap beer, but I think the old ones may be better.

there is actually a fantastic german style brewery in missoula, bayern brewery, started by a german brewmaster (accredited? certified? whatever the process is in germany?) who wanted to move to the idyllic mountains of montana

https://www.bayernbrewery.com/

highly recommended!

ooh that looks good

I used to get Schlitz and Blatz confused because they sounded equally scatological when I was a kid

I had no idea that Blatz is still sold today, but Wikipedia says so.

There were those who said Blatz was the best of all the Milwaukee beers. Like Liberace.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/KPwAAOSwPPNmWiW4/s-l1600.jpg