One good thing macrobrewers have done with their monstrous marketing budgets is create some very memorable and enjoyable advertising.  But over the years, the ads haven’t been quite as slick.  We pulled together 15 retro beer advertisements into this gallery to take a look back on what used to be.

From flickr user steve

The Independent has a nice write-up of Sierra Nevada and the history they carry with them.  From craft brewing through the early 80s to a coming east-coast expansion made possible — and in many ways necessitated by — the current craft beer renascence, Sierra Nevada is one of a small number of breweries that has a claim that few others can make, no matter how popular or trendy a given beer may be .

Fun and, given what he has witnessed over the past 40 years, pretty amazing too. The United States used to be the world’s biggest good beer desert but the revolution which Sierra Nevada helped create has swept across the country. America now has undoubtedly the most innovative and exciting beer scene in the world and Americans can drink at least as well as their British, German or Belgian counterparts. It’s quite a turnaround, admits Grossman.

“Attitudes to beer have really changed,” he says. “It has been a dramatic shift, and we’ve been a part of that. When we started it was difficult to get a distributor to take you seriously, and the retailers weren’t too interested and the public wasn’t that aware of what we were doing. That’s very different to today, when every distributor wants your beer and retailers are focusing on promoting craft brands and customers are very knowledgeable.”

From flickr user multiple trees

To Make Small Beer

Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses (sic) into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask—leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working—Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.

8 lbs pale malt
4 lbs wheat
1 lb molasses

1 1/2 oz east kent goldings 60 min
1/2 oz east kent goldings 10 minutes
american ale yeast

From flickr user Mijla

Last September we wrote about the discovery of the world’s oldest drinkable beer, discovered in the Baltic.  Five months later, the local government of the small island near where the beer was found has commissioned a scientific study to decipher the recipe.

Samples of the world’s oldest beer have been taken in a bid to determine its recipe – and brew it again.

In July 2010, a Baltic Sea shipwreck dated between 1800 to 1830 yielded many bottles of what is thought to be the world’s oldest champagne.

Five of the bottles later proved to be the oldest drinkable beer yet found.

The local government of the Aland island chain where the wreck was found has now commissioned a scientific study to unpick the beer’s original recipe.

Divers found the two-mast ship at a depth of about 50m in the Aland archipelago, which stretches between the coasts of Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea.

Imagine if this recipe was released to the public, giving homebrewers the opportunity to brew an ancient beer in their own homes.

From flickr user davehunt82

Remember the book/movie Jurassic Park, where scientists managed to extract dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber that was millions of years old?  They cloned the dinosaurs, opened a zoo of sorts, and then all hell broke loose, leaving us with the message that we should just probably not do anything like that in real life?

Well, one California scientist has done that anyway, but not with dino DNA.  He did it with yeast.   Then, as any rational person would do when they find themselves with some extra yeast, he brewed beer with it.

Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. has used Cano’s initial extraction of yeast to grow a much larger batch that fills a warehouse in Northern California used in the beer-making process.

“Our main beer is a wheat beer, and we also have a pale ale, but we’re really working on others, including an amber ale and an Oktoberfest,” Cano said.

Of those beers popular in the mainstream market, Cano compares the taste most closely to that of Blue Moon.

Despite initial skepticism from some about the taste the beer would produce, Cano says the flavor turned out surprisingly good and unique.

Critics have described the taste as one with lots of spice, resembling cloves, along with tinges of ginger and pineapple.

It’s a really interesting experiment.  If I can ever get to California, it’s definitely on my list of things to try.

From flickr user jvverde

According to ScienceNews, researchers have literally unearthed husks from roasted barley which were used in brewing back during the Iron Age.  These ancient recipes are discovered occasionally, and they’re still fascinating to me.

Early Celtic rulers of a community in what’s now southwestern Germany liked to party, staging elaborate feasts in a ceremonial center. The business side of their revelries was located in a nearby brewery capable of turning out large quantities of a beer with a dark, smoky, slightly sour taste, new evidence suggests.

Six specially constructed ditches previously excavated at Eberdingen-Hochdorf a 2,550-year-old Celtic settlement, were used to make high-quality barley malt, a key beer ingredient, says archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart. Thousands of charred barley grains unearthed in the ditches about a decade ago came from a large malt-making enterprise, Stika reports in a paper published online January 4 in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

I think it’s probably just a matter of time before Sam Calagione from DogfishHead organizes his camera crew and heads of to learn how to make a clone — assuming BrewMasters hasn’t been canceled, that is.

From flickr user macwagen

Who knew that the movie Smokey and the Bandit was about beer?  I didn’t, and neither did Boing Boing author Maggie Koerth-Baker, who, for some reason, was curious enough about the movie to find out.

Here it is…

So last night, while attempting to explain the plot of Smokey and the Bandit to my husband, it occurred to me that I didn’t really understand the back story that spawned this, one of my favorite childhood films. Why did Bandit and Snowman (and Fred) have a long way to go and a short time to get there? There was beer in most parts of Georgia by the 1970s. And even if you were trying to get booze to a dry county, why start in Texas and only give yourself 28 hours?

Thanks to Wikipedia and the very helpful Stephan Zielinski, I discovered the awful truth—Smokey and the Bandit is centered around America’s brief love affair with Coors Banquet Beer.

All that work, for Coors? It’s true. Wikipedia explained that the beer wasn’t available East of Oklahoma at the time. But I didn’t get the full extent of what was really going on until I read a 1974 Time magazine article sent to me by Zielinski. If, like me, you didn’t begin drinking until the late 1990s, this is going to come as a shock, but, once upon a time, Coors was apparently the best American breweries had to offer.

She goes on to excerpt the article from Time, which mentions that Presidents Ford and Eisenhower, along with Paul Newman, loved the stuff.  It turns out that there were real bandits, and since the unpasteurized Banquet Beer was only available in the west, near the Coors brewery in Colorado, those on the east coast who wanted it, and particularly those who wanted it in a dry county in Georgia, had to get it off a refrigerated truck.   Coors Banquet Beer, coming long before the craft beer movement, was the first of its kind.

From flickr user Lord Jim

We’ve talked before about how beer is good for you and good for society, but is it responsible for society itself?  Maybe, according to archeologists.

Some archaeologists have said that there is a possibility that beer may have helped lead to the rise of civilization.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains intobeer.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

It’s not so much the drinking that led to civilization as it is brewing.  So homebrewers take pride.

Popular Science

Back when Popular Science magazine decided to release their archives to the world, we went digging for articles about beer and found an interesting article about the science of non-alcoholic brewing.  Well, PopSci caught up and decided to go through their archives themselves, resulting in this alcohol-related slideshow.

A few of the highlights:

• How to Get Buzzed Without Booze: June 1920
• PopSci’s Guide to Home-Brewing: January 1921
• The Magic of Beer-Making: June 1933

From Flickr under a CC License

Nordic explorers have found the world’s oldest drinkable beer in the Baltic.

Divers salvaged the world’s oldest drinkable beer from a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea on Thursday, just days after work began to retrieve dozens of bottles of 200-year-old champagne, local officials said.

“We believe these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, a spokesman for the local government of Åland, said in a statement.

The beer bottles were unearthed from a shipwreck believed to be about 200 years old — as divers were recovering bottles of what is thought to be the world’s oldest drinkable champagne, discovered in July.

…

“The constant temperature and light levels have provided optimal conditions for storage, and the pressure in the bottles has prevented any seawater from seeping in through the corks,” Thursday’s statement said.

Cool stuff, but I have a hard time believing it will taste very good.