Tag: Henry Weinhard’s

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Weinhards Resurrection

Looks like Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve has made a convoluted journey back to Oregon.

You can read the full press release from Molson Coors HERE. In broad strokes, Weinhards was a fairly large regional that got passed around like a hot potato. The beer wasn’t even brewed in Oregon for the last twenty odd years. Somehow the brand alone ended up in Molson Coors hands and has been passed down to one of their subsidiary breweries, Hop Valley.

As for the beer itself, it is a ” 4.7% alcohol-by-volume lager, first brewed in 1976 and acquired by Miller Brewing in 1999, will be brewed using its original recipe and Cascade hops from Oregon.”

By the time that I could legally drink, the allure of Weinhards was trending down. I still have brand affection but it is not based on the beer so much as nostalgia. How Hop Valley converts new twenty-one year olds is a bit of a mystery especially after their parent company essentially put the beer in the freezer and walked away.

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Weinhard RIP

Weinhard has been given the ax. You can read about it HERE.

These regional brands really suffered in the transition to where we are now which is a few big conglomerates and a ton of smaller breweries underneath. The Weinhard’s of the world were stuck in a nether realm of too small and uncool to the SABInBev’s of the world while also not being small and nimble or cool to the craft sector. So they got bounced around like an NBA player during free agency.

I wish people (like myself too) could have one more bottle of the beer from its heyday before it left.

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This Schlud’s for You

Schludwiller was a fictional California brewery that was featured in ads in the 1980’s from Henry Weinhard’s. My Dad bought a shirt with the logo emblazoned on it. If my memory holds, it was packaged in a can.
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The faux-label for the beer had such gems as “A name in brewing for nearly one-half generation” and “Plywood aged for a real long time”.

I got to thinking about this gentle mockery with the apparent merger of ABInBev with SABMiller. I was playing with possible permutations of letters before they change their name to something like Altria or my personal choice OmniCorp and thought it would be fertile ground for a modern version of the Schludwiller campaign.