Epilogue: Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve
On Monday, Molson Coors (formerly MillerCoors and before that Miller and Coors) announced it was cleaning up its portfolio and dumping some of the more marginal off-off-market stuff. Yawns all around to the loss of Keylightful (?), Hamm’s Special Light, and Mickey’s Ice. One name, however, really stood out: Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve.
To be clear, the 45-year-old brand was a zombie beer, having died decades ago when Miller shuttered the old Blitz-Weinhard plant on Burnside Street in downtown Portland. The company moved production to Full Sail for a time and then I don’t know what happened to it. But the beer received the full Mickey’s Ice treatment in time, becoming a mere label on a bottle of generic mass market lager. One could still locate the bodies of Private Reserve on a few grocery shelves, but the soul departed long ago. The announcement sparked the old to travel on nostalgic trips to the 1970s and ‘80s, but it’s not like people lament the death of the current incarnation. We mourned and eulogized Private Reserve years ago. Still, it’s an important epilogue to a 165-year era in Portland history—and the United States.
Blitz-Weinhard released Private Reserve in 1976, during the worst decade for interesting beer America had experienced in centuries, excluding Prohibition. I am always surprised to run across the story of a little brewery somewhere—okay, usually in Wisconsin—where a German-speaking brewer was making great Bavarian lagers into the 1960s. But in fact, over 700 breweries survived Prohibition, and their numbers only got dire in the sixties before falling to around a hundred in 1980. Consolidation during the sixties brought half the market under just five breweries’ control by 1970, and they extended that to 75% by 1980.
For big breweries, it was the best of times. All that relentless consolidation allowed them to streamline the various aspects of their business and drive efficiency. Prices dropped and per-capita consumption hit its highest point in US history. Competition among those top breweries was fierce, but they functioned as a cartel and drove the market precisely where they wanted it.
That efficiency came at a hefty price to consumers, though, as the beer got ever blander. Miller discovered a minor innovation in “diet beer” and turned it into the 1970s version of hard seltzer; with Miller Lite, they created the easiest way for consumers to inject alcohol into their bloodstream without all that troublesome flavor. By the middle 70s, beer was a commodity and breweries were marketing firms.
Smaller regional breweries couldn’t hope to compete. They couldn’t make beer as cheaply as the giants, and slashing prices only hastened their decline. It was a therefore a canny, counter-trend move for Blitz-Weinhard to introduce a “super-premium” beer to the market. The million-barrel facility was making maybe half that, and even with the built-in regional audience, Blitz was getting beat up on cost. The Pacific Northwest was a fairly healthy place for breweries at the time, with six or eight scattered from Portland to Seattle. It’s not surprising that an accountant would look at the books and conclude the only way to make the ledger reconcile was by pricing up instead of down. The parochial nature of the region and that built-in local market made a premium product a good bet, and the beer was successful.
In the last few days, many folks have mentioned how important Private Reserve was in prepping Oregon for craft beer—and that’s certainly true. In less than twenty years from the time of the beer’s launch, Portlanders would be calling their city “Beervana.” The rate at which Portland and Seattle adopted craft beer was a decade ahead of any other region. It’s why Anheuser-Busch bought portions of breweries in those cities—they had no other way into a market that had, by the early 90s, shifted heavily to craft.
And yet, as important as Henry’s was historically, as a beer it was pretty tame stuff. When we look into the past through our filter of nostalgia, we can sometimes convince ourselves Private Reserve was some kind of titan of flavor, yet it was very much a mass market lager. A slightly more flavorful one, true, and one that harnessed the new indigenous hops, Cascade, that would change beer forever, also true, but still a classic American domestic adjunct lager. It was good, in other words, for what it was. Here’s Michael Jackson describing it in his Pocket Guide to Beer (1982):
“The defining characteristic of Henry’s is its delicate use of Cascades, especially as a finishing hop. They are lightly used in the copper, but great emphasis is given to bouquet. Henry’s has a firm, clean, fairly light body. It is brewed exclusively from two-row barley, employs 80 percent malt, and is fermented for two weeks and lagered for four.”
A nice beer, but still one made with 20% corn syrup and what, 18 BUs of Cascade? Henry’s was a very cool, quirky local product that reflected the kind of unusual thinking that has marked the NW for generations. It was one of the first warning signs to big breweries that maybe things had gotten a little too efficient. Yet it was at most a transitional beer, one that might have hastened the shift to the next era, but not one built to participate in it.
Henry’s did well, but it wasn’t enough to help the brewery escape the consolidation trap. Owners sold to Pabst in 1979. Although subsequent owners continued to support the brand, even adding to it with “Dark” and “Ale,” volumes didn’t grow enough to prevent the brewery from becoming an increasingly awkward piece in their corporate puzzles. By the end of the century, the neighborhood just behind the brewery became the toniest in the city, and the property was worth way more than the facility sitting on it. Miller shuttered the plant in 1999 and laid off 200 union workers.
In a way, the post-1979 history of the brand is as instructive as Private Reserve’s release. Blitz-Weinhard kept getting traded to larger failing companies that eventually passed it on to even larger failing companies, each one more likely to scuttle the brewery and brand. It went to G. Heileman after Pabst and then went to Stroh’s before Miller (pre Coors) picked it up. Pabst does still exist as an independent company, but they were forced to close their massive Milwaukee plant in 1996, when they started having all their beer contract-brewed. Heileman, Stroh’s, and Miller have all been gobbled up and most of them exist as brands in larger portfolios. Just like Henry’s.
One way to think of this passage, then, is another reminder of the death of the great era of German-founded, 19th-century breweries that defined American beer until the 1980s. They, too, have mostly become zombie brands disconnected from their founding breweries, made as commodities in a shrinking number of large plants. As a bonus resonance to this announcement, it comes as Molson Coors goes in deep on seltzers. Much as Blitz-Weinhard groped to find a solution to declining sales and chose an out that may have ultimately doomed it, breweries are now investing everything in a trend that may offer a different variety of foolsgold.
Yet this is the inexorable way of things in beer. Trends come and go and breweries along with them. Empires rise quickly and collapse even more quickly. Here in Portland, the Weinhard brewery scented the streets with wort for 143 years before giving way to a new generation of breweries like Widmer, Portland Brewing, and BridgePort—themselves now deceased or absorbed by others. In the midst of all that change, important, revolutionary, or extraordinary beers arrive to meet the moment. Yet the moment always passes and most of those beers go with them. So let Private Reserve stand as a reminder: enjoy good beers while you can, because they almost certainly will change or disappear eventually.