Idle 1980s thoughts about bad beers and old men.

I was thinking back to when my love affair began ... with bars, taverns and watering holes. It was before I began traveling, so these were the local spots -- some of them dives, others with slightly more dignified pretensions.

Seeing as I was just south of 21 when it started, pretty much all the patrons were older than me, and it seems that when it came to the old men, who in retrospect probably meant anyone older than 40, most of them were drinking traditional manly, old-man beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life.

At some point shortly thereafter, when I was in my mid-twenties, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s and Bud's television ads.

After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than ever before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul ... and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.

It pleases me that local brands like City and Sterling are back, in altered form; in short, drinkable. The Pabst renaissance over the past two decades as yet puzzles me. It tastes nothing like the Pabst I remember. In fact, it tastes like nothing at all.

Wait, I forget; that's the point, isn't it?

Pabst: How can that much beer come pouring out of an empty suit?

So, in a category created for beers like Pabst, Pabst gets a medal for best shitty beer in America. Hate's not the word, boys. Irrelevance is. Thanks to Beer Pulse for picking this one up.

"Murketing" makes the Pabst seem fonder.

After making various gibes in the general direction of a weirdly rejuvenated Pabst Blue Ribbon, generally along the lines of my finding it constantly amazing that a beer so unspeakably bland and formless could inspire an inexplicable cult following among young people who should know better, I’m feeling highly vindicated by the information provided in a recent book review.

The article is entitled “Branded” and was written by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times Book Review (July 27, 2008). The book being reviewed is Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker. You can bet that I'll be reading it.

According to the reviewer Manjoo, the author’s objective is to “lift the cloud of self-delusion that obscures our buying habits” and to “argue that our susceptibility to marketing arises from our ignorance of its pervasiveness.” In this extended excerpt, how these aims apply to bad beer is clearly detailed:

Consider Pabst Blue Ribbon. Beginning in the 1970s, the cheap beer that had long been synonymous with the blue-collar heartland began a steep decline, with sales by 2001 dipping to fewer than a million barrels a year, 90 percent below the beer’s peak. But in 2002, Pabst noticed a sudden sales spike, driven by an unlikely demographic: countercultural types — bike messengers, skaters and their tattooed kin — in hipster redoubts like Portland, Ore., had taken to swilling the stuff. When asked why, they would praise Pabst for its non-image, for the fact that it seemed to care little about selling.

Traditionally, a company that spots a sudden market opportunity responds by gearing ads toward the new customers. But Neal Stewart, Pabst’s marketing whiz, had studied “No Logo,” Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto, and he understood that overt commercial messages would turn off an audience suspicious of capitalism. Thus the company shunned celebrity endorsements — Kid Rock had been interested — and devoted its budget instead to marketing, sponsoring a series of unlikely gatherings across the country. Like “some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture,” Pabst paid the bills at bike messenger contests, skateboarder movie screenings, and art and indie publishing get-togethers. At each of these events, it kept its logo obscure, its corporate goal to “always look and act the underdog,” to be seen as a beer of “social protest,” a “fellow dissenter” against mainstream mores.

Pabst’s campaign was designed to push beer without appearing to push it. To the extent that it conveyed any branding message at all, it was, Hey, we don’t care if you drink the stuff. To people sick of beer companies that did look as if they cared — don’t Super Bowl ads smack of desperation? — Pabst’s attitude seemed refreshing and inspired deep passion in its fans. Many customers did more than just buy the beer. Walker speaks to one who tattooed a foot-square Pabst logo on his back. Pabst’s low-fi marketing is “not insulting you,” the fellow tells Walker.

Note that Walker has coined the word “murketing” to describe the deceptive corporate stealth that is deployed in these situations. In the absence of hard knowledge, murketing muddies the consumer’s conceptual waters and causes folks otherwise feigning marketing-weary savvy to embrace brands that play hard to get and seem somehow hip. The result is predictable.

In reality, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s anti-capitalist ethos is, as Walker puts it, “a sham.” The company long ago closed its Milwaukee brewery and now outsources its operations to Miller. Its entire corporate staff is devoted to marketing and sales, not brewing. “You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding,” Walker writes. But P.B.R.’s fans don’t care. In the new era of murketing, image is everything.

A trip to Red Pepper Chinese Cuisine, and much needed help for Pabst.

Hard as it may seem to believe considering Pabst Blue Ribbon's dumbed-down and vapid essence, apocryphal evidence continues to suggest that the beer that once made Milwaukee infamous has become a key status indicator in an emeging China. As one blogger notes, this may have much to do with "signs of a new cultural dominance approved of by the Chinese to assimilate to global standards."

Perhaps, but global standards of what? Considering that virtually all Asian beer is insipid and timid golden lager, I'd hazard a guess that it has everything to do with fantasy-borne symbolism and nothing to do with any widely held knowledge about beer among the Chinese. That's because to know about beer is to know Pabst's place in the pantheon of brewing, which comes far to the rear of the queue.

These matters began invading my cranium earlier today, when Mrs. Curmudgeon and I made our inaugural visit to Red Pepper Chinese Cuisine at 2901 Brownsboro Road in Louisville. For natives, it's located in the same building where Shariat's used to do business.

Order from the authentic Chinese menu (the red one), and I'm confident you'll agree that Red Pepper is a cut above the local Americanized versions of Chinese cuisine, with a good dining room ambience and a full bar. All this comes for a few dollars more than carry-out from Great Wall or Hing Wang, but it's worth it to experience dishes that seldom invade the palates of frightened metro denizens.

Red Pepper has cold beer on tap, and the most noticeable tap handle is ... yes, Pabst Blue Ribbon. I almost had one to accompany my fabulous Bean Paste Bitter Gourd entree, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it even if to do so would be authentic. Oddly, as our server warned me that my dish was very bitter and often objectionable to American tastes, I kept wondering if the bitterness from the gourd might actually assist the Pabst in going where the watery lager has seldom gone before.

Maybe next time I'll find out.