The Best Baseball Promotion Pretty Much EVER.

We here at Beerjanglin' are, without doubt, a baseball-loving bunch. Our loyalties are a bit divided, sure (Red Sox Nation, Yankees Country, and whatever the hell superlative Mets fans use to describe themselves as a collective are all represented among our numbers), but when it all comes down to nuts and bolts, we enjoy getting together to drink some good beer and enjoy watching our true national pastime.

So, when we were perusing this site, which lists the coolest promotions for the upcoming season of Major League Baseball, something caught our eye. It was this logo:



That's right. The Oakland A's are hosting a beer festival. On June 21, the technical first day of summer, no less.

According to the site, "The game’s not until 6PM, but come to McAfee Coliseum from 11AM to 1PM and sample beers from 30 breweries and listen to live music. Then go to the parking lot and tailgate. Can you tailgate in Oakland?

Admission is free with a game ticket, but you’ve got to pay $10 for a souvenir acrylic mug and two tastings. When you think about it, those might be the cheapest two beers you’ll ever buy at an MLB stadium."

After minutes of painstaking internet research, we uncovered a partial taplist from last year's event: Deschutes Black Butte Porter, Corona, Dos XX Lager, New Belgium Fat Tire, Skinny Dip, Heineken, Heineken Premium Light, Deschutes Inversion IPA, Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale, Red Hook, Singha Lager, Singha Light Lager, Tecate Light, Trumer Pils, and Widmer Hefeweizen. While there are lame elements to this list (do you really need to waste taps on Singha and Singha Light? On Corona and Heineken?), there are some interesting picks (we are now intrigued by these Deschutes people). It's not perfect - far from, but credit to these folks for trying something different in an attempt to bring beer-nuts out to the ballpark. The odd timing notwithstanding (11 AM to 1 PM before a 6 PM game? Seriously?), this makes us wish we were somewhere near Oakland in June.

A Real All-Star Line-up

We've been talking beer and baseball here lately, both subjects near and dear to the heart at Beerjanglin'. With today's announcement of the 2007 All-Star game rosters, it's only right that we mention a place that has quite an All-Star (beer) line-up of its own: Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. If you are going to pay through the nose for a ballpark beer, it might as well be for a good one. Much as we love those souvenir 16 oz. Bud Light aluminum bottles with the team logo on the side, if we're paying $7 or $8 for a beer, we prefer to enjoy drinking it. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with gazing drunkenly at a pyramid of empty bottles with snazzy graphics and realizing you just spent $88 to create a recyclable work of modern art, but there are better ways to waste your cash, especially at "The Bank."

Citizens Bank is one of the new retro-styled ballparks that have become almost the norm since Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in Baltimore way back in 1992. It gets almost all of the
details right, although it's pretty obvious that even after moving back the fences after the 2005 season, the power alleys are still a bit too hitter friendly. The city of Philadelphia's decision to put all of their major professional sports venues in one sprawling complex outside of downtown means that it can't have the spectacular views of, say, McCovey Cove at San Francisco's AT&T Park or our favourite, PNC Park in Pittsburgh.

Those are small quibbles, though, and we loved this stadium from the first time we saw it. In fact, we were there for the second regular season game ever played there, and have continue to be impressed through our handful of subsequent visits. The site lines are good, the seats are comfortable and there are plenty of good eats (we recommended the Philly cheesesteak from Tony Luke's with sharp provolone - we'll pass on the Cheese Whiz, thanks). Tony Luke's is a part of Ashburn Alley, which runs the full length of the outfield and is named after legendary Phillies broadcaster and former centerfielder Richie Ashurn. Among the other notable attractions of Ashburn Alley are Bull's BBQ (partly owned by former Phil Greg Luzinski, and their answer to Boog's Barbecue in Baltimore), Harry the K's Bar and Grille, built into the base of the scoreboard, and an exposed visitor's bullpen, which allows the Phillies notoriously polite and respectul fans to hurl verbal abuse upon helpless opposing relief pitchers for three hours every game day. But what may be most impressive of all is the beer selection. Philadelphia has earned a reputations over the past decade plus as one of the best beer cities in the country, and the draught list at the ballpark would stack up quite favourably with many beer bars. Local breweries are well represented, as well as some nice selections of more widely available beers. When we visited on a warm, sunny day in mid April, we enjoyed an old favourite, Victory Hop Devil, and also were quite impressed by our first experience with Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale. At $6, both were fairly reasonably priced, at least by ballpark standards. The baseball wasn't bad either.

Here's a fairly current list of the available beers at Citizens Bank:

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA
Stoudt's American Pale Ale
Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale
Dock Street Amber
Victory Hop Devil
Yards Philly Pale Ale
Troegs Sunshine Pils
Sly Fox Pikeland Pils
Otter Creek Copper Ale
Wolaver's Pale Ale
Sam Adams Summer Ale
Sam Adams Boston Lager
Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat
Grolsh
Red Bridge (Gluten free lager from A-B)
Anchor Steam
Straub's
Yuengling

Enjoy.

Of Cheap Beer and Baseball: Part II

Intrepid freelancer D.G. Dunford continues his moving piece on the ever declining role that cheap, locally produced beer has played in the game of baseball. Read Part I here.

I was born in the Bronx in 1977, a time and place that brought the world both the Son of Sam serial killer and a Yankees World Series title. This title was the first in the new Yankee Stadium. Previous championships were won in the old Yankee Stadium, which was overhauled in 1973-75, and prominently featured signage from the Yankees' old beer sponsor: Ballantine Ale, which was brewed in nearby Newark, New Jersey. Each of the other New York City teams had prominent sponsorships : the Brooklyn Dodgers were sponsored by NYC-based Schaefer (their logo was prominently displayed on the scoreboard, which was in play on the right-centerfield fence near a less-prominent but more famous sign that said, "Hit Sign, Win Suit"), the New York Giants were sponsored by Knickerbocker, and Rheingold Beer advertised very heavily with the then-fledgling New York Mets. It was possible, then, that if you lived in New York City at this time, your brand loyalty with beer would also indicate the baseball team you supported.

Correlations between locally-brewed cheap beer were certainly not limited to New York City. In Pittsburgh, a pseudo-tank of Iron City Beer lay just beyond the outfield fence of the long since replaced Forbes Field. Not too many pictures of this exist. Apparently, if you squint really hard while looking at pictures of Bill Mazeroski's famed 1960 World Series-ending home run (which led the hometown Pirates over the Yankees), you can spot it. Cincinnati's Crosley Field's center-field scoreboard proudly displayed an advertisement for the regionally-brewed Hudepohl. (As an aside, we had some Hudepohl once. The year was 1998, the place was Mansfield, Ohio, and the price was right, 50 cents a glass. I don't know if I could give it a Beer Advocate-worthy breakdown, though).

On the West Coast, the minor-league Pacific Coast League served as a primary baseball outlet for fans of the game who didn't have major league baseball teams and stadiums until the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the teams in this league played in Seattle. The name of the team? The Rainiers. The team shared their name with the iconic locally-brewed cheap beer, although (to be fair) both took their nickname from the nearby mountain range, so a direct correlation cannot be established. However, you could definitely drink a Rainier while sitting in the stands and watching the Rainiers.

The relationships between locally-brewed cheap beers and baseball weren't limited to the pre-1970 era of baseball, although that is certainly the "boom" time for this relationship. When Major League Baseball returned to Baltimore with the Orioles team in 1953, the team was owned by Jerrold Hofberger, the owner of the National Bohemian brand of beer, who purchased the team from Bill Veeck and moved the team from St. Louis. The Orioles subsequently were affiliated with "Natty Bo" (and their wonderful, winking mascot) until the team's ownership passed to onetime Jimmy Hoffa lawyer Edward Bennett Williams in 1979.

Today, most major-league ballparks feature Budweiser, Coors, or Miller products. The St. Louis Cardinals play in Busch Stadium, which is technically named after a locally-brewed cheap beer, but when one "heads for the mountains of Busch," as the advertisements once sang, they're heading for a beer that's available on a national level. Additionally, the Colorado Rockies and Milwaukee Brewers play in stadiums that reflect area brewers (Coors and Miller, respectively), but these brands of beer are, again, too national to qualify. There is one exception, however; the Chicago Cubs feature Old Style Beer at Wrigley Field, and have since 1950; while Old Style is now owned by the Pabst Brewing Company and brewed by Miller, we'll give them a pass for the sake of this piece because, well, it's a cheap beer that is brewed and marketed locally (within 100 miles of the ballpark) and despite the changes in ownership, there have been effortswithin the Chicagoland area to maintain the tradition of Old Style ingeneral. Also, despite Budweiser's efforts to sway the Cubs with sponsorship dollars, you can still get a fresh pour of Old Style at Wrigley and that's a pretty cool thing.

As I write this in 2007, almost every major-league Baseball team has made a conscious effort to position themselves with retro-styling. The majority of uniforms hearken back to old-school styles, and new ballparks across the country, from San Diego to Baltimore and everything in between, are styled to look like the Crosley and Forbes Fields of yonder days. But those quirky relationships between teams and locally-brewed cheap beers are all but gone, and probably will never return. Ah, well.

Of Cheap Beer and Baseball: Part I

Intrepid freelance reporter D.G. Dunford has had this piece "brewing" in his mind for several months now. He even did some research on it! Some would say this research includes well over a decade of drinking cheap beer out of cans, and nearly three decades of infatuation with the game of baseball. It turned out to be so epic that we had to split it into two parts.

In 1979, then-United States President Jimmy Carter signed a law that repealed federal restrictions on small-batch home brewing. This law cleared the way for microbreweries to gain a serious market share in today's beer economy; according to the national Brewer's Association, there are currently 2,000 breweries in these United States, 1,400 of which are classified as "craft brewers" (independent breweries that produce fewer than two million barrels of beer per year).

What does this mean? Well, first, it means that a beer blog such as this one has its work cut out for it, 1,400 craft breweries means a lot of sampling and writing. However, I'd like to focus on one of the less obvious ramifications of this act, the lessened restrictions on small-batch home brewing changed the way that brewing occurred on a regional level. Between this shift and the triumph of marketing achieved in the 1980s by major brewing behemoths Anheuser-Busch and Miller (which was in and of itself furthered along by eased federal restrictions on television marketing of alcoholic beverages), the last three decades have witnessed the slow decline of a once-great American tradition: the locally brewed cheap beer.

How to define the locally brewed cheap beer? You'd know it if you saw it. It comes in cans, and can generally be found alongside national cheap beers like Busch (an A-B product), Milwaukee's Best, and Pabst Blue Ribbon (both produced by Miller). It's the kind of beer that, by its very presence on the shelves, reassures you that you're close to home. Previous posts in this blog have discussed two pretty solid examples of locally brewed cheap beer; Utica Club, a lager brewed by the FX Matt Brewery of Utica, New York (a mere 70 miles away from the Capital Region of Albany), and Genesee Cream Ale (a favorite of many of ours from way back, brewed at High Falls Brewery near Rochester, New York).

Over the past few years, after a decades-long decline in popularity and consumption, some cheap beers have seen a resurgence of sorts; spearheaded by a hipster-led desire to drink cheaply and ironically, brands like Pabst Blue Ribbon have achieved a sort of credibility and have been seemingly re-energized by a new consumer base. However, from all appearances, this has only been occurring with brands that have support on a national level, like the aforementioned Pabst as well as brands like Hamm's and Rainier which are produced by Miller. Ultimately, despite this ironic resurgence, it seems as though the locally brewed cheap beer is dying a slow, painful death, replaced by nationally brewed cheap beer and locally-brewed craft brewing. While we generally think that this is a good thing, we have some sad feelings, as there is a character that locally-brewed cheap beer has that can't really be replicated. For this freelance reporter, that character is inherently tied to our national pastime, baseball.