Beer, Rolling Rock

Near and dear to my heart is beer. It's a genetic thing I think. My, dad being of German decent sure drank his share. I do and so does one of my sons. I always liked "good" beer. Coors, Olympia and Rainer were good beers. Not great beers, but good beers. Coors still is. Budweiser never was, too sweet and the barley malt was cut with rice. Which probably was a cost cutting measure and added to the sweetness. Beer alcoholics drink Bud. I don't. ABB, anything but Bud. After spending time in Germany, I "stepped up" from good beers to better beers. The Germans not only make good stuff like Sham-Wows, they arguably brew the best beer in the world. Good American beers like Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams. It didn't hurt things for me that Jim Koch is the owner of Sam Adams. Rolling Rock was always, to me, a pretty good beer. If not a great one. If somebody offered me a beer and the choices were Bud or Rolling Rock. I'd choose the Rock, ABB. I'm in New York state this week and was offered a beer and sure as hell the choice was, you know what and RR. ABB, I opt for the Rock. I hadn't had a RR for some time now and it seemed to taste about the same. I read the painted on label as I had a hundred times before and, Oh Oh. Instead of saying Latrobe Brewing Co., Latrobe PA. It said St. Louis. I hope you know by now that any beer, regardless of what brewing company the label says, if it's from St. Louis, it's Anheiser-Busch. If some the label of some beer like Killians says Golden Colorado, it's a Coors product. The same goes for wine. If the label says Modesto CA, it's a Gallo product. Gallo probably has more than twenty different brands that don't reference Gallo on the label. But if it says Modesto, it's Gallo. To get back to the point, I Googled Rolling Rock and did a little homework on Wickapedia. It turns out that AB bought RR from InBev in 2006 and promptly shut down the Latrobe PA brewery and moved the label to it's Newark NJ mega-plant. Ironically, two years later, InBev bought AB and acquired RR back again. Moral of this story is this. I like to patronise the little guys like Latrobe. AB and InBev aren't going to miss the couple of hundred dollars that I spend on beer every year. That paltry sum does impact the little guys a lot more. So, I am never going to spend another dime on this AB product unless I see Latrobe PA on the label and know that all of those people in PA who were pushed into the unemployment lines are once again painting Latrobe PA on the bottles.