1970s "Dark" Beer?

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Lounge Lizard

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Anyone ever go into a bar back in the 70s and drink "dark" beer?

I'm wondering what kind of beer it is/was? The choice was between regular and dark. Dark lager of some sort?

When out partying with the hoodlums back then, we would order dark. Of course, back then, anything that was different and got you drunk, was good. As I remember, it wasn't too bad, really. Not that many people knew what a good beer was back then.

We all had our own plastic steins that were hung above the bar. It pissed me off when the bouncer would hold a flashlight under my ID, to see if it had been altered... LOL

Anyway, I'm not planning on brewing up any "dark" beer (well, I don't think). You never know.
I still have my plastic stein as a keepsake.... :mug:

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Dark beer, back then, was BMC with caramel color (but not flavor). Some people said it the factories used wood ash for color, but that would have added flavor. I don't remember any difference from the regular stuff, but it was hard to find and that made it special. A little like getting Coors in upstate N.Y., because they didn't ship it east of the Big Muddy.
 
david_42 said:
Dark beer, back then, was BMC with caramel color (but not flavor). Some people said it the factories used wood ash for color, but that would have added flavor. I don't remember any difference from the regular stuff, but it was hard to find and that made it special. A little like getting Coors in upstate N.Y., because they didn't ship it east of the Big Muddy.


No kidding? Who would have thunk it. BMC trying to make us think we were drinking something special. It's been thirty years, but I seem to remember it tasting some different from regular draught. Wish I had a glass of it right now...
 
the_bird said:
Just remember that if they DID ship Coors to the East, we wouldn't have had Smokey and the Bandit - one of my top three guilty pleasures.


Yep, it's a pretty good flick. I'll watch it whenever I'm channel surfing and run across it....
 
Lounge Lizard said:
Just a beer darker in color. Not quite as dark as a stout. More dark brown than black IIRC.
Well, back in the '70s I was in Germany so I was drinking all kinds of beers. :tank: :mug:

I haven't drunk BMC since 1975 so I wouldn't know to which you are referring, but it's no important now.:D
 
Don't remember dark beer back then. Best we did was get kegs of Andeker or Michelob in the 70's and thought we were being high class instead of miller, pabst etc.
 
RAISED FROM THE DEAD!!!

Wasn't Guiness sold in the US in the 1970s? You couldn't get it at a bar or grocery store, but they had it at the larger liquor stores, I think.
 
Back then,we used to shop at a grocery store called Meyer Goldburg (yeah! Goldburg!lolz). That was when we noticed Stroh's Bock. It wasn't just coloring,it actually had a smooth darker flavor to it. Even Pizza Hut in our area carried it for years. And since I & my buddies were 18 when it came out (legal age at the time),we ordered a few pitures of it. It was really good. Seems to me it was in a yellowish can as well.
Sure wish they still made that one. Good stuff!
 
I remember the Student Union beer hall at San Jose State had some sort of "Dark Beer" on tap around 1975-78. I don't remember the brand - I stumbled on this thread while trying to find it. It wasn't great beer, but it was a change from the typical Coor's or Spudweiser. The next time I had a "dark beer" on tap in a US bar was in the St. Louis airport "Cheers Bar" where they served Sam Adams. Not really dark, but not exactly a standard US pale lager or pilsner! This was in the late 1980s, as I recall.
 
This feels like adding margin notes on the Dead Sea Scrolls…but it’s an interesting topic.

The seventies might have been the last time I saw Lowenbrau Dark. I remember trying Guinness Extra Stout in the bottle back then and being repulsed. There was also some Malt Liquor brand that was distinctly darker than everything else, perhaps just amber among the BMC variants.
 
In the very late 70's, I lived in a dorm, and discovered that there was a dark beer in stubby bottles (I think it was Pabst) that tasted okay warm. That was a Godsend because if I had cold beer in my dorm room the upperclassmen would steal it but they left warm beer alone, probably intending to steal it when it was cold. It really wasn't much different than their light-colored lager, except it went down at room temperature better for some reason.

There was also Shiner Bock (they still sell that), which is not a bock beer by any measure but it was pretty good for a cheap beer. Just an American lager with a little caramel color and maybe a tiny bit of black malt added. Now it gets sold as a premium brand which I don't understand at all. I would still buy it if it was cheap enough (about like Busch) but I'm not paying Sierra Nevada-like prices for it.
 
I remember working in a pizza joint that had Old Style and Augsburger Dark on tap. After closing and cleaning up, most of the staff would sit around playing cards and drinking "complimentary" draft beer until the wee hours. It was the 80s, and I was still a teenager, but I remember the Augie Dark actually tasting like dark beer.
 
At most pizza joints in Portland Oregon there was a dark lager beer available on tap from Blitz Weinhard brewing called Bavarian Style Dark Beer. It was later rebranded to Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve Dark Beer. Given the choices, it was pretty good stuff.
 
Here were our dark pizza beers on tap in the Northwest back in the late 70’s and early 80’s:
 

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At most pizza joints in Portland Oregon there was a dark lager beer available on tap from Blitz Weinhard brewing called Bavarian Style Dark Beer. It was later rebranded to Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve Dark Beer. Given the choices, it was pretty good stuff.
I was stationed at Fort Lewis WA in the early 80's and drank the Henery Weinhard's PR dark. It was pretty good. Then I got orders for Germany and found out what different types of good beer was.
 
I was in NYC not too long ago and I happened to walk by a bar called McSorley’s. Looked cool so I went in. Same setup, light or dark only. No other options. It definitely wasn’t just coloring though, and both were good! The sign says established in 1854.

I think I've been there, is it close to Grand Central Station across from the Hotel Pennsylvania?
 
I was in NYC not too long ago and I happened to walk by a bar called McSorley’s. Looked cool so I went in. Same setup, light or dark only. No other options. It definitely wasn’t just coloring though, and both were good! The sign says established in 1854.

NY history indeed. Once upon a time (read: embarrassingly recently) women were not welcome.

"Good Ale, Raw Onion, and No Ladies."
 
I remember visiting the Festhaus at Bush Gardens in Virginia back in the 70s and there was a beer they had there called Anheuser Bush Classic Dark, which a google search shows may have become Michelob Classic Dark. I’m wondering if it was that.

I was pretty young at the time and only had it the one time, but it wasn’t bad and good enough in fact that I remember that visit and the name some 40 odd years later.

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In 2014 my favorite tavern in Pittsburgh had Iron City Light and Iron City Dark. I wouldn't be surprised if IC still makes the dark
 
Sounds like many regional variations. AB was big and would have distributed nationwide or close to it. I think Lowenbrau was a Miller brand at the time? But there were many small regionals too. Bock beer was big in the 70s as others said. I remember commercials on tv for bock beer when I was younger.

Anyway, I'm not planning on brewing up any "dark" beer (well, I don't think). You never know.
I still have my plastic stein as a keepsake.... :mug:

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If you want to brew this kind of beer, I’d probably start with a Munich Dunkel recipe. 99% sure thats what most of those “dark beers” other than bock were based on
 
For dark beer, I think breweries mostly used their regular lagers, which were likely blended back with a mini batch of something dark.

I believe of all their conditioning tanks were filled with their regular lager beer. One of those breweries were running over 100 labels for themselves and area breweries. It was all was pretty much the same standard beer, despite what you might think. 1970's and the 2020's being separated by 50 years of beer time and evolution...
 
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NY history indeed. Once upon a time (read: embarrassingly recently) women were not welcome.

"Good Ale, Raw Onion, and No Ladies."
Yes it says women were not allowed inside until 1970, after being legally required to do so.
 
I've seen vintage pull-tab cans of Pabst Bock in various places. I assume that would suffice as a "period correct" dark beer?
 
It was a dark beer I had in the 1970s that led me to homebrewing. Somewhere between 1976 and 1979 while hanging out in the pubs and arcades of Ann Arbor, Michigan a group of us stopped into a pizza joint called Bimbo's and someone ordered a couple pitchers of beer. It was a brown ale which was foreign to me at the time but tasted great. I never found out what it was and many years later when craft beer started creeping into the landscape I would try to find something like what we had at Bimbo's. Having no luck I kicked off my homebrew hobby in an attempt to recreate that mysterious brown ale.
 
I remember taking a liking to dark beer in high school, early to mid ‘70s. San Francisco Bay Area. Heineken, Lowenbrau and San Miguel all made dark beer. I wondered why nobody in America made such a thing. Then we discovered Anchor Steam. It was an epiphany. Besides the standard steam beer they made a porter that I still like today.
 
Dark meant various things to different people back then. American light lager was so synonymous with "beer" that some waitrons believed that anything amber was "dark".
 
In the 70's, A local Philadelphia brewery (Schmidt's) would have a Bock beer in the Spring.
 
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