College and the Time of Beer. Part X

The Sixties Collegiate and Ballantine Ale

Recently on X formerly Twitter I took some time to post a retrospective of work at this site, beeretseq.com (just a sampling, it could have been much larger). The last posting assessed New York journalistic regret ca. 1900 at the passing of ale as a player in American beer stakes.

In the 1904 story I profiled, ale was distinguished from German-style lager – “beer” in American parlance until quite recently – but in a simplistic way. Ale was more hearty, a strong, warming drink with a “winter” image.

Lager was less head-spinning, more summery but lager-makers learned how to make a heavier, sustaining drink for winter (in truth German brewers long knew how). Result: lager, an upstart drink made by recent German immigrants, by 1900 had ousted the ancestral ale in American affections. Ale would continue stateside of course, but often in a way that seemed to make it a variant of lager – golden, fizzy, drunk cold like “beer”.

I noted that before craft beer, ads for ale did not enter upon technical distinctions from lager – ale’s estery character, say, or (often) English-type hop aroma. Only later would a generation of beer fans become familiar with such thereunto esoteric matters.

The shift was mostly due to the influence of British beer author Michael Jackson (1942-2007) and subsequent beer writers. In a word, trade talk became the lexicon of the advised beer fan.

Still, pre-craft 20th century American brewers used other stratagems to sell ale in the market. New Jersey’s Ballantine XXX, a 5% abv golden ale (still made under Pabst Brewing auspices) employed various gambits.

The beer was in its prime hopped and brewed in a way to have a deeper flavour than your typical lager of America. Lager-like it was, but with a comparative punch, and the brewery made hay of this in its ads.

The post-Second World War ads stressed the beer’s manly nature. Famed author Ernest Hemingway featured in one. Other ale makers including in Canada plied similar territory, e.g. for Labatt India Pale Ale. Some Ballantine ads did finally mention an ale hop,* but no great effort was made to show how ale really differed from lager. Perhaps because readers might see there were numerous resemblances, as well.

This manly theme continued in the 1960s but since brewers were confronting, as The Monkees sang, “a young generation [who have] something to say”, some pivoted to a less stereotypical approach. Ale man might be a more offbeat Ivy League collegian, too.

This approach was exemplified by a series of Ballantine ads in 1966 titled “How to tell if you’re an Ale Man”. A telling example appeared in the Daily Princetonian, December 12, 1966 (via archival site Papers of Princeton):

The ad copy is arch, comedic, yet hits bases rather traditional in beer ads: new ale man was no less active than the ale fishermen or ten-pin bowlers of the 1950s, but favoured more hip sports, here surfing. And was good enough to teach it, not just dabble in summer.

The new hero loved the motorcycle, which since the 1950s had a rebel image – big “hairy bikes” anyway. Ale man was not quite Joe College. He was more individualistic but after all a Princeton man, which said something right there (then).

You could mention Shakespeare, Napoleon and Caesar to him, as this ad did, and not offend – au contraire. Indeed ale man knew the Humphrey Bogart theatrical repertoire! Another Ballantine ad repeated this liking for theatre – off-off-Broadway no less.

Ale man, cultured as he may have been, was not a sensitive, irresolute-type still finding his path, not the kind of figure Dustin Hoffman portrayed in the same-era film The Graduate. He was going places, a boss in embryo. Watching pennies when buying clothing as stressed in the ad points to a thrifty, commercial instinct.

He was good with the girls, as the pictured black book suggests, but not a kiss and teller. Someone would have to pinch his black book for beans to spill. Another line says he knew how to get a date, vs. the wannabees who whistled (in the wind, is the implication).

The ad concludes with the claim it was pitching for ale men in training, as the real thing knew what Ballantine ale was. It would have been bold for the time to pitch to ale women, but Ballantine did not, as far as I know. Beer advertising is ever conservative, to act otherwise can court problems, as advertising history amply illustrates.

And so Ballantine carved its path in the post-1900 ale promotion stakes, specifically in the present context how to shift product to the Sixties college crowd.

Note re image: source of image is linked in text. All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owner. Used for educational and research purposes. All feedback welcomed.

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*See discussion and image in a Jay Brookston blogpost.