Sunday’s ad is another one for Rheingold Beer, this one from 1962, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Kathy Kersh. In this ad, she’s steering a small cart of Rheingold’s Golden Bock beer, which is being pulled by a small ram. The ad seems to suggest it’s the second year they made this seasonal beer, which is interesting. I don’t think of the sixties as a time for seasonal beers, but who knows? Maybe more breweries did actually dabble in seasonal beers.
This might have been very good, hard to say. Perhaps the current owners of the Rheingold label would be minded to re-brew it with benefit presumably of historical brewing records. Interesting to see bock associated to “Autumn” (I thought Americans said “Fall”, no?). The beer seems technically more a Maibock, not a Maerzen with its associations of being drunk in the fall at Octoberfest. Always the lingering confusion of bock/Marzen Bier/Fest Bier. Anyway another example of how Madison Avenue worked those silky formulas so early. The Autumn is crisp so therefore this Golden Bock is rich and robust? Why not winy and contemplative, or earthy and bucolic? Got to love those ad guys, and as many 1930’s ads you’ve featured show, they got good at this a good generation earlier.
Gary
Oops I see the beer was being released in early February. That explains more the rich and robust thing (for cold weather). It still looks like a Maibock though.
Gary
From what I recall and have noticed, East Coast breweries didn’t really do seasonals in the 1960s to the 80s, but with one exception. Many of them made a bock beer for the spring, which would be darker than their single year round beer, a gold lager.
Many people would say this was when the breweries cleaned their tanks each year and that’s how the darker beer was made. We all know now that is BS but the average person had no source of knowledge regarding brewing back then.
It’s a mystery as to why a bock beer for spring would be the lone seasonal beer. It’s also a mystery as to why so many breweries fell in line with doing that.
It was the tail-end of a long period of standardization. Just as Ballantine once had a porter, an IPA, a Burton, today that label adorns only the basic XXX golden ale. The spring bock did hold on though (some breweries only), a vestige of an earlier time.
Gary
Late 50’s/early 60’s I remember Regal Bock popping up around the beginning of Lent – Regal was a CA brewery that distributed on the West Coast & maybe into NV & AZ.”
Also – the fine print under the pic says “goat cart”, but that animal is some eastern city-slicker adman’s clueless abortion of @ a goat! Sheep & goat horns curl backwards & don’t protrude sideways. The wool looks sheep; the face is a goat & sheep amalgam; the burl atop the head is ???? Perhaps the animal was a mutation found on some NV grassland around Area 51 during the N-test days!