Tuesday’s ad is for Rheingold Beer, from 1947, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Michaele Fallon. She’s riding a roller coaster called the “Rocket,” with her dog on her lap. I can’t imagine the dog is happy about that. There was a famous Rocket roller coaster in Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, Virginia, but it was torn down in 1979, after filmmakers competed the movie “The Death of Ocean View Park.”
This is an early example of promoting a beer as positive which has a taste that is both “crisp” (adjunct-influenced, I would think) and “dry” (lacking high malt content or highly attenuated). It might have had decent hopping – aroma hops anyway – though since aroma is mentioned as a characteristic. To most beer “connoisseurs” (I don’t like the term, but how else to say it?), too much adjunct and lack of malty sweetness denote something of limited interest. I don’t know whether the company truly believed it would sell more of the dry than a “sweet” beer, hence the advertising approach, or was trying to put a positive spin on factors which might have made the beer less costly to produce. Hard to say, but at any rate I’d think this beer was an early example of the kind of mass market lager the craft beer movement was meant to challenge.