Friday’s ad is still another one for Rheingold Beer, from 1958, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Madelyn Darrow. This time Miss Rheingold is in the boat with her rifle, with woman’s best friend and a few duck decoys.
Friday’s ad is still another one for Rheingold Beer, from 1958, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Madelyn Darrow. This time Miss Rheingold is in the boat with her rifle, with woman’s best friend and a few duck decoys.
Although you can never know for sure at this remove, Rheingold sounds like an early proponent of the American light lager style (light in its older sense): any number of mass market beers today meet the taste description of not bitter, not sweet, not filling. (Everything that makes beer beer seems to have been seriously cut back). Apart from that, the ads seem resolutely upwardly mobile in character, perhaps reflecting a New York ethos (if not the reality of the typical consumer, but it must have been felt he/she shared the aspirations). Lots of the activities shown are at leisure: duck hunting in a setting and wearing clothing suggestive of an upper-class pursuit; ditto of the fashion model-dressed figure feeding squirrels; the upscale feel even to the barbecue scene, and so forth. Some of the Budweiser commercials of the time show similar traits. I think the big error all these breweries made though was to denature the product too much. Odd that of all the great gastronomic drinks, only beer was selected for this treatment. Chardonnay, more upscale (at least initially) in its image and market, if anything took on bigger taste attributes than the French model it was based on. Ditto for the big American reds (they’re all big, basically). Craft whiskeys and small batch bourbons have a huge amount of taste and did since day one. (True, vodka took up the bland side of the equation). But it still puzzles me that beer was selected for this treatment, or not just selected, but to the point where virtually none of the older line of flavours was available any more by 1975. Enter Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, Ken, Grossman, etc. (And commendably people like Charles Finkel whose import selections inspired in turn the new brewers).
Gary
Mmmm, you hunt ducks with shotguns – not rifles.