Rheingold Lager

Dead Soldier

Where to Dig Up More About This Beer
Rheingold Lager
The Rheingold Brewing Company
372 Danbury Road - Suite 163

Wilton, CT USA
Bottled at:
The Rheingold Brewing Company
Wilkes-Barre, PA
Est. 1883
www.rheingoldbrewingcompany.com


Brain Damage Quotient = 5.0 % ABV

Fluid Oz. = 12.0


Postmortem Brew Review
Pale straw yellow color.
Sweet grainy malt and just a dash of hops in aroma.
Two finger, bubbly white head on pour, and then it's gone in 30 seconds.

No lace on the glass.
Hops are pretty indistinguishable and the copious presence of grainy malt abounds.
Very active carbonation
Light bodied.


Grim Reaper's Eulogy
Ballantine. Shaefer. Piel's. Shmidt. Yadda, yadda, yadda and the list goes on. This beer would have made a great addition to the run of Beers of Yesteryear that I ran a couple of years ago. It fits right in. I am old enough to recall Rheingold being around at the family picnics and gatherings back in the tri-state area of NY, NJ & CT.


It was the official beer of the Mets, (the Yankees had Ballantine). Rhiengold, like so many of the others mentioned above, had its heyday during the 1940's through the early 1970's. Then like most of the others, they were bought up for branding and recipe by Pabst, or swallowed whole by Anheuser Busch or put asunder by Miller and Coors. The redundancy of yellow fizzy lager beers caused the collapse and only the biggest and strongest survived. Well, this one couldn't be killed off that easily.


An investment group recently bought and reinvigorated the brand. Interestingly, they kept the same branding, logos, formulation, etc. in a hope that nostalgic lagers would become hip. After all, Pabst and Narragansett have been able to cash in on this type of success with good marketing campaigns. So now we have a beer that once hailed from New York, is now headquartered in Wilton, CT and is brewed (presumably contract) in WIlkes-Bare, PA. Is this a flag looking for a country or the other way around?

Any way you slice it, another tried and true name has been lifted off the scrap heap and is getting some air under it's wings for lift. For nostalgia's and their sake, let's hope it rises like the Phoenix out of the ashes.

This ends your history lesson for the day.