[00:00:05] Speaker A: Remembering the cheap beer Tyler's never heard of.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: A historic brewery goes up on the market.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: A UK man does the opposite of sober October. All this and more on it's. All beer.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome to it's. All beer. And this week, Tyler's gonna do the intro. Tyler.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: See?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Not so fucking easy in it. You know what? I give that a one. I give that a one with a gigantic turd on top of it.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Oh, sorry. I was trying to remember the words how, like, Law and Order Sbu starts, so I could be like, Bubba, this is the cases of beer industry fuck ups brought to you by Tyler and Jeremy. These cases are real and are dangerous.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Okay, we can do that. You would like to start again?
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Oh, I just did it. There we go.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Okay, I was actually going to give you and then you could do that, but I was actually going to keep all this in so that it's really awkward for anybody listening to this.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: They're like, did these fucks forget to cut this part out?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: No, we left it in on this was this was completely on purpose, because that's how I'm feeling tonight. I'm willing to sabotage this whole operation for the sake of a joke. Tyler, how are you tonight?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: I'm good. Was that actually your intro?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: It was not, no. I had something written. I will save it for next week. But since you took the initiative to lead into the show after the headlines, I decided, you know what, I've always wanted to just throw Tyler under the bus, especially after those days when I'll come up with something I think is pretty fucking clever. You're like, it's like a two. And someday I sit here and see, then I go, you know what? Fucking someday, Tyler. I'm just going to go, tyler and you're doing the intro and you're going to sit there like a lump sputtering and spewing, going duh dun. And it's going to be glorious. And it was everything I hoped it would be.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: I think I pivoted pretty well.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: It was cleansing.
It was a high colonic for the soul.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: The thing is, I don't know if I should say this, because it might not be as good for your colonic.
Yeah. That literally affected my life in no way, shape or form. So if you were trying to throw it to me to be like, yeah, got you, Tyler, I pretty much just took the goldfish approach and I'm like, oh, yeah, forgot and it's gone.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: That's kind of how I assume this whole enterprise works out for you. Tyler, are you still doing sober? October.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: No, I'm back on the.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Raining. The reigning champ and destroyer of livers is back. What are you drinking tonight?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: I am drinking sockeye's wet hop. Idaho seven.
And what do we know about wet hops?
[00:03:26] Speaker B: They're a little wet, little drippy.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Yes, but partly. I forgot to go buy beer today and I was like I have one of these in my fridge. I wanted to have a wet or a fresh hop on the podcast. So this will do.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: What occurred to me that we're a little bit past peak fresh hop season.
You've been on the wagon. I don't think I grabbed a fresh hop yet.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: You haven't. I've been very disappointed in you.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Well, it seemed time, so I went and grabbed the collaboration between Double Mountain and or sorry, the Iowa bar fight.
I don't know why the Iowa reference.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: But where's Solara from?
[00:04:16] Speaker B: They're from Oregon. I checked into it. I thought, well, maybe Solara is an Iowan brewery and they are not. They are both Oregon Breweries. That called their fresh hop collaboration Iowa Bar fight.
All right, for whatever reason, does it.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Make you want to go fight in a bar in Iowa?
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Most beers do.
Not Iowa specifically, but well, actually, no. Come to think of it, if I were going to pick a state to go get into a bar fight, iowa is up.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: You would get your ass whooped in a bar fight in Iowa. I'm just saying those corn fed hillbillies would whoop your ass up and down that farm.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: They exist on a diet of deep fried butter and mayonnaise balls. The biggest threat I face is when I throw a punch, it getting like stuck into the mass of their gelatinous, whatever I can't pull back and they just Conan's my head into the bar room floor. That's really the biggest threat I face in an Iowa bar brawl.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: Bro.
I've seen some of those farm boys before.
I'm betting on them twelve times out of eight.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Well, you know what? Come up to Idaho if you're mad enough. My name is Tyler Zimmerman. You can find I'm a beer rep.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: If some fucking Iowa farm boy shows up at my work or my house, I'm headbutting the motherfucker and being like, well, guess this is how it's going.
And I'm starting with the headbutt because it's going to throw them off.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: The beer itself, unlike Iowa Bar fight, is quite tasty.
Like nice notes of citrus peel, dank pine, that grassy, fresh hop flavor, super smooth, moderate bitterness, but finishes real clean. Again, unlike an Iowa bar fight.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: I.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Think this beer might be aesthetically the opposite of an Iowa bar fight. But I don't know.
The Midwest is somewhat Canadian in their politeness, or at least they used to be. So it might be the joke, might be just two guys standing apart from each other going, sorry, did I do Minnesota?
It creeps a little bit into Iowa.
I've definitely gotten a yabetcha in northern Iowa.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I can see.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Not well.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: I feel like out of all those states, iowa is going to be the one who's going to be like, fuck it, let's throw hands.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: No, that's nebraska.
They're angry. Nebraska is not a real and they're and they're more upset about that. There is nothing in Nebraska. Iowa has hills and shit and pig farms. There's an economy.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Iowa does not have hills. It has just slightly taller mounts of until.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: When was the last time you drove the entire I 80 corridor?
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Never.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: All right, let me put it this way. After you drive through Nebraska, you get to Iowa and start experiencing changes in elevation. It's only a few feet, but it feels like you're on a goddamn roller coaster. It's amazing.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: If you compare anything next to Nebraska, it's going to feel amazing.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: And that's why you're proving my point.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: It's going to be like jerking off with sandpaper and then just using your hand, and you're like, my hand feels so much better. No shit. You were using sandpaper before. That's Nebraska.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: And that's why they're angry.
You're bringing me back to the point I was trying to make earlier.
This has been us all comparing Midwest states.
Next on the list, kansas. Actually, let's not let's go to our top story. Tyler, what do you got for us today?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Well, Jeremy, we're starting with a remembrance of Schmidt beer.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Apparently it was I don't remember it.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Never fucking heard of it until I saw this article and I was like, wait, there's a shitty domestic beer that used to do wildlife themed, like and they actually look pretty fucking dope. And their tagline was the Brew that grew with the Great Northwest or beer for big spaces.
This just hit all, like, redneck buzwords that he wants to just shotgun a.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Beer by the I just I went ahead and just typed that into Google just to see what came up. And that's why when you mentioned Schmidt beer while we were going over what we were doing for the we were doing our planning session, I'm like, Schmidt Beer sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure if I ever don't know why.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: I want this lamp. They have.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: I've seen you can get an entire collection of Schmidt beer cans for $70 on ebay. I'm just saying.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Or someone turned one of them into a beer can lamp for $100. So if one of our listeners wants to buy Tyler an early Christmas present thank you.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Unless your wife listens to this and is desperate to get you something, I think you're out of luck.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, probably. But it looks fucking so as soon as I saw this article and was like, I've never heard of this, I was like, well, I have to read this and figure out what the fuck's going on. So first thing, make sure we aren't confusing Schmidt with Schlitz or Philadelphia's. Schmidt's.
Philadelphia had a brewery with the same exact name.
The Schmidt we will be referring to is a Minnesota based macro lager that was four and a half percent ABV and really just kind of took the Bush Light approach before Bush Light did of trying to lay into that outdoors. American wilderness.
Tagged himself as the official beer of the american sportsman and really just played into the Republican's wet dream.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: The perfect beer for freezing your ice hole off, right?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
So we got to jump way back to 1855, three years before Minnesota became a state, to kind of get back to the origin of Schmidt Brewing. It wasn't referred to as Schmidt at this time. It was Christopher Stallman cave Brewery. But it became the largest brewery in Minnesota, as well as one of the first American breweries to bottle its own beer shipping as far south as Memphis.
The Civil War put a little damper on that.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Put a damper on a lot of things.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: But Stallman ended up dying in 1883, and his three sons were the beneficiaries of the brewery. They all died in somewhat rapid succession, according to the article, over the next decade.
And the brewery wound up in the hands of Frank Nokolin, who was the second husband of Henry Stallman's wife.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: I make it a rule that if an entire family that owns a brewery dies in rapid succession, you don't drink the beer.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Or trust the wife.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Or drink the beer. She could be involved, she could not be. I don't know. I feel like that's a good rule of it's a rule that served me quite well in my life, actually.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: But he then changed the name to St. Paul Brewing Company to honor its native city did little to innovate the company and Jacob Smith, who had recently bought a large stake in Minnesota's North Star Brewery after a stint. As the brewmaster of Hams transferred his partial ownership of North Star to a new company with his son in law and his son in law's brother purchasing into that and becoming Jacob Smith Brewing, their facility was damaged, so they decided to purchase St. Paul Brewing Company in 1900, making it just Schmidt Brewing.
They managed to survive Prohibition by making non alcoholic beer, which gave them a really nice leg up when Prohibition was reversed. But you may have heard of some of these beers, jeremy Malta and City Club.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: How old do you think I am?
[00:14:09] Speaker A: You have, like, an OD, like, if you were like, oh, yeah, I followed Prohibition era, like, beers that became relevant after Prohibition.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Wouldn't surprise me. Okay, that's a fair assessment. I do have a command of thoroughly useless knowledge, which is why I do a podcast about beer. No, that one doesn't ring a bell.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: So they hit the ground running, rolling out alcoholic versions of those beers.
They started building so much wealth that the son of Adolf was kidnapped by the Barker Carfis gang in 1934.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: I am a little bit worried about how many of the founding fathers of America's brewing culture were named Adolf. We're up to, like, five.
Although it might have been a more common name until for some reason, in the mid century, it suddenly lost popularity.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think right around this time, it started losing popularity.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Since we did bring up the fun random facts.
There was only one surviving person with the last name Hitler.
He was his nephew, and he lived in the United States. And for reasons that no one is really sure, he did name his first son Adolf.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Really?
[00:15:41] Speaker B: By that point in time, he changed his last name legally. So his son wasn't named Adolf Hitler, but he did name his son Adolf. And you're kind of like, well, that is a bold choice, sir.
That is a bold choice, Mr. Hitler.
Sorry, I just happened to know there is a good example of random shit that I know.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: So his son was eventually released after paying the $200,000 ransom, which was twice the amount of Theodore Ham's son, William Ham's ransom.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: That must have stung at, like, weird rich guy parties. Like, oh, only had to pay 2000 for your son. Yeah, that sounds about right.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: How much?
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Okay, well, still okay. Only had to pay 100,000 for your son. Well, we had to pay how much was it, honey? We had a fork over 200,000. Yes, we had to sell one of the Bentleys.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: But in 1934, I feel 200,000 is a fuckload of money.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: It's a fuckload of money, but that's what I'm saying at the rich swanky parties. That had to have hurt in a really weird way.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: They became the 7th largest brewery in the nation by 1936 and were even contracted to brew beer for the troops during World War II, partly due to FDR's friendship with the Bremeners. Fast forwarding a little bit. American beer industry is really starting to go through the shakeup, where you're having larger breweries entering local markets, buying up smaller brands, running them out of business with cheaper prices, better advertising. And that's when Schmidt was acquired by Pfeiffer. It pulled back on City Club, bought Schmidt beer to the forefront, capitalizing on their Scenic Can series that we were just talking about.
But they owned a bunch of different breweries across the country, really sucked at managing these beers in different markets, and went bankrupt in 1972. Good job. All of the assets, including Schmidt, went to G Heilman Brewing Company in Wisconsin, which also owned Old Style, Blats and a few other macro lagers.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Oh, all those ones that you know and can easily get today. I think Old Style is still around.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Yep.
Unfortunately, the brewery got involved with the corporate takeover by a shady Australian businessman, Alan Bond, whom amongst the company fell into the largest financial collapse in Australian history and ceased operation in 1990.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: I feel a strange sort of national pride because of that.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: This marks the first time that the Schmidt brewery was out of commission since it was in its inception in 1855. The article then talks about how it was started, it got brought back, it was becoming more of a brand name than a beer, and it was mainly quickly becoming like one of their flagship brands that was more the brand instead of focused on the branding, not the beer. They do mention that it's kind of unclear how it was still remaining in production following the collapse of Heilman Brewing Company was still brewed for a couple more years and then it was being produced at a facility that was also producing Philadelphia Schmidt beer at the same time.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: So were the two Schmidts one at that point in time?
No.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: With your Schmidt combined, they kept the Schmidt's separate.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Well, I do feel like you do Schmidt separately. Yes.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: The Schmidt's brand was then sold to Papst in 99. Basically from there it keeps going but really just dying off pretty hard.
And it has long left its native home of St. Paul to the different macro spots now, but for the last 20 years, Paps has owned the rights to it.
So the question is, do we get a Schmidt's relaunch? And I am hoping so. With this history, I feel robbed that it basically fucking went belly up the year I was born. Like, this is bullshit. I want those cams. Fuck. I want a kangaroo on one of those cams. Because it led to the largest flop of any business in Australia.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: I think that should be like the tagline for the entire beer. Like, responsible for the biggest business collapse in Australian history. Schmitz tastes like failure.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Fuck you. Australia.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: On a massive scale.
Down under. More like down underwater, am I right?
[00:21:12] Speaker A: But when I was googling some of the pictures to look this up and see, there was a blog post from the Land of sky beer waters talking about how they are actually starting to bring back some of the retro Schmidt beer branding.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: And looking at the cans, this style and the overall design, it's a hipster's wet dream. It really nobody. I'm surprised no craft brewery has picked up just the general style and ran with it.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: I am really hoping Paps decides to roll out deep and heavy and just hammer Schmidt brewing beer into every major market because I would make that my domestic of choice.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: What if it tastes like a cigarette put out in an old oil can?
[00:22:20] Speaker A: I mean, I'm going to guess that it's not going to taste that bad. Like, literally, they could put PBR in the can and just fucking put a different can on and I'd buy it leaps and bounds.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Fair enough.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: And we did the blind taste test of the shit domestic beers and Ice House got second. So I'm like, how terrible could it actually be?
[00:22:43] Speaker B: I thought Natty ice got second.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Natty ice got second. Yeah, that was it.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Ice House was somewhere in the middle or towards the end. That was a redeeming, but not that that's much better.
There's a very real shame in my soul that we both picked Natty Ice for for her.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: I don't feel any shame. And I also feel I know that.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Tyler, I know that that's how I describe you to people.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: I put Budweiser dead last in that. And you did not.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Because what was the other one that would was it genesee? That was rough.
That was a rough can. I remember. That was shit. And for some reason I have this. Maybe it's just because it also is a throwback to the halcyon days when you'd likely get an empty can of geneseed chucked at your forehead by your abusive father. But I just assume all aging domestics sort of, kind of taste like that, just vaguely like barley and anger.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: That's what makes it so fun, I.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Suppose, if you're not within throwing distance.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Dip, dive, duck and dodge.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Jeremy, is that how you survived in northern Idaho?
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Probably.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Okay, I don't remember it. Then you were shit at it. That's the problem.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: What do we got next?
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Oh, the Anchor saga has reached another milestone news. Now, this particular issue has caused, as you have probably heard if you've been listening, a minor rift in the It's All Beer podcast. I, for one, would like Anchor to rise from the ash of its corporate bonfire and continue on as a worker owned brewery, maintaining the Anchor brand and the history and culture that comes with it. And Tyler.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Die, motherfucker, die.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: I don't want to put words in his mouth, but Tyler would like to set the whole thing on fire, watch it burn, and preferably while giving hand jobs to Sapporo board of directors. I'm right? Am I right on that?
[00:24:56] Speaker A: All besides the hand job part.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: I thought the hand jobs were the point.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: No, I want the hand job from the Sapporo board of directors.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: This comes from the San Francisco Chronicle.
So, the properties at 495 and 501 De Harrow streets that made up the Anchor Brewing facility officially hit the market last week. Sapporo Holdings Limited is asking 40 million for the 2.17 acre properties that make up the brewery. And it should be noted that the Anchor brand is not included in this offer.
The Anchor brand itself is up for sale, but not for the 40 million. They're talking just the buildings. Now, the question on a lot of people's minds is what does this mean for the Hail Mary bid? For the workers to take control of the facility and keep the brand alive?
[00:25:54] Speaker A: That pass is incomplete. The clock has hit zero. Kiss your ass goodbye. It's fucking over.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: I don't think it's any more over than it was earlier.
The only thing that's really changed, and even they mentioned this in the article, is that now they know exactly how far away that they need to throw that pass.
I think it's beyond a football field. I think they need to somehow chuck it out of the stadium, hit a passing car that then knocks it over to an adjoining stadium and then run for a touchdown. But not impossible.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: I was thinking you were going to say and then score a goal and.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Then shoot a basket.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: That's what they do in football.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Now, to their credit, the workers on the GoFundMe effort have raised $107,000 so far in about a month, but a little short.
Listen, I actually did some maths, and it works out like this. If they manage to continue the momentum and raise 100 grand for every month from here on out, it would still take them 33 years and four months to get enough money together to buy the buildings outright. And of course, that's just the bricks and equipment. If you actually want to brew Anchor Beer, which I think is the point of the Anchor Steam Beer, which I think is the point of this whole fucking thing, that's going to be extra.
Sapporo may even make them pay the entire 80 million that they originally paid for it to begin with. Tyler, what does this mean?
[00:27:45] Speaker A: It's dead good. Runway, you had an anchor.
This, to me, is just the final nail in the coffin. This fucking GoFundMe is going to go away. It's sad to see it go, but time to hit the bricks.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: So Patrick Makle said the workers are still very serious about purchasing the brewery.
Like I said, this is just the next development.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Still serious about becoming a billionaire, but I think I might have a better shot.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: What are you doing to become a billionaire?
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Selling cocaine.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: You have to grow the cocaine to be a billionaire.
Not selling the cocaine. No one who sells the cocaine is a billionaire.
Have you not seen Scarface, bitch?
[00:28:36] Speaker A: He didn't fucking grow it.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah, but he did a lot of it, so that's something I think he was doing so much coke, he was actually producing it himself.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: And technically, the growers are usually getting the shit end of the stick.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: I'm talking about the guy who owns the farms and the farmers and the.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: That is then selling it.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Yes, that guy.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Fuck you.
As you were saying, the union did.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Approach Sapporo about buying the brewery way back when they originally stopped production. But those talks I think I said before, either fell apart or weren't held together much besides Garden Twine and Dreams. To begin with, Sam Singer says that the anchors creditors well, Sam Singer is with CBRE. It's a real estate services firm, and anchors creditors have hired them to market the brewery's property because there are, quote, disparate buckets of value.
On a side note, Disparate Buckets of Value was my nickname in college.
Disparate buckets of value. Either that or I think that's or it could have been one of Tyler's party themes.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: I mean, that sounds like a punk rock band to me.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Essentially, they are tasked with trying to pull all the money they can out of this heap so that those who are owed money can get away with something. CBRE has, in turn, hired an investment bank, although it won't state which one. Now that investment bank is where this whole thing could live or die. Like every other interested party, the workers collective will have to make a presentation to the investment bank. And I've got to say, a ragtag group of brewery workers having to make a pitch to a bunch of uptight investment bankers sounds like a really bad movie setup.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah. I can tell you how it's going to go. You know what?
[00:30:46] Speaker B: I'll tell you how it should go. Fuck it, guys. Roll with it like rehearse a dance number.
Break out.
Rip off clothing.
Break out.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: Don't walk in with a giant bag of cocaine and be like, who wants the party?
[00:31:04] Speaker B: Break out. Don't stop believing. Record that shit.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Get a snow machine packed full of cocaine and just blast it into the room. And the investment bankers might appreciate it enough to be like, fuck it. We'll sell it to you at a major loss.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: You're more acquainted with the nose candy than I am. How much coke can you get for 100 grand? And is it enough to fill a snow machine?
[00:31:34] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: I don't know either, but I doubt it. I don't think you can.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: That is a GoFundMe I would be willing to donate to.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Don't think you can make it rain or make it snow, as it were, with 100 G's worth of coke. I could be wrong. Maybe I'm drastically overestimating the cost of a brick of coke, but it's been a minute since I had to fork over money for one.
But no, seriously, it won't work. But what they've got planned, which I'm sure is like a thing with charts and like, we are the workers. Please let us buy this.
No, it's not going to work.
You might as well go out in some glittery unitards under your coveralls. It's awful, but it'd be epic. I'm singing full song and dance number. Sure. Maybe like, flood the place with coke that doesn't like it. I don't think that would hurt because listen, we've been through a lot, all of us. Humanity has been going through a rough few years and it doesn't look like it's improving anytime soon. So I think we at very least deserve to see in real time because I want you to record this shit. The befuddled and slightly frightened look on a bunch of Harvard educated finance bros as they whisper back and forth, trying to come to grips that they are now become the villains in shitty 80 movies. We need that. I think we need that.
So as for the other buyers, CBRE says they have a range of investors interested in the property. Some that will keep it as a brewery. Some have other designs. It should be noted that this particular area of San Francisco is now nicknamed area AI due to the sheer number of artificial intelligence startups that are taking up the industrial spaces in the area. And I guess where I'm going with this is this. There is now a non zero chance that in 50 to 100 years someone might say to themselves, if we only would have sold that building to the singing dancing brewery union, we may have avoided nuclear exchange and the robot wars. Don't stop believing.
That's all I'm saying.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: I did not see that one coming.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Tyler, what do you got for us?
[00:34:05] Speaker A: I'm going to talk about the time that everyone thought corolla was piss.
No, not tastes like piss. Actual piss.
I thought it was back in if you asked the right people.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: I think it's Budweiser. I constantly accuse of being made out of clandestine Clydesdale horse urine.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: So while some people will talk about domestics or Corona having a piss like you, in the 80s, there were a number of whispers that snowballed into a nasty rumor that Corona contained actual urine.
And that rumor traveled all the way to the top of the company.
So we got a hop back to 1987 to a Chicago based beer wholesaler called Barton Beers Ltd. Which began shipping Corona extra that had been delivered to the Midwest back out to the states in the Northeast where Corona had yet to acquire the state permits necessary to sell its beer.
The deal was shady at best, according to the article, and it passed through many hands before reaching its final destination.
[00:35:28] Speaker B: I just love the idea of bootlegged Corona.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
Apparently the bottles look like hell by the time they reach the bar tops in Manhattan, according to Philip Munchig, and whether the shipper had brought inferior product in or was subjecting the packaging to incredible wear and tear on the trip eastward, the result was a belief among some of the drinkers that the brewery was not the most sanitary place.
Though baseless, that idea hastened the spread of the then emerging rumor that Corona contained urine.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: That strikes me as a hell of a leap from I don't know about their sanitation practice to they are actively urinating into this beer. There's a lot of ground to cover between those two things.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah, but it was back in the day where word of mouth was the main way to spread something virally.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: It was the only way of spreading something virally. Really?
The only other thing you had were chain letters. Do you remember chain letters?
[00:36:51] Speaker A: No.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Was that a thing that they briefly tried to migrate to email, but they never really took off?
[00:36:57] Speaker A: Basically, I remember the chain emails.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Okay, well, they evolved from chain mail, and basically what you would do is a bunch of little rings that you'd have to put together to make a vest. It would take one person like 30 years to make one vest for one warrior, and then that guy would have to send that vest to 30 other people. And if you didn't send that vest on, it was bad luck. I think I might be mixing up several things.
[00:37:28] Speaker A: An La. Times. Article in July of 1987 quoted Barton, who claimed that one of his Corona distributors in Southern California received 35 separate inquiries about the rumor in a single day.
At the same time, there was a rumor floating around CBS News program, around the CBS News program 60 Minutes that they had aired video footage of a sewage ditch feeding directly into the Corona brewery. Even though no video clip ever existed, people clung to it.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: How would that even look?
Let's just assume the logistics of that are true.
You've got, like, a whole town peeing into a sewage line that's going directly into, like, is it an open sewer going directly into the brewery? I know the footage doesn't exist, but I'm trying to picture what people had in there.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Is it coming in? And then I'm just imagining it run into an open drainage ditch like a culvert that then runs into the building and out of spigot into the mash ton of just, like, urine and sewage, like, dropping in on top of the grain.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: And is it gravity fed? Because then you're asking people to walk up a flight of stairs to urinate in what is essentially the world's worst aqueduct into the brewery?
[00:39:04] Speaker A: Or was the brewery just downhill from the rest of the town and just, like, their water treatment or sewage facility, just someone turned the lever, like the train where it sent it, derailed it to a different pipe down to Corona.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Okay, that's more plausible than.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Being a giant flight of staircase.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: Hey, when you want to listen, if you're going to make a beer out of piss, you got to put in the effort, and you got to convince an entire town to do a pea dance all the way up a flight of stairs before they finally let loose and you can make your golden suds.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: But apparently there were bars throughout the country that had free Corona refill signs plastered on the inside of all its bathroom urinals that summer.
But as they started to further examine this, most of what they could attribute, like, why these rumors got started were kind of a deep seated racism towards the Hispanic products and culture, and it was a PR nightmare for their distributors and Groupo Modelo, which is the parent company to Corona.
They had finally tapped into that American market, and less than a decade later, they are struggling to keep their footing because people have spread the unfounded rumor that their beer is full of piss. Doing a massive ad campaign, they spent roughly $500,000, which equates to about $1.3 million, to broadcast the PSA, stating, this is a hoax. It is not real.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: You are in a very poor position when you are having to spend a lot of advertising dollars to repeat the phrase, listen, our beer contains no more urine than your average beer.
There's water in fish. Do things to water. We can't control that. And am I on bread?
Am I getting the message across. It contains very little urine. Thank you for.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: So Barton Beer's, Executive Vice President and General Manager Michael J. Mazani did a bit of sleuthing to find out who started this fucking rumor.
It's unclear how he found out who did it, but he managed to found the guy to trace the rumor back to Lucy and Sons, a beer wholesaler out of Reno, Nevada that didn't carry Corona, but carried heineken a competitor that the Mexican Lager was catching up to.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: I can't speak for Lucy, but for some reason I imagine that one of her sons was a proto you. I feel like if you would have met him, you're like, holy shit, there's my doppelganger.
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Hey, mom, listen, I got this great idea. You know that beer that's catching up to us? We just say there's pee in it. Everyone's going to freak the fuck out.
She was like, yeah, sure. Go for it, son. Whatever. You're doing great. And then it actually started working, and she's like, holy shit. That may be the smart one.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: Holy shit, that might be the smart one.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Because in 1986, Corona made up less than a half percent of the total US. Beer market.
So they felt like they were the little guys being picked on. They were dismayed that their competitors would resort to such dirty tactics. And they did what any good beer distributor corporate people would do. They took them to court.
They sued them for a $3 million lawsuit.
The initial lawsuit was dropped.
They did agree to pay an out of court settlement and publicly announced that Corona is free of any contamination.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Conversely, I feel like you still win a little bit when you are like, kind of forced to go to a microphone. Go.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: Corona does not contain any piss. Wink, wink.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: I've been forced to tell you all by a court that Corona does not contain any piss. I have been forced by a court order that it is free mostly of pee.
I don't think we're winning yet, guys.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm like, I would pay to have been at that press release where they're like, corona does not contain any pea.
But because rumors are pretty resilient little fuck, it did take some time for the dust to settle. But eventually the joke got old, and by 1999, the Mexican Lager had surpassed its competitors and become the best selling imported beer in the United States. The title that it's held ever since then. And this just got me thinking. I was like, okay, such a simple little lie. But it worked fucking great. I am surprised we don't see that more.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: Well, it was a simpler time.
I think there was a measure of boredom.
Could you imagine just like, random rumors that are not based on any truth at all, somehow spreading miraculously throughout the population, completely unchecked? Like.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: I don't know that Miller Light contains high fructose corn syrup among them? Yes.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: I'd go out onto the Internet and pick one. Yeah, I think now we're so saturated with bullshit that I think right now, if we heard someone said, no, totally. Corona is actually made with pee, we'd probably be like, it still tastes pretty good. Snoop Dogg likes it, so he's on a beach. I kind of want to be on a beach with Snoop Dogg. Also, I'd let him pee in my mouth.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Also. I was like, dude, Corona's just had a little rough history with misinformation. Because when the Coronavirus pandemic started, everyone thought you could get it from drinking Corona. And all the beer shelves are empty besides Corona.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: I don't remember that. Was that really a thing? Was that like people like, yes, but people are like, oh, my God, the Coronavirus. We can't drink Corona beer because we are that fucking base.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Corona's official Twitter account was like, Corona, the beer has nothing to do with the Coronavirus. And actually tweeted at the CDC and was like, can we change the name of this?
[00:46:33] Speaker B: And they did. And they changed it to COVID. And that was much better.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Well, I think that was technically the name it was. Everyone's just like, yeah, everyone's just like Corona. And Corona is like, no, don't call it that.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: Please stop. Please stop.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: They were probably like fucking 1987 all over again.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: The guy comes out I can neither confirm nor deny that Corona was absolutely responsible for the release of the Coronavirus, mostly because they pee in it. I've been ordered by a court to tell you that is absolutely not true.
[00:47:12] Speaker A: I'm just thinking, like, what rumor should we start about a brewery?
[00:47:20] Speaker B: I feel like you are venturing on dangerous ground here, sir.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Well, I'm thinking we go after, like, Stone.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Stone. Okay. Because why? You want to guarantee a lawsuit?
[00:47:33] Speaker A: We always said if we get a cease and desist, this podcast was a win.
[00:47:39] Speaker B: Is that the end game is just like, we got to get a cease and desist. Budweiser is pretty much jolly well fucked. They're not paying attention to us anymore. Your best bet is to poke the bear. That is the probably way too way too bored.
I was about to say Keith Stone.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: That's why they won that lawsuit.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Greg Coke's name was in my brain. But the weird thing, it quickly got replaced by Keith Stone. And I'm like, shit, that's not right. Reverse. Reverse. I guess there is your rumor that Keith Stone actually owns Stone Brewing.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: Done.
Send in a chain letter to all my friends. We're getting this spread.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: You can send Greg, Keith, whoever you are, you can send your cease and desist to it'sallbeer
[email protected] only if it's.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: In the form of a chain letter.
Jeremy, what do we got next?
[00:48:52] Speaker B: Life goals. News now.
John May from Sheffield in the UK has set a challenge for himself. This comes from Vice magazine by Ella Glossop. The idea came to him when he was scrolling around online, as we want to do, and came across somebody who had challenged himself to drink 1000 pints in a year. Now, it should be noted that the Brits are a thirsty bunch. They consume, on average 400 pints of beer per person, according to the Organization for Economic Croppation Development. So 1000 is only double what your average Brit downs. And when we consider that the average includes a large portion of tea tollers 1000 a year seems well within the range of your average British drinker. Well, John apparently said fooey and peshaw to that, and he embarked on a journey on TikTok where he vowed to drink 2000 pints. And in a move that is curiously American, he also shortened the length to 200 days just to up the stakes. And because he's like, you know what.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Fuck it, I'm going us standard not following normal year, I'm doing my drunk year.
[00:50:04] Speaker B: And maths do get difficult when you're blotto. To quote May about the challenge. Quote on one hand, you're essentially killing your liver. On the other hand, you're doing something mildly impressive, which is a concerning disregard for one's liver. To his credit, he over the past year has amassed a fairly substantial fan base of 80,000 followers, enough for him to quit his job and just hang around, drink and make TikToks. That is what he does.
[00:50:38] Speaker A: Now, I know plenty of people who just hang around, drink and look at TikTok. They're called unemployed.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: He makes them and I assume makes money from them.
There is a difference. I don't think he is, though. The social safety net in the UK is much better. I don't think he's relying on government assistance to get through this. Now, a good portion of the comments, as you might expect, are basically some combination of preaching, begging or shaming him for doing what he's doing to his liver. As near as I can tell, after perusing his videos, he spends about as much time addressing these concerns as he does actually drinking. In fact, it took me a good 15 to 20 minutes before I actually found him drinking something. It was a cider, weirdly enough, but.
[00:51:36] Speaker A: That'S one quick thing. Yes, going back just a second that reminded me of a T shirt I saw on another person in the industry that said a legend and an out of work bum look a lot alike.
[00:52:00] Speaker B: In this case. Yes, there's not as much distance between those two things in this particular instance as you might hope or desire, but that's the internet. One person doing something ungodly dumb while thousands scream at him to not do that dumb thing, but at the same time providing both financial and psychological incentive for that person to literally do nothing else. We live in fun times. This is great. No notes. May, for his part, claims that his liver currently does not hurt. Because that's how you can tell, because I guess you go Homer Simpson, like oh, my liver when it starts to fail on you.
But he said he will go to the doctor when it's over and quote, have a scan.
I'm not sure he's ever been to a doctor.
[00:52:57] Speaker A: I'm sure he can't spell doctor.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: And about hangovers, quote, I'm too young for hangovers. You can't get a hangover unless you're sober. Anyway, to be fair, he's 25, he's got a point.
I do remember being young enough where hangovers didn't hurt. I remember in college.
[00:53:21] Speaker A: But I think the cumulative hangover of six months of drinking every day, ten beers a day, might kill the dude.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: Are you saying that at this point in time he has no choice but become a chronic alcoholic?
[00:53:40] Speaker A: He's going to have to spend the rest of the year trying to wean himself down to like a beer a day?
[00:53:45] Speaker B: I mean, after ten beers every I mean, I can drink ten beers in a day and I have drank ten beers in a day. It's over the course of a day. And in fact, when I go to Naba, I probably am drinking ten beers every day while I'm out there. And then I immediately stop for like a month and that's like a week. And that hangover is pretty that one hurts.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Like I said, at this point he can't stop short because when he stops, he ain't going to be able to pick it back up. Like this is going to fucking hurt.
[00:54:26] Speaker B: There are others apparently worried about how much money he's spending on this challenge. He says he's up to 6000 pounds right now.
That's actually still roughly about 6000 in freedom units. And he says he'll probably get up to 8000 by the end of the challenge. But he claims he's single handedly propping up the UK economy.
Aside from people going, please stop drinking, you're killing your liver, dude. What are you doing to yourself? Tyler pretty much you're going to die when that hangover hits.
There is, among the comments, a strange sort of national pride. Again, to quote May, this is probably the most British thing anyone can do, counting the number of pints they are drinking on an Excel spreadsheet.
[00:55:15] Speaker A: Dude, I'm just waiting for the Irish person to come out and be like, that ain't fucking nothing.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: It does remind me the old Irish joke where a guy drinks like ten beers and says, I'll give anyone $1,000 if they can drink 40 of them. And Irish guy gets up, leaves, comes back, says, I'll take your bed, drinks all 40 pints, and guy says, Where'd you go? And he goes, I had to go to go across the street to the bar across the street to see if I could do it.
See, I'm glad you enjoyed that.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: I had never heard that once, but I like it.
[00:56:00] Speaker B: It's a rough version of joke, but anyway, he says he's gotten warm welcomes.
He's constantly getting people in his hometown, stopping him to take a picture with him. He went to a wedding where some guy went down on his knees and kissed his feet. That's what you do, apparently. There what Britain is different than I imagine it. I don't know.
He's going to hit his goal later this month. He's going to drink his 2000th Pint on stage in front of a live audience. And I just want to say, if someone asks you how you're going to spend your evening and your answer is you're going to go watch a guy drink a beer, just lie. Lie. Make up something else. You're fork winnowing or dolphin slapping or staying at home woman sorting your collection of horses.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: I'm going to go smoke meth and club a baby seal. That's what you should say.
[00:56:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to store my collection of stolen hotel bibles. Anything better than that, all of it seemed.
But apparently he claims that there are people coming from Ireland in order to watch this, which okay, yeah, if there's a country that contains people willing to buy a plane ticket to watch a guy drink his 2000th pipe, yeah, it's Ireland that does track for that. That is a country full of hopeless drunks and what lies in store. Well, he says he's going to give it a rest for a couple of weeks and then he's going to go on to just reviewing Pints, which yeah, since nobody is reviewing beer on TikTok, I'm pretty sure what I don't get.
[00:57:46] Speaker A: This doesn't even sound fun.
It just sounds like a job.
[00:57:51] Speaker B: It is his job. Now.
That is literally what he's doing for a living.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: Yeah, fuck that.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: We joke that we are professional drinkers, but this man is quite literally drinking professionally. As in, it is the act of drinking that is making and making videos about it that is then making him his money. So, again, we live in ridiculous times.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: You know what good on that, dude? I hope he does a great job chugging that final pint.
[00:58:32] Speaker B: Tyler, do you have anything else for us today?
[00:58:35] Speaker A: That is it for me.
[00:58:36] Speaker B: Well, this has been it's all beer. I think it's going to take us significantly more time to drink 2000 Pints. I'm not sure how many beers we've had on this podcast over the past five, but I don't think it's 2000. So we need to up our game.
If you'd like to suggest a ridiculous challenge that Tyler can perform in order to raise the profile of this podcast, you send your suggestions to you can send us to Instagram or our Facebook account where I post some updates and pictures and shit. Very occasionally you can send those suggestions to our email at involved
[email protected]. And if you would like, you can leave us a rating on Facebook or itunes and leave your suggestion there.
Whatever you'd like to see Tyler do to raise the awareness of this podcast.
Tyler, I think national pride is at stake.
I think you got to do 3000 in 100 days.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Tell you what, you said you were.
[00:59:48] Speaker B: Drinking before we started. You claimed that you were doubting a 30 rack every day in college.
[00:59:55] Speaker A: I think it's time every day to every other. I said there was one summer where I hit it hard.
Well just couldn't do that.
[01:00:06] Speaker B: It's only 100 days. So it's basically a summer.
It's from like may until September. You could even probably do it while we are taking our summer break. Just slam a 30 rack every day.
[01:00:21] Speaker A: No.
[01:00:23] Speaker B: If you'd like to see Tyler do.
[01:00:25] Speaker A: That, you're going to have to pay me 100 grand for that 30 days.
[01:00:32] Speaker B: In other news, I'm starting a go fund. Me. Where are you?
Get a hold of the anchor workers collective. Be like listen, if you can't buy a brewery, how would you like to punish an Idaho?
[01:00:48] Speaker A: You should hear what he's that about you guys on this podcast.
[01:00:52] Speaker B: And that'll be quite enough from us. I'm Jeremy Jones.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: I'm Taylor Zimmerman.
[01:00:57] Speaker B: I'm going to drink 2000 beers.
[01:01:01] Speaker A: Have fun eventually.
