High Class PBR?

I drink PBR, and I’m not the only one. Everyone loves a good craft brew, but there is something intrinsically alluring about drinking an ice cold, working man’s brew after a hard day’s work. That’s exactly what Pabst brews and how it has been marketed for the past 175 or so years. Over the last five or ten years Hipsters have started gravitating toward ordering a PBR when they’re out. I guess they think it’s ironic or something. Pabst is holding tightly to its authentic image and outside of a few concert sponsorships they seem to almost completely ignoring the twenty-something crowd that is picking up on Pabst. In my mind that is the best possible way they could market their product to that crowd. They want to drink

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something that would seem out of character for them to be sucking down. So Pabst lives and breathes by its image as a beer that a construction worker, coal miner, or a factory worker would drink after work.

Until now that is. Pabst, like all major breweries, has operations that span the globe. The Chinese arm of Pabst is just now releasing a high-gravity ale called Blue Ribbon 1844. The beer runs for the equivalent of $44 per bottle and is sadly only available in China.

They have some very cool advertising materials for Blue Ribbon 1844. The only problem is that it is all in Chinese. I had a little bit of it translated and got a little bit from the relatively weak online translator. I did see that they compared 1844 to Scotch whisky, French brandy, and Bordeaux wine because those three, along with 1844, are all aged in wooden casks. It is also suggested that you drink your 1844 from a champagne flute.

As usual with the beers I’ve been blogging about recently, I’ll probably never have a chance to try this beer. I’m really hoping that it does extremely well in China. Then maybe if it goes great Pabst will decide that they should bring a premium beer to the US. I just want to know how a brewery with a flagship beer appreciated more for its price than its flavor would approach the brewing of what is supposed to be a quality beer.