Beep that bleep! Pabst American Pale Ale!

Jim Lundstrom

Yup! Pabst makes an American pale ale. Or, let me rephrase that – someone brews an APA for Pabst. All the can label tells us is “Pabst Brewing Company, La Crosse.”

So, I am guessing that City Brewery of La Crosse makes this beer for Pabst.

I saw a sixer of these 16-ouncers towering over the landscape at the local beer emporium. Of course I had to try it.

I remember back in the day of homogenous domestic lagers when Pabst was considered one of the hoppiest of them all. And then, of course, there are the immortal lines uttered by Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (1986), which, unfortunately, we cannot repeat in full here because Frank is a potty mouth: “Heineken! Bleep that bleep! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

A reboot of that classic David Lynch dystopia might have Frank Booth waxing poetic on PAPA – Pabst American Pale Ale. Today’s Frank Booth would wear a MAGA hat while sucking nitrous oxide and shooting cans of PAPA. “Don’t you look at me!”

This is what the company says about it: “Pabst brewed this beer for those who refuse to be ranked and filed; those who are inventing their own American Dream with grit, optimism and ingenuity. Made with All-American Chinook, Liberty and Cascade hops, it has a bright citrus flavor. Straightforward and unpretentious, Pabst American Pale Ale is beer for the rest of us.”

Except for mention of the three hop varieties, it reads like the typical macrobrew bluster and hyperbole. “For the rest of us”? Isn’t that for Festivus?

And grit? Are they talking about “America’s Greatest Family Newspaper”?

No matter. They don’t have to convince me. I can drink this, with its mild, pleasant hoppiness riding atop a grainy base malt. Very crafty, Pabsty!