Indie Sleaze Came Back. Here’s Why the PBR Phenomenon Never Will.

A pretty good and widely known rule of thumb for American consumerism is: “everything is cyclical.” It’s the sort of world-weary aphorism that anyone can toss out at a cocktail party and reliably sound smart when the conversation shifts to whatever kids are up to these days. Here, watch:

Somebody just told me that low-rise jeans are coming back.
Makes sense, I guess. Everything is cyclical.

Wait, Motorola is making a new version of the Razr?
And people kind of love it, because everything is cyclical.

It makes me feel 1,000 years old to hear Zoomers using Creed songs on TikTok.
Why not? Everything is cyclical, and butt rock is everything.

You get the idea. It’s a pretty good rule, this rule! Of course, there are exceptions. Not everything is cyclical. For example: While the “indie sleaze” aesthetic of the aughts may have recaptured some attention earlier this decade, the astonishing, outta-nowhere resurrection of Pabst Blue Ribbon that lubricated so much of that over-exposed, Brat-presaging oeuvre will never happen again. Much like the Light Beer Wars of the 1970s and 1980s, it can never happen again, for structural evolutions — or devolutions, such as they are — of the United States’ brewing industry, cultural landscape, and collective palate. Follow your humble Hop Take columnist on this.

I don’t care to litigate the exact definition of the “hipster” here (or anywhere else; it’s 2024, for chrissakes), and certainly not “hipster beer,” which Maggie Hennessy already gamely wrestled with in these digital pages earlier this year. As ever, I’ll take Potter Stewart’s preferred out: You know it when you see it. I saw a lot of it when I arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2010 for the death rattle of this peculiar aesthetic. PBR was, to no small extent, the defining totem of hipsterism, more so than American Spirit cigarettes, Carhartt duck-canvas jackets, or knuckles tattooed with a soft person’s imagination of a hard person’s credo, like H O L D F A S T.

I think the co-founder of n+1 was probably right in codifying the subculture as “an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption” in 2010. I think it’s also true that this obsessiveness existed before hipsters, and has continued to exist long after people (including me, in 2015) proclaimed them dead. For example: Dimes Square. But even with a river of crypto-fascist tech money sloshing around, that coterie failed to produce enough culture to even become a subculture, much less trigger the sort of broad reproduction that launched hipsterism — and with it, PBR — into the mainstream in the aughts.

Moreover, while certain behaviors of hipsterism may return to vogue at some point, and arguably already have, contemporary and future performers of the aesthetic will always seek to subvert their overlap with hipsters by eschewing mass adoption of such on-the-nose symbols as a tallboy of Blue Ribbon. (Or, heaven forbid, a tattoo of the same.) Like “yuppie,” the word “hipster” exists in the American vernacular as something akin to a slur. Some wells are just too poisoned to go back to, and this is one of them.

Here, the media — not Hop Take, which is infallible, of course, but everyone else — deserves an enormous amount of blame. After all, hipsters may have snatched PBR from ruin and elevated it to something approaching reverence, but they had plenty of help from credulous media looking for tidy explanations to the real and messy demographic and social shifts that brought throngs of mostly white knowledge workers back to American cities hollowed out by white flight a generation prior. Mainstream journalists painting with the extremely broad brushes that were still allowed — if not encouraged — in the culture pages of the country’s tone-setting, corporately owned magazines tarred the shit out of hipsters, making them synonymous with performative consumption, damaging displacement from gentrification, and other categorically negative symptoms of neoliberalism’s half-century of deliberate social degradation. As hipsterism’s inadvertent battle standard, PBR sustained significant collateral damage.

This can never happen again, but not for reasons that will help would-be Blue Ribbons ride the lightning in the future. Cracks had already begun to show in the American media’s monocultural facade at that point; since then, it’s been shattered into a million pieces. Paradoxically, this has made subcultures virtually impossible to maintain coherently. Slang, brands, and other niche ephemera that might have enjoyed a PBR-like slow burn now flame out after speed-running the entire lifecycle of that phenomenon in mere hours online. “Epic bacon” lasted roughly from the mid-aughts to the mid-2010s or so, argued Rebecca Jennings at Vox in 2022; at Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argued earlier this month that “Hawk Tuah” already “feels like the end of something,” and that “virality is decoupling from popularity.” Both, I think, are correct. The placid, singular media environment that let both hipsters and PBR gestate into “a thing” simply no longer exists.

We have watched this play out on the beer aisle’s bottom shelf since the ebb of hipsterism in the first few years of last decade. What started organically at The Lutz Tavern in Portland, Ore., as former Pabst marketer Neal Stewart described to me in a two–part Taplines episode about the early green shoots for the moribund Milwaukee-by-way-of-San Antonio brand in the aughts has long since been formalized. “The marketing of no marketing” is nice, but it doesn’t scale. When Steven Grasse joined the team of investors that acquired the Narragansett beer brand back in 2005, the brand-design whiz reimagined the erstwhile Rhode Island beer as a sort of craft PBR. All of the “authenticity” of the Blue Ribbon, with better liquid within. (Check out his episode on Taplines right here.)

Grasse and co. were hardly the only savvy beer marketers to take a run at recreating PBR’s hipster halo with a return — or was it a retvrn? — to retro graphics designed to evoke blue-collar legacies. Why not? With PBR reeling from overexposure to a radioactive subculture, and less-than-excellent on the tongue, the country’s dive bars and gentrified simulacra thereof needed other cheap-ish beers with Americana vibes to sell to hipsters by any other name. This country is littered with defunct beer brands that fell victim to the 20th-century rise of megabrewers Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch, to say nothing of the subsequent light beer slugfest between the latter and Miller Brewing Company. Falstaff, Hudepohl, Brown Derby, Rainier, Grain Belt, Pearl… and on, and on. Grasse’s firm took on some of these gussy-up jobs — notably High Life and Hamm’s — but the playbook was there for anyone to run.

No storied American brewing brand to reinvigorate? No problem: Make one up! As we’ve discussed before, Montucky Cold Snacks’ staggering success last decade derived less from the liquid (it’s fine) than from its shrewd positioning as a retro redesign on a funky old legacy brand. The fact that said “legacy” was created from whole cloth in 2012 by marketers demonstrates two things to me, at least in the context of this column: the potency of the wave PBR rode to prominence in the aughts, and its superficiality.

Whatever the intentions of the hipsters who first began associating themselves with the Blue Ribbon to channel its “authenticity” back then, they were chasing figments of the popular American imagination of the country’s working class. The Rust Belt tableaus of hard hats, lunchpails, and sparks-’n-steam factories that urbane hipsters drank PBR to ironize were an inaccurate representation of blue-collar work when Stewart made that first sojourn up to Portland two decades ago. Now, they are pure anachronism. If Pabst Blue Ribbon was a first-wave gentrifier that turned Brooklyn’s abandoned warehouses into lofts, art studios, and rave venues, Montucky Cold Snacks is a real-estate developer from out of state that erected a Potemkin Williamsburg back home and charges beaucoup bucks to tenants impressed by its to-a-T charms.

This is the most important reason that the stunning, counterintuitive explosion in PBR’s sales figures and cultural cachet during the first decade of the 21st century will never happen again, to it or any other brand. Hipsters fetishized the Blue Ribbon’s “authentic” brand because it couched their clever, self-conscious cultural affectations within the nobility and humility of the “average Joe” without ever looking into whether Joe was actually all that average.

Which is fine! They were just drinking cheap beer, and for most of them — and most of the people since who have moved on from PBR to Hamm’s or Montucky Cold Snacks or whatever — it was never that deep. But you can only stack so many copies atop one another before the thing falls down for lack of a solid foundation, and the PBR phenomenon never had one of those. The American underclass was never so monolithically white, male, or traditionally employed as hipsters conceived of it in the aughts. To put it another way, they gentrified PBR as a symbol of a shared past that wasn’t shared at all, and now that’s our shared past. The Pabst Blue Ribbon boom might not be cyclical, but it sure proved that irony can be.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Then*

Remember when craft breweries used to eschew high-ABV, adjunct-heavy, bang-for-buck beers as juvenile perversions of the almighty artisanal form? Hop Take can’t, either. Anyway, Brewbound reports that in 2023, Kirin Holdings Lion Little World Beverages New Belgium Brewing will roll out a “sequel” to its wildly popular 9.5 percent ABV Voodoo Ranger Juice Force IPA called — wait for it — Fruit Force. The new “fruit punch IPA” label bears the brand’s familiar skeletal fighter pilot dressed up in a sharp new uniform. Pretty sure there’s a “Top Gun” / “Top Gun 2” joke in here somewhere: Tom Booze? Highway to the Ranger Zone? Talk to Me, Juice? Hmm… can’t quite land it. — Originally published October 6, 2022 here at Hop Take

*This section looks a little different than normal because your humble Hop Take editor has stepped away from headquarters on his long-belated honeymoon. Instead of Hop-ocalypse Now, focusing on the news of the day, enjoy Hop-ocalypse Then, an original item from roughly the same time two years ago — his first few weeks on the column. We’ll return to normal programming (including “Ups” and “Downs”) when Dave returns to the desk on Oct. 11.

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