PBR Hasn't Actually Won a Blue Ribbon Since 1893

I drank PBR in college because it was cheap and the can looked like it belonged in a garage fridge, and I never once wondered if the blue ribbon meant the beer had won something recently. A friend sent me a Smithsonian article last month and I got pulled into the rabbit hole, because it turns out the stripe on the can is basically one old story from Chicago that Pabst never stopped printing.

The part that stuck with me

Pabst was already tying real silk around bottle necks by 1882, which is more than a decade before the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The beer wasn't even called Pabst Blue Ribbon yet; it was Best Select out of Milwaukee, and the company had only recently switched the corporate name from Best to Pabst on the letterhead. People in bars started asking for "the blue ribbon beer" because you could spot the fabric across a smoky room full of embossed glass that didn't have much readable type on it. By around 1900 the brewery was buying something like one million feet of silk ribbon a year, which is when I stopped picturing a cute trophy and started picturing a purchasing manager signing reorders next to the hops invoice.

The 1893 fair is the date on every can you've seen since. Pabst says Best Select won the top beer prize at that exposition, and Jimmy Stamp at the Smithsonian tells the story straight enough that I believed it on first read. When I kept digging, the picture got weirder. A lot of fair paperwork from that era lists bronze medals for exhibitors instead of one beer getting crowned over every rival in the building, and Wikipedia's PBR page flat-out says the 1893 win is disputed. I am not saying Pabst made the whole thing up; they had ribbons on bottles for other fairs before Chicago, and the 1893 summer still became the year marketing locked onto. "Blue Ribbon" was on the brand by 1895, and the full Pabst Blue Ribbon name showed up in 1899, and after that every redesign was mostly new fonts around the same sentence.

If you have a can nearby, flip it and look for "Selected as America's Best in 1893." That is the whole award story on the package. There is no 1905 date, no 1952 seal, no mention that Pabst Brewing won "best large brewing company" at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival. They won that trophy in this century. It did not replace the ribbon art on the grocery shelf.

Silk, then ink

World War I is when the real ribbon stopped, because silk went to the war effort and the Army needed it more than beer bottles did. After Prohibition, cans were still a gamble, and Pabst put other brands in aluminum before it risked the flagship until people were used to drinking from cans. The stripe you see now is ink. Silk was gone from the line by the 1950s. The 1893 line stayed anyway.

Why it blew up again in the 2000s

I always assumed PBR's comeback was some deliberate cool-brand campaign, and the real story is more boring and more interesting at the same time. The brand had been sliding for years, with volume peaking around 18 million barrels in 1977 and falling to under a million by 2001, which is roughly a tenth of the peak. Rob Walker wrote in Pabst Unsold that sales rose 5.3% in 2002 and another 9.4% through early 2003 while Bud and Miller were still sliding, and he tracked how little money Pabst was spending to make that happen. Walker put measured ad spend around $427,000 in 2002 while the big two were in the hundreds of millions.

Portland is where people usually start the story. Miller killed a cheap local beer a lot of bars had been pouring, and owners swapped in PBR at about a buck a can so the margin would still work. Cases moved, kegs moved, and the company mostly stayed out of the way because they were worried a loud ironic ad would kill the vibe of customers who were showing up on their own. The old ribbon on a flat can looked vintage enough that nobody needed a new contest win to justify ordering another round.

Where I landed

I still think PBR is fine beer for what it is, cheap and easy and good for a night out when you are not trying to impress anyone with your glassware. I just do not read the blue stripe as proof of anything recent. The silk is gone, the 1893 fair is the only win the label still talks about, and even that year is harder to pin down than the can makes it look. Pabst kept the ribbon because it still sells beer, and once you know the timeline you cannot unsee it.

Where I read this

• Jimmy Stamp, "Where Did Pabst Win That Blue Ribbon?", Smithsonian Magazine
• "Pabst Blue Ribbon", Wikipedia
• Rob Walker, "Pabst Unsold"
• Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer

Lead image: Pabst Blue Ribbon can, Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.