Beer in Film and Television
Beer’s role in modern popular entertainment has been, much like Hollywood’s output over the years, uneven at best. Until the past few years, its depiction mirrored the general public’s perception of the beverage: comical at best, low-class at worst. It’s an interesting exercise to watch many of these films and TV series in chronological order, as it captures, in ways large and small, beer’s place in the cultural zeitgeist of a particular moment.
In a lot of ways, television and cinema are still catching up to where beer is at the moment, but it’s definitely getting there.
Cinema
What! No Beer? (1933)
Not only does this Buster Keaton-Jimmy Durante vehicle bear the distinction of being one of the first—if not the first—motion picture with beer as a major plot point, it’s the rare film about the end of Prohibition that was actually made near the end of Prohibition. Elmer J. Butts (Keaton) is enamored, from afar, of a woman named Hortense. Elmer dreams of one day being incredibly wealthy so he can buy Hortense nice, worldly possessions and win her hand in marriage (this is the ’30s after all). Elmer’s buddy, Jimmy Potts (Durante) hatches a scheme to open a brewery just before what would be the Twenty-first Amendment repealing Prohibition. Master bootleggers they’re not, and they manage to get raided by the police as they finish their first beer. I turns out they’re even worse brewers than they are hoods, having inadvertently produced a beer with no alcohol. The upside is that they’ve broken no law, so the cops have to let them go. They ultimately partner with an actual bootlegger, as the two also have haplessly stumbled on a way to make a beer inexpensively. Hijinks ensue when they run afoul of the competition, another gangster, whose moll just happens to be the beloved Hortense.
Jaws (1975)
Okay, everyone knows that Steven Spielberg’s classic, Jaws, is about a great white shark that eats a bunch of people in a rustic New England beach town at the height of the tourist season. However, it also turned out to be some of the best free product placement for one of the quintessential regional brands of the era, Narragansett. (It was the movie that single-handedly invented the concept of the summer blockbuster, after all.) Salty fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) was quite the fan of the beer, and Rhode Island’s Narragansett Brewing Company never forgot it. In 2012, the company reintroduced the ’70s-era design of the can that Quint was so fond of throwing back and, most notably, crushing with a single hand in a display of machismo to put a little scare in Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper, the university-educated shark expert of upper-middle-class extraction. (Ultimately, the two got drunk and bonded together before Quint’s untimely demise in the belly of Bruce, the Great White.)
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Sure, beer’s really just the MacGuffin in the Burt Reynolds/Jackie Gleason truckers-and-Trans-Ams ’70s stuntfest, but it’s a great illustration of how certain beer brands become white whales of sorts to those who don’t have immediate access to them. It’s hard to believe there was ever a time when Coors wasn’t ubiquitous, but that’s exactly the market reality that set the film’s action in motion. Father and son gazillionaires Big Enos and Little Enos Burdett (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) are planning a party in Georgia and need four hundred cases of the Rocky Mountain original. The trouble is that Coors wasn’t legally available east of Texas in those days. The duo offer trucker Bo “The Bandit” Darville (Reynolds) $80,000 to pick up the beer in Texarkana and transport it to Atlanta in twenty-eight hours (a minute later and he forfeits the purse). Bandit enlists his buddy Cledus “Snowman” Snow to aid him in the scheme. Cledus (Jerry Reed) would drive the tractor trailer full of Coors, while Bandit acts as a decoy in a black Trans Am, drawing law enforcement’s attention away from their real target, the big rig full of sudsy contraband. They didn’t count on one particular lawman—Sheriff Bufort T. Justice (Gleason), the titular “Smokey”—being so tenacious in his pursuit of the smuggling team. It was actually quite common back in the ’70s for Eastern folks visiting the Western US to be tasked with fitting as much Coors in their trunks as they could to appease their thirsty friends back home. It was a precursor to modern beer tourism; many of the best craft beers today have either local or regional distribution and very few are available in all fifty states. That’s part of the reason for modern white-whale-ism.
Midnight Madness (1980)
The film focuses on an elaborate all-night scavenger hunt through Los Angeles, pitting five teams of college students against each other. Each team’s a different stereotype. There’s the jock team, the nerd team, the nice guys and gals team (the heroes of the story), etc. They’re tasked with solving clues at each stop to get to the next destination, all ultimately leading to the finish line.
The most noteworthy aspect of this generally forgotten madcap comedy is that it features a young Michael J. Fox in a supporting role. It also features something that is now an ancient relic: a Pabst brewery. See, despite the fact that Pabst Blue Ribbon is so popular among the skinny-pants-and-twirly-mustache set these days, Pabst Brewing Co. hasn’t owned an actual working brewery in decades. It’s essentially a holding company that owns a lot of trademarks—including Lone Star and Schlitz—but outsources all of the production to MillerCoors. One of the secret locations throughout the night is a Pabst brewery, much to the delight of the fratboy jock team.
Take This Job and Shove It (1981)
There’s never been a better portrait of the state of the beer industry at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. The film is mostly one of those “you can go home again” type comedies about a successful yuppie who returns to his rural hometown. In this case said yuppie, Frank Macklin (Robert Hays, riding high after the success of “Airplane”), works for a conglomerate that just acquired a handful of failing breweries, one of which is based in that Frank’s hometown. It’s Frank’s job to turn the brewery around. One of the great tragedies of the twentieth century was the deindustrialization of America, which was especially felt with the rapid consolidation and closure of breweries nationwide prior to the craft beer revolution. Though Take This Job and Shove It preferred to focus on romance and monster trucks, it still managed to capture the very dark mood of the time within America’s dying beer market.
Strange Brew (1983)
The 1983 Bob and Doug Mackenzie romp is an unqualified classic, there’s no doubt about it. Even though it centered on these two bumbling, beer-swilling oafs, it was very smartly written. It was loosely based on Shakespeare, for crying out loud—Hamlet, to be precise. The main setting was the Elsinore Brewery, and one of the primary antagonists was named Claude, who married the heroine’s mother, Gertrude. (The name of the heroine in question was Pamela—not quite Hamlet, but close enough.)
This was the early ’80s, a very dark time for brewing in North America. So don’t expect the classiest representation of beer. That doesn’t mean it’s not laugh-out-loud funny. The Mackenzie Brothers (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) set the wheels in motion with a harmless little scam to extort a bit of free beer out of Elsinore. They showed up at the brewery holding a bottle with a live mouse in it. They claimed to have found it in the bottle (a classic stubby!) while they were drinking it, but in reality they planted a baby mouse in it and waited for it to grow up. The scheme actually got them hired on the bottling line to scope out any infiltrating vermin.
Beer itself was a character in the film, mostly utilized for comic effect. There’s a scene where Bob has to drink an entire vat of the stuff—probably in the neighborhood of 10,000 gallons—before he and Pamela drowned inside it. After accomplishing that, he put his bladder to good use by putting out a fire with his stream.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Three years after Strange Brew, David Lynch unleashed his seminal work of suburban depravity on an unsuspecting public, and to this day it remains not only his most quotable work but one of the most quotable films of all mid-’80s cinema. It’s not about beer per se, but one of its most iconic lines focuses on two beer brands that targeted wildly disparate demographics. It occurs when villainous psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) terrorizes our young hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan).
Frank: What kind of beer do you like?
Jeffrey: Heineken
Frank: Heineken?! Fuck that shit! Pabst! Blue Ribbon!
Even those who never have seen the film are familiar with that line. What’s most interesting about the juxtaposition of those two brews? At the time, Heineken was considered the highest of the high end. It was the fancy import in the green bottle, the one to which a clean-cut college boy like Jeffrey would gravitate to for its badge value (an earlier scene has him singing the Dutch brand’s praises). To him, it was a sophisticated affair. Now Pabst, at the time, was the rough-and-tumble working man’s drink.
The Saddest Music in the World (2003)
Twenty years after Bob and Doug Mackenzie drank their Strange Brew, the indie film-going public was treated to a much different look at the Canadian beer industry.
It’s 1933 and the Great Depression that started in America is very much felt the world over. In the film, Winnipeg, Manitoba has had the dubious distinction of being named the sorrow capital the world by the London Times for four consecutive years. It’s there that Lady Helen Port Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), owner of Port-Huntley Beer, announces a competition to find the saddest music in the world and offers a purse of $25,000 (big bucks in those days) to the victorious performer. The contest is basically a promotional effort for her brewery—Prohibition is about to end south of the Canadian border, opening up a new market of thirsty Americans. The film, directed by Canadian auteur Guy Madden, is shot in grainy black in white—much of it on Super 8 cameras—giving it a true Depression-era feel. It’s basically a campy, melodramatic, and sometimes soapy comedy. It’s also got some fairly bizarre twists; Lady Port-Huntly lost her legs in an accident, and among her artificial limbs are a pair of glass legs filled with beer. It’s definitely not a film for everyone, but it’s worthy of a spot in the pantheon of brew-themed entertainment.
Beerfest (2006)
Craft beer was in the midst of its second (and more sustainable) upswing by 2006, but it took a while for Hollywood to catch up. With Beerfest, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe—whose previous cinematic efforts included Super Troopers and Club Dread—delivered a fraternity brother’s fantasy of a beer-centric film that was more about binging and inebriation than it was about actually appreciating the fine beverage its characters were consuming. The film centered on a pair of brothers, Jan and Todd Wolfhouse (Broken Lizard’s Paul Soter and Eric Stolhanske), tasked with transporting their late German-immigrant grandfather’s ashes to Oktoberfest. While there they stumble upon a secret Olympics of sorts, with a series of events related mostly to college-style drinking games—beer pong, hardcore chugging, and more. They’re forced into a future edition of the event by some distant relations with decades-old scores to settle against their family, and they return to the states to form a ragtag team of old drinking acquaintances (the rest of the Broken Lizard crew: Jay Chandrasekhar [who also directed], Steve Lemme, and Kevin Heffernan). The movie does have its share of laughs, but it does little to advance the perception of beer in the United States.
Beer Wars (2009)
Most of the entries on this list have been narrative films. This one’s a full-on documentary. The overarching theme that filmmaker Anat Baron presented was David vs. Goliath. She followed a handful of small brewers as they dealt with the day-to-day trials and tribulations of making and selling beer in a market dominated by multinational players. The most interesting facet of the film actually happened offscreen. At the time Beer Wars was being edited, the market was undergoing a bit of a sea change. Large distributors, once hostile to small craft brands, had seen the light and realized the margins they could reap with craft were substantial. It became less of a struggle for brewers to find distribution. At that point, distributors were actively courting crafts, as they realized such brands were the future. Right around then, the segment started to achieve double-digit year-on-year growth and hasn’t looked back since.
Drinking Buddies (2013)
At long last, an indie romantic dramedy firmly rooted in the world of craft beer. Filmmaker Joe Swanberg has carved out a niche for himself as the king of “mumblecore,” characterized by low-budget production values and naturalist—often improvised—dialogue among its cast of characters. Drinking Buddies adapts that concept to a brewing milieu. The lead characters, Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), work at Chicago’s Revolution Brewing Co., an actual Windy City craft brewery. They’re best buds, but there’s obviously more of a connection there. The only trouble is that both are involved with other people. Things get a bit out of balance when Kate’s boyfriend, Chris, breaks it off with her after kissing Luke’s fiancée, Jill (the incomparable Anna Kendrick). (Jill and Luke don’t break up.)
The film is wall-to-wall sexual tension. Sounds fairly trite on paper, but the improvised dialogue and the brewery setting make it all seem fresh. It’s also one of the few films to actual get the modern craft brewing scene right. That’s thanks, in part, to the fact that Swanberg is a homebrewer himself. He even insisted that his two leads learn to brew as soon as they arrived on location in Chicago (Swanberg’s home, which put him doubly in his element). The opening montage features some of the best brewery porn—a term for gorgeous equipment and supplies, nothing more—ever caught on camera.
The World’s End (2013)
Yes, it’s ultimately about an alien intelligence infiltrating earth and replacing most of the population with synthetic replicas, but at its heart it’s a love letter to the English pub. Gary King (Simon Pegg, who also scripted) has seen better days since the epic early-’90s pub crawl that he sees as the defining moment in his life. Twenty years after that crawl, he’s chronically unemployed and in group therapy. He actually considers the original crawl a bit of a failure because he and his four friends didn’t make it to the final destination, The World’s End, on the twelve-pub journey. He reconnects with his buddies, who’ve all moved on and have found various forms of success, and manipulates them into reluctantly joining him on a repeat of the two-decades-old bar-hopping adventure—this time with the intention of finishing. Eventually, science fiction intervenes and things get progressively more ridiculous. But the nostalgia theme has another bittersweet layer. Britain’s pubs continue to close at an alarming rate and are, therefore, a dying breed. Gary’s wistfulness isn’t just for a part of his life that no longer exists; it’s actually for a major component of British life that’s in danger of extinction.
Television
Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983)
Forget the years after the dynamic duo moved to California (and eventually ceased to be a duo). The golden age of the show was the Milwaukee era. (It was a spinoff of Happy Days, after all.) Since it took place about two decades before it was produced, it’s not a snapshot of its times per se. But, with the titular team spending their days on the bottling line at the fictional Schotz Brewery, it captures the Wisconsin city in its prime as one of the great beer cities of the world. Milwaukee has become a hotbed for the craft renaissance as well, and the city’s Lakefront Brewery invites its tour groups to sing along to the Laverne & Shirley theme song. Lakefront owns the actual bottling line used in the opening title sequence—and yes, there’s a glove on one of bottles.
Cheers (1982–1993)
Of course a sitcom about a bar deserves a mention here. Cheers’ relationship with beer is complicated at best. Bar owner Sam Malone (Ted Danson) is a recovering alcoholic so he’s never really drinking any—except for a dark time in his life at the beginning of season 3, when he fell off the wagon following his (first) breakup with Diane Chambers (Shelley Long). Beer is most closely associated with barfly Norm Peterson (George Wendt), who was very likely a functioning alcoholic himself. On one hand, the show was supposed to be about unwinding after a rough day and going to a place “where everybody knows your name,” but it played more like a cautionary tale centering on a lot of very broken people.
Breaking Bad (2008–2013)
Okay, this one’s a bit of a stretch, but one of the things that made Hank Schrader—Walter “Heisenberg” White’s DEA-agent brother-in-law and eventual arch nemesis—relatable was the fact that he was a homebrewer. (When he’s first seen brewing in his garage, it’s a major turning point for the character; it’s about the time he becomes likeable and some audience members actually start to root for him.) He even named the stuff; Schraderbrau could very well have been the name of a legitimate brand. Unfortunately, Hank inadvertently over-carbonated his bottles, which exploded in his garage, emitting a series of loud bangs that made Hank and his wife, Marie, think they were victims of a drive-by shooting.
Brew Masters (2010)
This one-season reality show chronicled the everyday challenges of running Delaware’s Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione was the star and narrator of the program, which showcased some of the crazier concoctions the self-described “off-centered” brewery would cook up. One of those involved a tie-in with a surfboard company that resulted in a brew in which Dogfish Head incorporated pieces of those surfboards. It also followed Calagione as he traversed the globe in search of ancient inspiration. One such trip to Peru prompted him to create a brew based on Peruvian chicha, among whose ingredients is an enzyme found in human saliva.
Shameless (2011–)
The remake of the British series of the same name hasn’t done beer—especially the Pabst-owned Old Style brand—any favors. To call Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) a drunk would be offensive to drunks. It amazes me that Pabst authorizes the product placement for Old Style, which is a bit of an institution in the Midwest, especially blue-collar and hipster Chicago. (The brand actually got a more positive shout-out in the aforementioned Drinking Buddies, in which the lead character, Luke, wore an Old Style trucker cap throughout).
Brew Dogs (2013–)
Much like Brew Masters, Brew Dogs focuses on the antics of the founders of an against-the-grain craft brewery. In this case, the brewery is Scotland’s BrewDog, which drew much of its inspiration from the more radical American brewers, including Dogfish Head. Brew Dogs, which has airs in the US on the Esquire Network, follows founders Martin Dickie and James Watt as they travel across America (and sometimes Europe) going from beer town to beer town and celebrating the local brews and culture.