Back In My Day We Didn’t Need An Explanation

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This must be the New Generic Beer.

Back in my day, we drank the shit out of this,

We didn’t need to have it explained to us. Well, almost all of us.

I have this friend I have known for fifty years now and at one time back in the early 80’s we were room mates over in Portland.

OMG the parties.

Because Oregon has the bottle and can deposit, we used to stack empty half racks up against a wall in the apartment and when we’d get broke, we would take them in and cash them out.

This one wall was full of empty BEER cans , 7 foot high and twelve feet long.

White cardboard cartons with big black letters that said BEER.

We must have drank a thousand gallons of that shit.

He worked a weird shift and didn’t get home until about 8 and one night an impromptu party broke out with a bunch of friends and neighbors.

Everybody is just pounding this Generic Beer, because it’s cheap.

My buddy finally comes home and I just happen to be standing by the front door with a full can in my hand when he walks in.

Hey Jerry! Here, have a beer.

He grabs it out of my hand, turns it around, looks at the label and says,

“What Is this, Beer?”

The guy will never live that down as long as I’m alive.

8 thoughts on “Back In My Day We Didn’t Need An Explanation”

  1. Good ole “unknown beer”. There was also Light Beer. I remember going to a party, 1979-80, and bringing a couple six packs of the local cheap beer. At the party, my 2 sixers were the “good” beer. Everything else was Beer.

  2. So, how do you know it was beer, eh?

    I mean, just because the label says “beer” don’t make it so. Right?

  3. The same kind of shit was going down just a few clicks south in Salem back in that day. I recall being at a Halloween party, just four doors down from Gov. Atiyeh’s home. The State Cops showed up, and asked what we were doing. We told them we were having a Halloween party. People were in costumes. It was Halloween. Duh?
    They went away.

  4. The white generic “Beer” of the 80’s was produced by different manufacturers. Pabst, Miller, Falstaff, and Pearl all produced the “Beer” back then. In Georgia it was predominantly Miller but when I went out to Texas “Beer” was made by Pearl and it had a different flavor. I drank in GA because I was almost always broke. When I was in TX it was a few months before I could afford anything but the cheapest beer. By the time I could anything name brand I had found out it was Pearl at a third of the price.

  5. depended on your station in life. college miller high life or Micky bigmouths cause you were poor. After college coors light (switched to miller lite eventually). Now Guiness if in the mood, if not miller lite.

    • Time was, when you bought a can of vegetables. That’s what you got. Can, pic’y label, contents.

      At some point, the manufacturers were forced to add the following to the label:

      Open can, place contents in pan, heat, serve.

  6. In the movie Repo Man, every product was generically labeled- beer, chips, cigs, you name it.

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