Once upon a time (this is not a fairy tale) P. Ballentine and Sons was a family owned brewery, and they made some good products. The they were bought by some evil empire and things changed. Does anyone rememr these but me?
Ballentine Ale - what they sold in quart bottles was not the same as other form factors, I think. It seemed to have more hops. At one time it was the largest selling ale in the USA.
Ballentine IPA - at one time aged one year in wooden barrels. It was never a classic IPA style, think very hoppy porter, dark and roasted with big malt balanced by big hops. I have fond memories of a batchelor party in a bar where my band used to play, and at 3am the owner closed the door and it was all on the house until dawn. Jack Daniels with an IPA chaser...
Ballentine Dark - odd sneaky stuff, AFAIK only sold in draft. I used to know two bars which had it, and in the winter you could drink all night with no visible effect until you hit the cold air. After that it was all over.
Still lots of great beer around, but a lot isn't distributed nationally. Fortunately some breweries are owned by people who have intension of selling out, so our tastebuds are safe.
I remember it in glass 40's when I visited Boston.
I used to buy a sixer every week. My introductions to IPA's. Fabulous stuff!
There's a lot of home brewers out there trying to recreate those great brews, right down to the wood aging. While I've yet to try one that's completely successful, it's been fun trying all the efforts. In fact, some have actually been better.
Yup, and they sold out to a coupla fellows named Badenhauser when Prohibition hit.
"Evil empire?". Falstaff was no worse than any other medium sized brewery at the time (1972) and Ballantine was in bad shape - wasn't a case of some giant brewery coming in and buying out a little local brewery. Ballantine was once HUGE (#3 or so in the Fifties - the largest East Coast brewery and the largest single brewery). THEY let the market share disappear.
Falstaff kept Ballantine XXX Ale and Ballantine India Pale Ale alive (along with some other nice brews like Croft Ale, Pickwick Ale, Krueger Old Surrey Porter, Narragansett Porter, a few bocks long after MOST brewers had dropped everything but light lager from their portfolio.
Now, once Paul Kalmanovitz got ahold of Falstaff, well, yeah, it was an evil empire and got crazier as it went along, ever shrinking, until it got a hold of Pabst and shrank to nothing...
C'mon - do you really think they'd brew a whole batch of ale and ONLY put it in Quarts? (Or, as some other think- cans, 16 oz. cans, deposit bottles, etc.). There's a lot of reasons why the same beer might taste different in different packages (air space in the neck, exposure to light, better seal at the cap, etc.) - I really doubt that any brewer changed formula based on the package - I'd guess that many "batches" of beer often go into several different packages, including kegs. (I WILL admit that I always preferred Ballantine Ale in deposit bottles - it DID taste different but I chalk that up to being kept out of the light, better caps, thicker glass and, well, just a nice package...).
Yup... and the label claimed it long after it wasn't true (Bass probably outsold it eventually and even Genesee Cream Ale used to have a neck label that seem tweek Falstaff that said something like "The #1 Ale in the USA".
(Even Falstaff aged the IPA in wood, tho' not for one year. The original Ballantine product was also bottle conditioned - a 1930's era back label read:
It was
Huh? I don't agree. It WAS the classic IPA (pre-micro) and a lot better than any of the UK brands available in the US at the time. To this day, I am often reminded of BIPA when drinking the first bottles of S-N Celebration Ale of the season.
Falstaff DID brew some very hoppy porters, marketed under the Krueger & Ballantine names, only available on draft. They tasted pretty much like a dark version of Ballantine XXX Ale (and may have been).
Lots of bars in New England and upstate New York* used to have dark beers on tap from breweries that didn't bottle them. In NE, IIRC, the beers were usually dubbed "Bavarian Dark" (is that right?), as in "Narragansett Bavarian Dark", etc.
Certainly one could find Prior for many years in upstate NY long after it disappeared as a bottle product.
Besides the Ballantine products you mentioned, I still miss the short-lived (Falstaff product, no less) Ballantine Brewer's Gold Ale (NICE stuff). And then, I drank my last bottle of Ballantine Burton Ale (brewed in 1946, bottled in Nov. 1963) a few months ago when my beer drinking buddy moved out of state when he got a transfer.
Can't find an old bottle now, but I believe that the quart bottles were bottled in a different location than the six packs. I assumed that it was also brewed in a different (local to the bottling plant) brewery. I certainly don't have a reference at hand to check.
I thought you were talking only of Newark brewed Ballantine Ale (i.e., pre-Falstaff purchase)? All their products came out of Newark (which is why they were the largest single brewery brewer in the country for awhile- they shipped all over the country from Newark well after Pabst, Schlitz, Falstaff & A-B were multi-breweries brewers). For a time they DID have two separate breweries in Newark (one for ale, one for lager) but I think that ended by Prohibition, and they did run the old Feiganspan PON (Pride of Newark( brewery for awhile but that ended around WWII IIRC. Perhaps you're thinking of some very old paper labels that list a sales office in NYC?
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