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The next time you open a bottle of beer, don't just chug the brew - take a look at the logo on the label. Ever wonder who St. Pauli Girl actually is? Or why there's the mysterious number "33" on Rolling Rock beer bottles? Read on. Neatorama takes a look at the Stories Behind 7 Famous Beer Logos:
Photo: safoocat
[Flickr]
What's not to like about the St. Pauli Girl? She's blonde, big bosomed, and brings us big frothy mugs of beer! But what most people don't realize is that she's not exactly just a waitress. Yep, St. Pauli is the famous red light district of Hamburg, Germany.
In 1977, St. Pauli Girl Beer started to choose a spokesmodel to represent the beer brand and appear on the popular St. Pauli Girl poster. In 1999, they started using Playboy magazine playmates as the girl (the 2008 St. Pauli Girl is Irina Voronina). Here's the gallery of St. Pauli Girls from 1977 to 2007: Link
This one's pretty straightforward. PBR was originally named Best Select, then Pabst Select and finally Pabst Blue Ribbon, named because the practice of tying blue ribbons around the beer bottleneck from 1882 until 1916.
Pabst advertisement from 1911 (Source)
The
mysterious '33' has been on the label of Rolling Rock since the Latrobe
Brewing Company brewed its first batch in 1939, but what does it actually
stand for? Theories about the origin of the cryptic '33', some undoubtedly
hatched in bar arguments, range from the year 1933 (the year Prohibition
was repealed), how many steps it took to walk from the brewmaster's office
to the brewing floor, the number of the racing horse on the label, and
even the highest level of Freemasonry (33rd degree).
According to James Tito, the former CEO of Latrobe Brewing, the number '33' may actually be an accident. When the founders of the company came up with the slogan
Rolling Rock - From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.
someone wrote '33' at the end to indicate the number of words, but the bottle printer mistakenly incorporated it into the label graphic. They decided to keep the 33 instead of having to scrap and replace the bottles. Even though the slogan had been changed several times in the history of Rolling Rock, the company had made sure to use the same number of words. (Source - see argument against this reasoning within)
(Image: Gravy Bread)
The logo of Heineken is rather simple: it consists of the five-pointed red star and the word "Heineken" in green, but there's something remarkable about it: Alfred Henry (Freddy) Heineken, the grandson of the founder of the company, Gerard Heineken, helped develop the company's own typeface (common today, but rare back then). He insisted that the 'e' in the logo should look friendlier. Indeed, the three letters 'e' in the logo are slightly tilted backwards to make it seem that they are smiling.
Arthur
Guinness brewed his first stout in 1759, it took Guinness over 100 years
later to select its logo - the harp of Brian Boru - a gaelic harp in Ireland's
heraldic emblem and a symbol of Irish unity, not to mention the Euro coin.
By the way, Ireland is the only country in the world with a musical instrument
as a national emblem.
Brian Boru was the king of Ireland that ruled from 1002 to 1014 and protected and/or freed - depending on who you ask - the Irish people from the Vikings. The harp named after him, however, was actually much, much older. According to Celtic myth, the gaelic harp was owned by the Dagda, a king/god/father-figure, that can summon the seasons.
There's actually a real instrument named the harp of Brian Boru. It's one of three surviving medieval harps dating from the 14th or 15th century and is on display at Trinity College Dublin.
By the way, if you are named O'Brien or O'Brian, then you're a descendant of King Brian Boru - so a toast (Guinness, of course) is in order!
Stella Artois was launched as a Christmas beer in 1926 - its name is a combination of the latin word for "star" and Sebastian Artois, a brewmaster in the Den Hoorn Brewery (founded 1366) in Louvain, Belgium.
The logo of Stella Artois beer reflects the beer's origin - Den Hoorn is Dutch for "The Horn," and the now-defunct brewery lives on as the horn prominently displayed on the top of the label of every bottle of Stella Artois beer. The fancy frame around the name is also in the style of Flemish architecture in the city.
(L) Bass & Co's Pale Ale, the very first trademark registered in the
UK (1876) at the Intellectual
Property Office; (R) current logo
Bass Pale Ale's Red Triangle logo may be simple, but it's pretty darned special: it's the very first trademark registered in Britain. When trademark registration law took effect on January 1, 1876, a Bass employee was sent to wait overnight outside the registrar's office in order to be the first in line to register a trademark the next morning. Bass & Co. Brewery got the first two trademarks, the first being the Bass Red Triangle for their pale ale and the second the Bass Red Diamond for their strong ale.
Bass is also the most frequently featured beer in fine arts. Bottles of Bass beer can be seen in Manet's 1882 painting Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
Bar in den Folies-Bergère by Edouard Manet (1882)
Okay, so this isn't exactly about beer logos - but brewers often advertise their beers in outrageous manners, and there's nothing quite as outrageous as the notorious Old Milwaukee's Swedish Bikini Team:
Ironically, there's nothing Swedish about the Swedish Bikini Team - the women were all played by American actresses wearing platinum blonde wigs!
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Obviously we haven't talked about many other beer logos. So if your favorite beer isn't listed here, why not tell us all about it in the comment section?
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If you like the article above, take a look at the rest of Neatorama's Logo series:
- Evolution
of Tech Logos
- Evolution
of Car Logos
- Stories
Behind 10 Famous Food Logos
- Stories
Behind Hollywood Studio Logos
In the early 90s, Old Milwaukee decided to compete with the imports by inventing the Old Milwaukee Swedish Bikini Team. The ad features a bunch of guys out fishing and being manly men and they think that it just can’t get any better. And then, of course, the Swedish Bikini Team shows up wearing spandex, cans and six-packs of Old Milwaukee parachute in, and the camera pans in on lots of jiggling boobs.
The ad triggered a sexual harassment suit by five members of the Stroh Brewery who said that the ads perpetuated an environment of verbal and physical abuse that had been going on since the mid 80s anyway. You can tell it really scared the company – shortly thereafter, the “bikini team” was featured in Playboy For your viewing pleasure…
In 1989, Miller ruffled more than a few feathers with a 16-page pamphlet distributed in 55 college newspapers across the country. Called “Beachin’ Times,” it instructed college students on how to get drunk and pick up babes. One such gem includes a piece on “Lite Beer Pro Beach Volleyball” which asked readers to “Name something you can dink, bump, and poke. Hint – it’s not a babe.” You can tell it was 1989 because the pamphlet is liberally peppered with “babe” references – another section was called “Four Sure-Fire Ways to Scam Babes.” I don’t know about you guys, but I’m totally hearing Jeff Spicoli in my head. Even college students were offended – groups of students at two universities organized protests and threatened to boycott Miller, which was enough to scare the company into an apology. They sent letters with the headline “We Blew It” to all 55 student newspapers the pamphlet had appeared in. It didn’t impress some people, though – the University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan ran an opinion column that compared the apology to after-the-fact birth control – “It might make you feel better, but it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”
Looks pretty tame, right? But when this ad was first published, complaints rolled in by the barrel-ful. The look on the girl in the barley’s face was apparently much too suggestive for the liking of the general public, because the Minneapolis Brewing Company received so many letters that they recalled the posters as so not to offend any more potential customers. Photo from Land of Amber Waters by Doug Hoverson.
This is actually not a controversial ad, but Rolling Rock wanted you to think it was. I watched the You Tube video and wondered what people found so offensive about it – girls in bikinis? Because there’s much more scantily-clad women on Rock of Love every week (trust me, as an avid viewer, I know). But that was all just part of the scam. A little more digging revealed that Rolling Rock actually released “Beer Ape” as a viral Internet campaign. They put up billboards and other ads, apologizing to anyone who was “offended” by the campaign… the campaign that never actually aired anywhere except YouTube. Of course, this resulted in people flocking to YouTube to see what this offensive commercial was all about. Kind of genius… kind of underhanded and sneaky. Check it out for yourself:
Photo from World News’ 25 Most Controversial Ads
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad. It ran in 2002 and showed two women getting in an out-and-out down-and-dirty catfight over whether Miller Lite tasted great or was less filling… you know the schtick. They end up tearing off each other’s clothes, wrestling into a public fountain and eventually tear it up in a pool of cement. At the end of the ad, we see that the whole thing was really just the fantasy of two guys sitting at a bar.
Miller contends that they were mocking the stereotypical male mentality, but that didn’t really hold water with the hundreds of people who called or wrote to complain. Miller made it a point of pointing out that the majority of people who complained were women over the age of 40 who had children… I find the fact that they pointed this out more offensive than the actual commercial, personally. Here it is in all its racy glory:
