Where To Buy Stag Beer
Follow Stag beer on social media @stagbeer to find out when to celebrate one of the most iconic American lagers near you. You can find the Stag beer team in Belleville IL, St Louis MO, Taylorville IL, Carbondale IL, and Murphysboro IL in September.
where to buy stag beer
Wisconsin- American-Style Lager- Gold Medal 2005 GABF. "Stag is the beer for those that take life by the horns. Brewed under special conditions that enhance malt's natural flavor, Stag corrals the hop's zest with the simplicity of pure Midwestern grains."
Rob Girardier poses for a portrait at the front door of his St. Louis home on Monday, Sept. 11, 2017, which has a Stag Beer logo carved into it. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
Various Stag beer bar signs cover the walls of Rob Girardier's St. Louis living room on Monday, Sept 11, 2017. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
An antique Stag Beer marketing piece featuring the cartoon character, Mr. McGoo is protected under a glass table on Monday, Sept 11, 2017, at the St. Louis home of Rob Girardier. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
Many shelves in Rob Girardier's St. Louis home are filled memorabilia, draught tap heads, etc. emblazoned with Stag beer logos and photographed on Monday, Sept 11, 2017, in his living room. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
Various Stag beer bar signs cover the walls of Rob Girardier's St. Louis basement on Monday, Sept 11, 2017. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
One shelf of many in a case in Rob Girardier's St. Louis home is filled with various beer glasses, photographed on Monday, Sept 11, 2017, in his living room. Girardier has filled his house with hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of memorabilia and swag from the classic beer brand. Photo by Christian Gooden, cgooden@post-dispatch.com
Griesedieck Brothers Beer is a historic St. Louis beer brand that has been reintroduced after years of absence. The Griesedieck family once owned three St. Louis-area breweries, Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, Griesedieck Western Brewery Co. in Belleville, Illinois (producers of Stag Beer) and the Falstaff Brewing Corporation, producer of Falstaff Beer.
German immigrant Anton Griesedieck brought his family brewing tradition (dating from 1766 in Stromberg, Germany) to St. Louis in about 1866. He owned a series of breweries, employing his four sons, including Henry Jr. and Joseph "Papa Joe", and nephew Henry L. Griesedieck, who would later found Griesedieck Western Brewery Co.[1] The four sons established the National Brewery Co. in 1891, which later became part of the Independent Breweries Company in 1907. Henry Jr. ran IBC for four years until he quit to help his five sons Anton, Henry, Raymond, Edward and Robert found Griesedieck Brothers Brewery Co. in 1911. GB made non-alcoholic beer and soft drinks during Prohibition but closed its doors by 1920. For the next 13 years, the Griesedieck Brothers would anxiously bide their time before they could once again brew what would become the most popular beer in St. Louis.
After prohibition ended, the heirs of Henry Jr. kept Griesedieck Brothers while the heirs of Papa Joe ran Falstaff. Starting in 1947, Griesedieck Brothers sponsored the St. Louis Cardinals radio broadcasts with Harry Caray until the Anheuser-Busch brewery bought the team in 1953. Shortly after Anheuser-Busch bought the team, it renamed Sportsman's Park as Busch Stadium and introduced Busch Beer. This new beer was sold at new low prices and significantly dug into Griesedieck Brothers sales.
Falstaff's peak production year was 1966 at 6,000,000 barrels, declining thereafter. When Falstaff got hit with court costs involving the acquisition of Narragansett beer, the company had to sell. Paul Kalmanovitz purchased the company in 1975 and moved the headquarters to California. By 1977, the old GB plant was closed down. Through various mergers and acquisitions, Pabst Brewing Company eventually acquired the Falstaff brand but quit production in 2005.
Family descendant Raymond A. Griesedieck, son of Henry A. Griesedieck (the last president of the original Griesedieck Brothers), incorporated the new Griesedieck Brothers Brewery Company in 1992. By 2002, Griesedieck Brothers Beer re-emerged in the St. Louis beer market.
In a roadside gas station along Highway 21, in the Missouri Ozarks, I scan the beer cooler. Less than 100 miles south of St. Louis, AB-InBev products dominate my view. The red and white family-crest of Budweiser. The blue blast and white italics of Bud Light. The snow-topped mountains of Busch. The yellow and green highlights of Bud Light Lime. In the bottom row rests a few outsiders like Natural Light and Keystone.
First brewed in Belleville, Illinois in 1851, Stag predates Budweiser by a remarkable twenty-five years. In 1989, following a path worn a decade earlier by TV's intrepid Laverne and Shirley, George Heileman bought and moved Stag to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where dreams have been known to be made to come true. Today, the Stag Brewing Company is in turn owned by the Pabst Brewing Company and contract-brewed by MillerCoors at their Milwaukee plant. But Stag is anything but a big city beer. One won't find it in the watering holes and dive bars of that great beer metropolis, but instead in the open fields and country saloons hundreds of miles south. In fact, the geographical distance between brewery and consumptive locale leads to a reasonable inference that part of Stag's unique taste comes from some form of in-the-can travel-aging.
For three days, Stag beer was by our sides, as we paddled through riffles and pools, around limestone bends, and under forests of pine and oak. I saw Stags regularly render single hands nearly unusable for those carrying canoes around shallows, for those shimmying up cracks through limestone caves, and for those beaching boats for lunch breaks. Stags were jammed between legs when frantically paddling away from snags. And Stags floated aimlessly downstream next to guffawing paddlers and overturned canoes. Stag became an invaluable commodity when young-uns and parents were out of sight, and the float trip tradition of boobs-for-beer would see bartered Stag cans flying through the air in exchange for fleeting, fleshy visuals. It was a Stag in the hand of one old feller, sitting in a lawn chair on a beach, who at the sight of my approach, relieved himself through his shorts without standing up. Whether it was a defiant lack of bowel control, or some form of pheromone warning system alerting me that he'd claimed the spot, I never found out.
Stag didn't always occupy such a limited niche. In the 1950s, Stag was a mainstream beverage pushed by a semi-cosmopolitan cartoon spokesman. In a series of persuasive commercials, the nearsighted Mr. Magoo bumbles his way through numerous beer-fueled misadventures. In one, he drunkenly jumps aboard a disembarked riverboat and shares a pint with the conductor. In another, Magoo unwittingly prognosticates the future popularity of slosh ball by picnicking on a baseball diamond during a professional game, presciently shifting the ballplayer's wandering attention to drinking. In a third, Magoo confuses a public library for a bar and demands table service from a mousy librarian, before inexplicably pulling his own beer from his Stag-branded briefcase and insisting a studious patron imbibe with him. 041b061a72