Beer and Girls | The Rheingold Lady

Guys are predictable- no doubt about it. If you want to sell something to guys, put a girl on it, in front of it, next to it, whatever- we’ll buy it, especially something like beer. Guys already like beer. Putting a girl on the can just increases the probability of us picking it up and taking it home. Breweries have had our number for a long time.

As a little kid, my friends and I collected beer cans. The older and more rare, the better. To find such gems, we would go to the ends of the earth (as a little kid, the ends of my earth were the edges of town) to find places that were undisturbed for many years prior. Some of the best places were those at old houses and buildings where people had thrown out non perishable rubbish. We’d sort through everything from old car parts, broken kitchen equipment, old pots and pans, furniture, and seemingly tons of beer cans (the truffles of our hunt).  We’d dig around for hours and days to find these treasures. Our parents must have thought we were a bunch of idiots spending our free time digging through “garbage” bringing home dirty rusted cans- and some of the worst cases of poison ivy that the world had ever seen. Thinking back on it, maybe we actually were idiots…

Some oldies found that day in the ivy. The center Rheingold Ale is c.1953.

In the folklore of beer can collecting, there was no item more prized by us than the famed “Rheingold Lady”. It was but a legend, only seen in books, until we began that fateful dig (mock dramatics).  At a particular old colonial house on Congress Street in Fairfield Ct., we had found an area that just spoke to us.  Once the poison ivy had been cleared, we quickly began finding some very old cans- lot’s of heavy metal cans. Some going back to the 1940′s and early 50′s. It’s important to note that this hunting was taking place in the 1980′s, so these “artifacts” had been buried for upwards of 40 years. Then out of the muck appears the first of the Rheingolds. Over the course of the day, we probably found 10-12 of the Miss Rheingold cans. Good fun and finds for all.  All the Rheingold cans on this page were found that day- except the brand new aluminum below right.

As opposed to bottles, cans provided brewers with maximum surface area on which to advertise and clinch some brand recognition.  Keglined was the patented lining applied to the inside of cans to keep the beer from interacting with the metallic cans and ruining the taste. Check out the seam on that can- seriously solid

The aluminum can on the right is from the early 1980′s (and still full of beer). The strong graphic appeal of the older cans makes you wonder why anyone would agree to “updating” to something like the one on the right.

I very recently opened the boxes containing my collection, which my parents had been holding since I left for college. I went through the whole lot and found two good examples of the concept of “sex sells”. First being the Miss Rheingold cans. Rheingold Brewery held a yearly beauty contest of which contestants were put on the cans and consumers could vote for their favorite lady. Sales skyrocketed during the times of the contests. The above picture shows a normal Rheingold can of the day, the 1957 winner, and a contestant.

As an example of changing times- but using the same concept of girls and beer, the above cans are from the early 1980′s, showing a very different female aesthetic from Britain’s Tennent’s Brewery. Nowhere on the scale of Rheingold’s distribution, Tennent’s still saw soaring sales during the release of their “Penny” series.

I think there were more in the series, but the above four Tennent’s Lager Pennys were all I was able to find in my local liquor shop.  Worth noting that with me under the legal drinking age at the time of my collecting, my family was forced to drink all the many beers that I needed for my collection. Many thanks for your sacrifices.

The long-gone pull tab rings.