Rheingold Lager Beer

Rheingold Beer was established by the Liebman family in 1883 in New York City. For many decades it remained a fairly popular regional brand, sponsoring The Miss Rheingold Pageant and The New York Mets baseball team. But, like most smaller players in the beer world, it stumbled badly in the 1970s and was shut down in the middle of that decade. The brand rights were acquired in 1998, and the beer was reintroduced that year. It has changed hands, and is currently owned by liquor brand holder, Drinks American Holdings, LTD (DKAM). They acquired the rights to the beer in 2005 and reformulated it.

Mostly available on the East Coast, Rheingold has minimal distribution and presence. It is not available in Louisiana. This author tried it once, in 2011, and found it to be substandard and cheap. One wonders what it was like before the 2005 reformulation. Rheingold Lager Beer might be an example of what happens when people try to revive a brand that may have been better left dead.

An interesting side note- During the clean up of the World Trade Center damage following the September, 2001 attacks on New York City, many old cans of Rheingold were apparently found in the rubbish. It seems like the construction workers who built the towers in the 1960s and early 1970s were drinking this economy brew on the job and hid the cans in the walls to stay out of trouble.