{"id":54566,"date":"2013-03-28T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T17:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=54566"},"modified":"2013-03-26T22:54:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-27T03:54:04","slug":"upwardly-mobile-beer-rolling-rock-and-the-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/28\/upwardly-mobile-beer-rolling-rock-and-the-working-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Upwardly Mobile Beer: The Class Status of Rolling Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the Pittsburgh of my youth many decades ago, Rolling Rock was an ordinary, low-priced local beer \u2013 like Duquesne (\u201cDuke\u201d) or Iron City. (\u201cGimme a bottle of Iron,\u201d was what you\u2019d say to the bartender.\u00a0 And if you were a true Pittsburgher, you pronounced it \u201cAhrn.\u201d).\u00a0 The Rolling Rock brewery was in Latrobe, PA, a town about forty miles east whose other claim to fame was Arnold Palmer. The print ads showed the pure sparking mountain stream flowing over rocks.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That was then.\u00a0 In the late 1980s, Rolling Rock started expanding \u2013 geographically outward and socially upward.\u00a0 Typically, when ideas and fashions diffuse through the social class structure they flow downward. Less frequently, the educated classes embrace an artifact of working-class culture. But why?\u00a0 Their conspicuous consumption (or \u201csignalling,\u201d as we now say) is saying something, but what ideas about themselves and the social landscape are they expressing with their choice of beer?<\/p>\n

I had an e-mail exchange about that question with Keith Humphreys, who blogs at The Reality-Based Community.\u00a0 He too grew up in western Pennsylvania, and we both recalled being surprised years later to see Rolling Rock as a beer of choice among young stock traders and other decidedly non-working-class people.\u00a0 But we had different ideas as to what these cosmopolitans thought they were doing.\u00a0 Keith saw it as their way of identifying with the working class.<\/p>\n

Those of us who grew up near Latrobe, Pennsylvania are agog when upscale hipsters who could afford something better drink Rolling Rock beer as a sign of their solidarity with us.*<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was more skeptical.\u00a0 I saw it as the hipsters (or before them, the yuppies) trying to be even more hip \u2013 so discerning that they could discover an excellent product in places everyone else had overlooked.\u00a0 Rolling Rock was a diamond in the rough, a Jackson Pollock for $5 at a yard sale.\u00a0 The cognoscenti were not identifying with the working-class. They were magnifying the distance.\u00a0 They were saying in effect, \u201cThose people don\u2019t know what a prize they have.\u00a0 But I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had no real data to support that idea, so I asked Gerry Khermouch, who knows more about beverage marketing than do most people.\u00a0 His Beverage Business Insights puts out industry newsletters, and he writes for Adweek and Brandweek.\u00a0 He\u2019s also beverage buddies with the guys who changed Rolling Rock marketing.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what he said,<\/p>\n

[F]ar from expressing solidarity with the working class, urban drinkers far afield regarded it as an upscale icon in much the way that Stella Artois has claimed today — a triumph of pure marketing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One ad campaign in the 90s, \u201cSubtle Differences,\u201d aimed directly at the drinker\u2019s connoisseur fantasies.\u00a0 Here are two examples:<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a>

It\u2019s the little nuances that make life more interesting. Rolling Rock uses slightly more malt than other domestic golden lagers for a refreshing taste that\u2019s got a little more body, a little more bite. If you\u2019ve noticed, we salute you.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Words like\u00a0nuance<\/i>\u00a0were hardly an appeal to solidarity with the working-class.\u00a0 Neither was the strategy of raising the price rather than lowering it.<\/p>\n

To the marketers, the nuance, the malt, bite, and body didn\u2019t count for much.\u00a0 Their big investment was in packaging.\u00a0 Instead of stubby bottles with paper labels, they returned to the long-necked, painted-label bottles with the mysterious \u201c33\u201d on the back. Apparently, the original packaging, the\u00a0 \u201cOld Latrobe\u201d reference, and the rest added notes of working-class authenticity.<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As for the actual beer inside those bottles, it may have once been what the ad copy said.\u00a0 The brewers had tried to overcome the \u201cwatery\u201d image from the beer\u2019s early water-over-the-rocks imagery.\u00a0 But when Anheuser-Busch bought the company in 2006, they closed the Latrobe brewery, and Rolling Rock became a watery, biteless product indistinguishable from the other innocuous lagers that dominate the US market.<\/p>\n

* This was an aside in a post about the future of the marijuana market<\/a>. \u00a0See also our post about the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. In the Pittsburgh of my youth many decades ago, Rolling Rock was an ordinary, low-priced local beer \u2013 like Duquesne (\u201cDuke\u201d) or Iron City. (\u201cGimme a bottle of Iron,\u201d was what you\u2019d say to the bartender.\u00a0 And if you were a true Pittsburgher, you pronounced it \u201cAhrn.\u201d).\u00a0 The Rolling Rock brewery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,23703,212,23705],"class_list":["post-54566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-marketing","tag-alcohol","tag-vintage-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54566"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54576,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54566\/revisions\/54576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}