Rheingold Brewery
Within a week, Samuel leased a small brewery on Meserole Street where he started brewing beer with his three sons.
[16][4][17] During Prohibition, from 1920 through 1933, the brewery survived by selling "near beer", lemonade, and "Teutonic", a concentrated liquid extract of malt and hops for nutrition and good health.
Its expansion into California was unsuccessful; the San Francisco plant was closed in 1955, and the Los Angeles facility was sold to Hamm's Brewery in 1957.
[11] In 1964, the fourth generation of the Jewish American Liebmann family sold the company to New Jersey based Pepsi-Cola United Bottlers, Inc. (“PUB”), a bottling and distribution company of Pepsi-Cola and other soft drink brands, for $26 million, which then adopted the name “Rheingold Breweries” for the combined entity.
[31] In February 1973, PepsiCo, Inc. bought a controlling interest in Rheingold Breweries, paying $57 million for 83% of the Rheingold/Pepsi Bottling operation.
[32] Industry observers said that PepsiCo was more interested in the company's soft drinks bottlers in California, Florida, Mexico, and Puerto Rico than in the beer business.
[26] In January 1974, after difficult negotiations with the local Teamsters Union, Pepsi closed the Brooklyn plant, explaining that it was on track to lose $8 million due to high costs.
[34] William Black, the founder of the Chock full o'Nuts coffee company stepped in and negotiated a deal with the union, giving their members ownership of 10% of Rheingold Brewery in exchange for wage concessions.
No written record of this can be found, but vintage Rheingold Premium cans are occasionally seen on eBay that show "G. Heileman Brewing Co., LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN" on the side panel and with 1990s-style stay-tabs,[40] and the Christian Schmidt Brewery Wikipedia article says, "Heileman produced Rheingold after 1987, but it was retired by Stroh in the late 1990s".
Matt Brewing Company in Utica, New York, and, starting in 2004, at Greenpoint Beer Works in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
As of 2010, Drinks America was selling Rheingold Beer in the New York Metropolitan Area, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
It included radio and television jingles, the annual "Miss Rheingold" contest, official sponsorship of the New York Mets, and print and TV advertising with racial diversity that was atypical at the time.
Rheingold was the official beer of the New York Mets, and its advertisements featured John Wayne, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Vaughan and the Marx Brothers.
"[57] During the cleanup of the World Trade Center rubble after the 2001 collapse, Rheingold cans were found that had been stashed in the beams by construction workers decades earlier.
Each year, six candidates were chosen from a large field of applicants by a panel of company leaders, celebrities, and advertising executives.
The contest was heavily funded and the winner would be widely-publicized throughout the following year in TV and radio commercials, on billboards, and packaging, as "Miss Rheingold".
In the 1950s, as many as 25 million votes were cast, leading the company to claim, "the selection of Miss Rheingold was almost as highly anticipated as the race for the White House.
Two of the final winners were actresses Emily Banks (1960) and Celeste Yarnall (1964), both of whom had featured guest roles as yeomen on separate episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series.
A number of Miss Rheingold runner-ups achieved success in show business, including Jean Moorhead, Suzanne Alexander, and Robbin Bain.
In the introduction to the Eartha Kitt song "I Wanna Be Evil", she sings, "I was made Miss Rheingold though I never touch beer".
[70] The band 33 on the Needle from Alton, Illinois, released the song "Rheingold Girl" on their 2017 album Sounds Across the Midnight Sky.
[71] In an episode of The Golden Girls, Sophia recalled that Rheingold was the favorite beer of her late husband, Salvatore.
