alecomesback3

Because the sale of the brewery to the Badenhausen brothers was not finalized until May, 1933, the renovated brewery of P. Ballantine & Sons would not market it's beer until Feb. 1934.

Thus, the above advertisement (dated December, 1934) for these two "Aged in the Wood for One Year" beers, which would not be available until a year after full Repeal.

(Left) Ad from a Chicago Bar-tenders Union publication 1939 -which notes that Ballantine was one of the few large breweries in the US with a full line of beer styles- ales, beers (lager, bock and dark), porter and stout.

A 1938 ad from an Ohio store. While they seemed to specialize in the various ales, stout and porters from the brewery, they mis-spelled the name "Ballantine".

(For a comparison on prices, national brands like Pabst and Budweiser were sold by the store for 2 for 25¢- cheaper than Ballantine XXX Ale).

[ABOVE] Wording from a Ballantine Brown Stout ad implies it is an all-malt product.

While a number of northeastern brewers would resume brewing porters (where it often became a bottom fermented product and known in the industry as "Pennsylvania Porter" due to the prevalence of the style among that state's brewers), few large post-Prohibition brewers offered a stout.

A rare example of a mention of the IPA was this note in the cooking section of the New York Times (7/29/1955) by their noted Food Editor, Jane Nickerson:

Clearly, these two products were modeled after English and Irish brews (in particular, Bass and Guinness), even being bottled, at this point, in 11.5 ounce bottles, a size that was more common to imports than to US beers (where 7 and 12 ounce were the standard "single serving" bottle).

Another brewer with a "full line" of beers was The Louis F. Neuweiler Brewing Company in nearby Allentown, PA, which marketed 4 ales, along with a porter and a stout.

Ballantine would gradually de-emphasize these two "specialty" beers in their advertising.

While they would continue to use the phrase

"BALLANTINE'S ALES & BEER" (note the "s" in "Ales"), little other promotional effort would be made.

The Brown Stout would be discontinued by the 1950's, as would be the draught version of the India Pale Ale.

Ballantine India Pale Ale in bottles would survive into the Falstaff and Pabst ownership eras, tho' the beer would be continually changed (lower hopping rates, lower abvl, less aging time, etc).

It would finally be dropped in the mid-1990's, after the closing of it's last home, the Pabst Milwaukee brewery.

(above) from 1935 ad - Click for full view with additional serving suggestions for XXX Ale and Porter at Ballantine's Beer Menus page

More post-Repeal India Pale Ale labels.

Falstaff's India Pale Ale labels.

(Above) By the late 1950's, few other breweries were still brewing and marketing an India Pale Ale in the US, as can be noted by this Pennsylvanian retail beer distributor's ad which doesn't even bother to use the "Ballantine" brand name when it proclaims they stock the "Famous India Pale Ale".