What kind of San Francisco business are you guys? You skip over the hometown quaff, good ol' Anchor Steam, for some crap no one has ever heard of -- Lucky Lager? WTF?

Carling Black Label, the red can with the Black label?

Or P.O.C.? I think it stood for Pride of Cleveland, but we called it Piece of Crap.

My dad was a champion cheap beer drinker and would add to this list:

Natural Light (half the calories all the taste, naturally!)

Keystone Light

Buckhorn Beer

Rheingold (drink Rheingold the dry beer, buy Rheingold when you buy beer!)

Hudepohl-Schoenling is still around in some form, they make the delish "Little Kings Cream Ale" which, from what I've seen, is available in ONE bar in Michigan.

Peace out Desi,

No disrespect to Fritz Maytag's brew, but Lucky Lager "a brand nobody heard of?"

Lucky was a proud citizen of San Francisco many years ago. I remember the brewery quite well from when I was a kid, and even did a tour of the place with my Cub Scout pack (no samples to fourth graders, though). The brewery was a fixture on the City skyline for years, and it made a good, solid brew. Lucky deserved a place in this review.

Ever heard of Brew 102? Brewed in La. I don't know if it was ever brewed anywhere else. Sold for $.99 a sixer when Bud was $1.50 a sixer.

Worst beer ever brewed but you could get drunk on it.

I can honestly say that not only did I hear of most of the beers listed here in the Northeast/New England section, my dad at one time or another featured them in refrigerator at our family camp. The one omission that seems to be the most glaring is Piels Real Draft. Like most of the "great" (used ironically) beers listed here it tasted best ice cold. Mostly because that way it had no discernible taste.

Also, Genny Cream Ale was better known as Genny Screamers in the capital district of New York back in the 70s when I was going to high school and it was the best beer we could afford on any given Friday night.

Drink one, you're ok. Drink two, still ok. Drink three, and have your friends regret having you in the car for the rest of the night.

Schaefer has only one F, not two -- as someone who blearily looked at hundreds of their cans back in my cheap beer days, that jumped out at me right away.

And as a lifelong Baltimorean, I can say with certainty that Mr. Boh (the National Beer mascot) does not wear a top hat - at least the version that everybody is familiar with. I think you're confusing him with the National Premium beer guy (same brewery, different beer), who wore both a top hat and a monocle. Mr. Boh is a staunch member of the beer mascot proletariat, and wouldn't be caught dead wearing such an elitist symbol.

The thing that National Beer had going for it was that it was cheap -- but National Premium was actually pretty good and only slightly more expensive. There is a local craft brewery in Baltimore now (Clipper City) that has revived the original National Premium recipe for one of their own beers. That's what I drink now when I want a basic American lager, but although distribution is widening, it's still not available most places.

As a shiftless youth in Michigan I drank kegs of Stroh's and Stroh's Dark(!) at parties, bottles of Buckhorn on the roof, Green 40-ouncers of Mickies out of brown paper bags, and (under protest) the Falstaff that my roomates stacked on the living room floor in its yellow plastic cases.

Michigan is also a major market for Canadian beers. I held that the best cheap beer available in the State was actually Cinci Cream Ale which came in the traditional Canuck stubby bottle and was less than $9 for a case. Perfect for watching the Red Wings on TV with the roommates.

Then I moved to Austin in 1989 to go to college and discovered the local Shiner Bock. The Shiner brewery was still independently owned by the Spoetzl family and was a tenacious brand that had held out against the big boys since the 1890s. Less than a regional or state beer, it was only available in central Texas. Shiner Premium, the pilsner-style lighter cousin was less available and less often drunk. At $3 a six pack at my neighborhood gas station, Shiner Bock was the best cheap beer in the nation.

We didn't drink Lone Star in Austin. It may have been nationally recognized as the beer of Texas, but it wasn't the beer of our Texas. Years before the annoying, hyperbolic Pabst phenomena began in Portland, Shiner Bock was the unofficial beer of the indie rock scene in Austin. We loved it for what it was: very good given how cheap it was. But we didn't get tattoos about it.

Then the Shiner Brewery was bought out by the Gambrinus Company, importers of Mexican beers. After a few years Gambrinus saw two trends that it thought it could take advantage of: the sudden fame of Austin as coolsville, and the rise of microbreweries. In their vision Shiner Bock would cease being a cheap regional beer and become an expensive micro-brew to be sold around the country as what the hipsters in Austin drink.

Problem is, Shiner is a great cheap beer and a lousy expensive beer. A huge marketing budget does not make a beer taste any better. Pay $8 for a six-pack for Shiner when I could get Rogue's Dead Guy or Bell's Amber for about the same price? Not even for old-times sake.

Mirroring the fortunes of Austin itself Shiner Bock is now more expensive, more hyped and not as good as it used to be. Poetic.

aka jo-bel

So cheap back in college that a couple cases of empties were enough for another case of beer. It didn't taste bad, you always felt awful the next day.

And I second that Genesee Cream Ale was always know as Genny Screamers (Buffalo, NY)