Rainer Beer had great commercials. Some featured Mickey Rooney; some were parodies of other commercials or Saturday Night Live Skits. Bud’s croaking frogs? Copied from Rainier. Others were just plain clever. Unfortunately, they did not convey that hot-looking babes were attracted to Rainier drinkers.
Traveling up Interstate 5, you knew you were entering Seattle when you saw the red script “R” on top of the Rainier building. The brewery stood sentinel at the south end of the city. It was as much a part of Seattle as Starbucks is now.
The Washington Brewery, later Seattle Brewery, had been operating since 1854. It launched the Rainier brand in 1878. It became a Northwest staple, competing with Heidelberg, Lucky Lager, Olympia and Blitz-Weinhard for beer-drinkers’ loyalty.
Washington State imposed its own prohibition in 1916. The owners moved the brewing operation to San Francisco until nationwide 
prohibition went into effect in 1920. At prohibition’s repeal, Fritz and Emil Sick purchased the brewery and reintroduced Rainier in 1935. Seattle beer drinkers developed a taste for their “Vitamin R.” Before the arrival of Major-League baseball, the Seattle Rainiers, part of the old triple-A Pacific Coast League, played their games at Sick’s Stadium. The Sicks – and locals – did nothing to dispel the rumor that Mt. Rainier was named after the beer.
Regional brands fell on hard times during the seventies and eighties 
as the national brands extended their domination of the marketplace. G. Heileman Brewing Company bought Rainier in 1977. It was bought and sold a few more times, eventually owned by Stroh’s, who closed the brewery and sold the brand to Pabst. Tully’s Coffee moved into the building and replaced the red “R” with a green “T.” Rainier’s Northwest competitors met similar fates. (Miller-Coors owns the Blitz-Weinhard brand.)
The emergence of craft brewing – microbreweries – caused the major brewers to take note. Anheuser-Busch promoted itself in Super Bowl ads as a “macrobrewer,” sneering at the microbreweries. Ironically, Belgian-owned A-B has been buying craft breweries outright, and is one-third owner of Craft Brew Alliance, whose brands include Widmer, Red Hook, Kona, and others. Purchase of a small operation by a big guy occurs almost weekly. Heineken recently took a 50% share of Lagunitas. They’re not boasting about it, though. Tracking ownership is difficult. Check out the Craft Brew Alliance web site and try to find a mention of Anheuser-Busch. Or see if you can find A-B on a Shock Top label. Blue Moon doesn’t mention that it’s part of Miller-Coors. Craft brewers Pyramid and Portland Brewing are both owned by a Costa-Rican food and beverage company, Florida Ice & Farm.
(More irony: the founder of the Virginia Craft Brewers Fest is no longer eligible to be part of it.)
In the meantime, Tully’s went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their headquarters are still in the Rainier building, but they took down their big “T.” The “R” went back up in 2013.
Rainier Beer is back, too … sort of. A company called TSG/Eugene Kashper eventually took ownership of Pabst and the Rainier brand. They worked out a deal with Craft Brew Alliance to brew Rainier Ale at their Red Hook facility.
New breweries are popping up as fast as the not-so-new ones cash out and become part of international corporations, so it’s still possible to drink local. And you can find those great Rainier commercials on YouTube.
Ha! I’d forgotten about the Mickey Rooney commercial. Rainier was at the brew fest I went to yesterday. Now I wonder how many of the 36 breweries represented are actually locally owned. And the Rainiers play at Cheney Stadium, close to my house, if you ever want to visit Tacoma and take in a game.