Taplines: Saving Narragansett, New England’s Beloved Legacy Lager

Before craft beer, decades of consolidation, and even before Prohibition, every city had its own brewery — and odds are that brewery made a lager. But by the time repeal day rolled around on Dec. 5, 1933, several of those breweries had gone out of business, and those remaining would face brutal competition as heavyweights like Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch built massive breweries across the country and harnessed the power of advertising. The breweries that didn’t get acquired — even the ones that did, to some extent — mostly dwindled into irrelevance. These were dark times for the legacy lager.

These days, the American beer landscape is dramatically different, and legacy lagers are having a bit of a moment. Today, we’re joined by the founder of Philadelphia’s Quaker City Mercantile, Steven Grasse, to discuss the revitalization of a brew that, at one point, looked down for the count, too: Narragansett.

After trading hands several times and closing its Rhode Island facility to contract brew, the Narragansett brand was eventually scooped up by a group of investors in 2005. With hands-on experience marketing beverage alcohol from creating Hendrick’s Gin and Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, Grasse set about rebranding the flagship legacy lager and the rest of the company’s portfolio for a future befitting its storied past. This is the story of how that went down. Tune in for more.