It hasn’t always been easy for Seattle fans of Rainier Beer.
There were the traumas of the 1970s, when the quintessential Seattle company was sold to the first in a string of out-of-state beer conglomerates.
Then Rainier’s landmark brewery near Boeing Field was closed in 1999, and the actual brewing of the beer was outsourced — eventually to a facility near Los Angeles owned by former rival Miller.
Even the iconic “R” was ripped from Seattle’s skyline in 2000 and replaced with a replica more than a decade later.
But now, Seattle’s Rainier faithful must confront the ultimate outrage: a partial outage of the pale lager that has idled local taps and laid bare the byzantine realities of the macro-brew industrial complex.
Yes, Seattle, we’re out of draft Rainier. Though bottles and cans of Vitamin R remain as plentiful as starlings, kegs of Rainier have been unavailable since late March, according to proprietors and customers of sundry Seattle-area watering holes.
“We ran out two weeks ago,” said Tylor Dows, co-owner of Touchdown’s Sports Bar & Grill in Shoreline, where draft Rainier is — or was — the most popular of a dozen tap beers.
Likewise at Al’s Tavern in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, where Rainier accounted for maybe 70 percent of tap sales and where manager Percy Weintraub had to pivot with extra cases of Rainier tallboy cans, which his regulars “blew through in, like, two days.”
“We have no kegs at this time,” confirmed Lindsi Taylor, spokesperson for Columbia Distributing, the largest distributor in the Pacific Northwest.
Substitutes have been suggested. At Al’s, bartenders offered up Pabst Blue Ribbon draft, but that led at least one Rainier man to walk out after just two sips — and “he won’t come back until there’s Rainier here,” cautioned fellow customer John Smith, who was in attendance Thursday afternoon.
Just how long that might take is far from clear.
In a terse email last Wednesday, Sean McKillop — a spokesperson for Rainier’s Los Angeles-based parent, Pabst Brewing — said that “our intention is to be at full supply of Rainier as soon as possible.”
Also unclear are the reasons for the shortage, with various explanations pointing to a strike at a Texas beer brewery, hiccups in the supply chain and strains on the system of contract brewing that produces a lot of today’s “macro” brews, including Rainier.
For decades, many of America’s most cherished local beer brands have not been local at all, but have been brewed far from home, often by national producers with extra production capacity.
Pabst, for example, is essentially a beer holding company for dozens of brands — including Pabst Blue Ribbon, Rainier, Stroh’s, Old Style, Lone Star and Old Milwaukee — that it doesn’t actually brew itself, according to media reports.
After Pabst purchased Rainier, it contracted with Miller Brewing to produce Rainier, first at the old Olympia Beer brewery in Tumwater and then at Miller’s facility in Irwindale, Calif., near Los Angeles, according to media reports.
“Pabst is a virtual brewer,” said Benj Steinmann, president of Beer Marketer’s Insights and a veteran industry observer.
According to estimates by Beer Marketer, Rainier’s total 2023 output was around 165,000 barrels — about 5 percent of Pabst’s volume.
