Vintage 1990s Elephant Red Beer Pin 🍺 "Stand Out From The Herd" Pinback Button

Remember Elephant Red Beer? 🐘 Elephant Red "Stand Out From The Herd" Beer Pin, 1990s

Size: 3" ~ Unused, never worn.

Stand out from the herd! This is a big three-inch pinback button for Elephant Red, the red lager Carlsberg's Elephant brand brought to America in the middle of the 1990s red beer craze. An elephant with tusks charges straight at you with its ears spread wide, inside an oval with ears of wheat on either side. Above him, a little IMPORTED banner and ELEPHANT, below him RED, and running around the top, STAND OUT FROM THE HERD. The back is plain metal with a wire pin. It's a bar promotion piece from the height of the red beer years, which is exactly why I love it.

🍺 The red beer craze of the 90s

If you drank beer in the mid-90s you remember this. Every brewer in the country suddenly had a red. In June 1995 Drug Store News reported that red beers were the fastest growing segment in the whole beer category, up more than 25 percent in four years according to a Coors spokesman. Coors' Killian's Irish Red was one of the first to be widely marketed, and some insiders thought its success was why everybody else jumped in. Coors had just announced Coors Red Light, Molson was about to test-market a red, Miller was distributing Leinenkugel's Red Lager, and Anheuser-Busch's specialty brewing group was distributing four of them: Elk Mountain, Red Hook, Red Wolf Lager, and Elephant Red.

That same June, Beverage Industry quoted a Salomon Brothers analyst saying Anheuser-Busch would keep moving into specialty beers "with products such as Crossroads, Elephant Red Beer and Red Wolf Lager." A 1996 edition of Graphis Packaging, the international design annual, featured the Elephant Red package and said the beer was developed to compete with the red lagers. And a bartender's guide from the 2000s explains the "IMPORTED": Elephant Red was made under license from Carlsberg by the Labatt Brewing Company in Canada and distributed in the U.S. by Anheuser-Busch. Business references of the late 90s still list Carlsberg Elephant Red among the Carlsberg beers sold in the United States.

🏛️ Why an elephant?

The elephant is Carlsberg's, and the story most people tell is that it comes from one of the most famous landmarks in Copenhagen. In 1901 the architect Vilhelm Dahlerup built the Elephant Gate at the Carlsberg brewery: a tower carried on the backs of four granite elephants, inspired by Bernini's elephant and obelisk on the Piazza della Minerva in Rome. The tower was built as a water tower and herb silo, and it's still the best-known landmark of the Carlsberg district. Carlsberg started brewing its strong Elephant beer in Denmark in 1959, and Carlsberg itself still teases the question on its own website: did they name it Elephant to honor the statues guarding the brewery gates, or because it's a beer you'll remember forever? Elephant Red was the red version made for the American craze. Anheuser-Busch's own trademark filing puts its first sale on November 14, 1994; the ELEPHANT RED name and elephant design were registered in December 1995 (U.S. Reg. No. 1,944,099), and the registration was cancelled in 2002 when no one filed to keep it in use - so this pin comes from a beer that lived for only a handful of years.

🎁 Display

It's a great piece of breweriana for a beer can or tap handle collector, a man cave or a home bar, a Carlsberg fan, or anybody who collects elephants. Pin it on a jacket, a hat or a bar-room corkboard and stand out from the herd!