Vintage 1960s Golden Pheasant Beer Label 🍺 from Michigan Brewery

Who Brewed Golden Pheasant Beer? 🍺 Golden Pheasant, Sebewaing Beer, Sebewaing Brewing Company, Sebewaing, Michigan

Size: 4 1/2" x 3 3/4" ~ Unused, never on a bottle.

A ring-necked pheasant bursting up out of a field of golden clouds, wings spread, long tail streaming out behind him. That's the Golden Pheasant label from the little Sebewaing Brewing Company up in Michigan's Thumb, and it's one of the prettiest beer labels I've got. This is the larger 1960s version of the label - there's a smaller 1950s one too.

🔍 What's on it

GOLDEN PHEASANT across the top in big black capitals with a yellow shadow, the pheasant in flight in the middle, red face, white neck ring and all, and Sebewaing Beer in red old-English script underneath. CONTENTS 12 FLUID OUNCES runs up the left edge, and along the bottom, SEBEWAING BREWING COMPANY — SEBEWAING, MICHIGAN. The back is plain.

🦁 The brewery with the lions

Beer in Sebewaing came back as soon as Prohibition ended. In 1933 William Wreford led a group of investors who bought the old brewery and renamed it the Sebewaing Brewing Company, with Dr. J. E. Wurm as president. They sold their first batch of Old Style Beer in April 1934 and added Old Stock Ale in October 1935, and over the years came Sebewaing, Bock, Sport and Golden Pheasant.

Now here's my favorite part. Dr. Wurm bought three lion cubs from a traveling carnival owner, and the lions became the brewery's trademark. They toured in a steel-barred cage on a trailer, and on July 28, 1940 the New York Times wrote about a trailer carrying four African lions advertising the brewery's trade mark. Lions don't come cheap, though, and by 1948 the brewery had gotten rid of them. Where they went depends on who's telling it: some say they were sold off to zoos, and others say an employee named Otto Thede shot them.

The Sebewaing brewery was always a small one. By the late 1950s it was making about 38,000 barrels a year, only seven-tenths of one percent of all the beer brewed in Michigan. Sometime between 1960 and 1964 it renamed itself The Michigan Brewing Company and brought out a "Pride of Michigan" beer, but the quality slipped. A sale to Ohio's Buckeye Brewing fell through in March 1965 after local court fights, the brewery reopened under the Sebewaing name in June 1965, and it closed for good in May 1966, still owing $104,000.

🌾 Pheasant country

The pheasant on the label fit the country it was sold in. Ring-necked pheasants were brought to Michigan from China in 1895 and took off across the farm country. From 1937 to 1959 Michigan hunters took more than a million pheasants a year on average, and in 1944 the harvest topped 1.4 million birds. Those were the years of small fields and brushy fencerows, perfect pheasant ground, and a beer named for the bird was a natural in hunting country. By the 1960s the farms had changed and the birds started to thin out.

🍬 Sebewaing, Sugar Town

Sebewaing sits on Saginaw Bay, on the river that shares its name. The village got its start in 1845, when the Lutheran minister Rev. John J. F. Auch came as a missionary to the Ojibwe, and it was incorporated in 1879. The name was first spelled Sibbewaing, usually said to mean crooked creek. Sugar beets made the town. Ground was broken for the sugar factory on September 28, 1901, the first campaign started on October 27, 1902, and in 1906 the local factories were combined into the Michigan Sugar Company. Sebewaing still throws the Michigan Sugar Festival every June.

🏡 Display

It's small enough to frame anywhere, a great piece for a bar, a man cave or a hunting cabin, and a perfect gift for a breweriana collector, a pheasant hunter, or anybody from Sebewaing, Huron County and the Thumb.