Vintage 1960s-1970s Olde Pub Tavern Brew Beer Label 🍺 Erie Brewing Company Erie PA | New Old Stock

Olde Pub Tavern Brew Beer Label 🍺 The Erie Brewing Co., Erie, Pennsylvania

Size: 3 1/2" x 3"

An unused quart label for OLDE PUB(R) Tavern Brew Beer - a big lidded tavern stein with "oLDE PuB" on its front - with NET CONTENTS 1 QUART up one side and THE ERIE BREWING CO., ERIE, PA. down the other. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🏭 Erie's Brewery

There was a brewery on that ground in Erie from 1855. George Frey's name was on it that first year - Frey is the man credited with brewing the first lager in Erie, in 1847, after he helped brew Buffalo's first lager in 1843 - and it soon became the Eagle Brewery, which J. Henry Kalvelage ran for the next 28 years. In 1883 Jackson Koehler bought the Eagle Brewery there and put his own name on it - 6,500 barrels his first year, 30,000 by 1895 - and in 1899 it merged into The Erie Brewing Company, along with Fred. Koehler & Co. (the Koehler family brewery his father Charles had run), C.M. Conrad's National Brewery and the Cascade Brewing Co. Jackson died in 1903, but his name stayed on the beer. Erie Brewing rode out Prohibition (the plant ran as Imperial Beverages from 1920 to 1933), reopened in 1933, and made beer on State Street until it closed in March 1978. Its flagship was Koehler's, alongside names like Yacht Club and Old Dobbin Ale, and Olde Pub was its tavern beer, sold by the quart.

Erie Brewing guarded those names at the U.S. Patent Office - it filed Old Dobbin for its ale in 1946, Koehler's in 1948, Yacht Club in 1962 and Jackson Koehler's Eagle Brew as late as 1971. Olde Pub first went on the market on June 28, 1966, the same day as Koehler's Erie Beer, and it was registered on July 11, 1967. That's what the little ® after OLDE PUB is telling you: these labels were printed after that registration came through, somewhere between mid-1967 and the March 1978 closing. The trademark outlived the brewery, too - it ended up with Miller Brewing in Milwaukee and didn't lapse until 2008. The old brewery was put on the National Register in 1982 and torn down in 2006. (Today's Erie Brewing Co. is a separate craft brewery that took up the name in the 1990s.)

📜 The Stories

The lore among Erie brewing fans is that Koehler's ads leaned on the idea of what happened when a party ran out of the right beer - collectors still tell of the "ghost of Jackson Koehler" turning up to spoil get-togethers where a lesser beer was on the table. The story goes that Olde Pub itself was Erie Brewing's bid to own the neighborhood tap. Local legend also has it that more than one Erie tavern owner kept a stash of labels from the old local breweries tucked behind the bar, a little memorial to the beers the neighborhood grew up on.

Perfect framed for a home bar or anybody with Erie roots. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Olde Pub labels for Erie again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.