Vintage 1940s 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. 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. Erie Brewing rode out Prohibition, reopened in 1933, and made beer on State Street until it closed in 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. 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 answer to the post-Prohibition tavern boom, when the bars reopened and every regional brewer raced 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.