When Bob and Doug McKenzie filmed Strange Brew at Pacific Western Brewery (PWB), they drank all their beer - and there was a lot of beer - from stubby bottles.
Only they weren't called stubby bottles, they were just called beer bottles back then. But not long after the credits rolled, the stubby got hosed - the victim of '80s marketing trends.
Fast-forward 30 years. If Canada's favourite plaid slackers came back to the same Prince George brew house today, they could coif their suds again from a stubby bottle. PWB has released a limited edition line of Cariboo Genuine Draft in the squat amber chalice, the first time a stubby has seen any suds in this town since about 1989. Beauty, eh?
"We were about the last ones in B.C. still using stubbies but we eventually stopped. It's all about marketing, that's all there was to it," said longtime PWB plant manager Tom Leboe. "Everyone was into the longnecks, the public was expecting that by then, so I thought we had seen the last of them."
The final stubby that came off the PWB line was ceremoniously buried in the brewery's lawn by then-mayor John Backhouse and other dignitaries. An era ended almost as abruptly as it started.
THE STUBBY IS BORN
Canada switched to the stubby bottle in the first place with just the click of a pen.
In the 1950s the Canadian beer laws strictly dictated that all beer sold in a province must be brewed and bottled in that same province. Only three breweries had the historic wherewithal to operate on such a 10-province scale - Carling O'Keefe, Molson and Labbatt's. This ensured they could control more than 95 per cent of the nation's beer sales between them.
They, and a few small independents comprised the Brewers' Association of Canada (then called the Dominion Brewers' Association). In 1958 they voted to rid themselves of their hodge-podge of vessels in pints and quarts in favour of a single standard receptacle. This would make it easier (cheaper) for everyone to stock, store and ship their staple stuff.
In his book Brew North - How Canadians Made Beer and Beer Made Canada, Ian Coutts described how it all happened. It was May 1961 - 50 years ago exactly - when the first test stubbies rolled off the bottling line and within a year of positive results the whole stubby nation was freely flowing.
According to Coutts, three glass companies had to blow 288 million bottles to fill that first Canada-wide order.
Leboe said it is harder to source stubby bottles today. Few companies anywhere in North America use the little brown jugs. He said a broker in Quebec sourced a supply in Germany in order to cap off their little Cariboo Genuine Draft dream.
"Regular use? I can only think of Red Stripe beer in Jamaica anymore," said Sean Dennis, marketing manager for Brick Brewing Company in Kitchener-Waterloo.
His company acquired the Red Cap brand, a top seller in decades gone by under an early version of the Carling O'Keefe company (which, for a very brief time, also owned the Prince George brewery in the 1960s).
"We stopped bottling Red Cap in a stubby approximately a year ago. Primarily it was just minimizing operational complexity here and for ease of sorting and shipping."
Kichesippi Beer Company of Ottawa still bottles in a stubby, but unlike PWB they are going in the other direction.
"We are phasing out of the stubby," said a company representative.
Beer industry insiders could think of no other brands in Canada embracing the stubby.
THE STUBBY'S DEATH
The consumer forces that stretched the neck of the stubby are the same as those causing the stubby to get sized up again. In a word: curiosity.
When the so-called Big Three brewers ran out of Canadian interest in what they were pouring, and relaxed protectionist laws allowed other beer companies to work up a head of steam, they tapped into international partnerships to survive in the new environment.
South of the border, mega-popular American beer was almost exclusively in longneck form. But the rules in Canada still dictated then that all beer sold in Canada had to be brewed in Canada, so these partnerships still got squeezed into the stubby.
In 1980 Labatt's scored first and biggest by bringing Budweiser to the Great White North, Molson joined up with Coors and Carling O'Keefe - important for this discussion - took Miller as its dance partner. All of these relationships formed within five years of each other.
Unlike the other brands, Carling O'Keefe took a marketing gamble and poured all the Canadian versions of Miller High Life into its American package: a clear long-neck bottle.
When that intoxicating new glassware caught consumers' eyes, "the stubby's days were suddenly numbered," wrote Coutts. "By 1986 it would be gone as anything other than an occasional novelty nostalgia item."
That was not quite true. There were still indie brewers, like PWB, who were stubbified over it all and held on a few years more. A rare few are still willing to give the stubby a try.
THE STUBBY'S SURPRISING RESURGENCE
Andre Fortin, spokesman for the Brewers' Association of Canada - the group that started it all - was stumped on that, but charmed that PWB was getting down to the short strokes.
"I think there is a certain fondness for the stubby across Canada. It still brings up a lot of great memories for all the people who were used to that bottle," he said.
Dennis went a step farther, calling it "definitely an iconic Canadian bottle" and Coutts wrote that the stubby was "the single-most distinctive feature of Canadian beer. As a piece of ingenious homegrown industrial design, it was as original in its day as today's Blackberry."
Leboe's customers clearly agree. He said Vancouver Island beer drinkers and the home base libaters of Prince George were most keen to pop a short top, at least in the early days of data collection.
Leboe admits it was a tall order to accept the idea of resurrecting the wee dram (which is, BTW, only 14 millilitres shy of the standard tall bottle) but it took only a few simple attachments to the bottling line to modify the mechanics of it, since PWB also pours 15 other brands into either longneck bottles or cans for the carry-away retail market.
And the company was greeted with a pleasant surprise.
"We were caught a little off guard by the demand," Leboe said. "We didn't have enough to fill our first order so more bottles are on the way and we hardly have any left here in the plant."
Perhaps Canada's biggest stubby fan, Leonard Whistler, proprietor of the stubby.ca website was excited to learn of the little Cariboo venture.
"I don't know of any breweries using the stubby today. I will pick up some to update my collection," he said.
"What I didn't like about the recent Brick stubbies was that they were twist-off caps. The original stubbies required a bottle opener and I assume the Pacific Western stubby bottles will also be twist-off. I think Pacific Western should use the original design - no cap threads on the bottle - and maybe give out free bottle openers as a promotion."
Instead, they are giving out trees. As part of the company's Refresh And Reforest Program, every purchase from their Cariboo line of beers (in addition to the genuine draft, the Cariboo series also includes a cream ale and a honey lager in standard vessels) generates money for the cause.
"Cariboo Brewing has teamed up with the [provincial government] to plant 150,000 trees in the Cariboo region over three years to replace those lost to forest fire and pine beetle," said Paul Mulgrew, PWB's Brand Manager.
Leonard Whistler and fellow stubbyphiles should still get a bottle opener ready, or they could get some scratched hands. Leboe stoutly resisted the twist-off cap, for reasons they will appreciate.
"The threaded tops leak," he said. "Oxygen will egress through them. That affects the beer badly. They aren't as good a package."
The Cariboo Genuine Draft stubby unit has one other unique feature. It is all green.
Beer bottles are not that ubiquitous nut-amber colour by accident. Coutts's book explains that the brown glass protects the hops in the fluid from reacting to the sun's ultraviolet rays, thus preserving the intended taste of the brew.
However, although it looks forest green to the casual eye, the Cariboo stubby's colour is simply a coating applied to what is the standard bottle underneath.
"We just wanted to make it all our own, something that stood out to people," said Leboe, as if size didn't matter. "As long as people keep buying them, we will keep running them."
They might just take off, eh?
