Buzz
Before PBR became the iconic beer associated with hipsters, blue-collar Wisconsinites, and Frank Booth, it was originally known as Best Select. The name paid homage to the brewery's founder, Jacob Best, who had retired and handed over the operations to his sons. His son-in-law, Johann Gottlieb Friedrich Pabst, a former steamship captain, was also a shareholder, eventually becoming the president and renaming the brewery to Pabst Brewing Company.
As per the company's historical records, Best Select had already won a host of accolades at beer competitions both locally and internationally. A savvy marketer, Pabst had blue silk ribbons tied around each bottle starting in 1882, signaling its victorious status. Within ten years, the brewery was using up a million feet of ribbon annually.
Despite its many awards, Best Select had never actually won a physical blue ribbon until then. The first came during the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The publicity and boost in sales led the company to officially rename Best Select to Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Some versions of the Columbian Exposition's history contradict Pabst’s account. Like many other fairs of its time, the 1893 exposition enticed exhibitors with promises of awards. However, according to several contemporary and historical sources, the organizers approached the prizes differently. Rather than having exhibitors compete directly against each other, they were judged against a set of criteria that defined excellence for their respective categories. “Every entrant who met the standard would leave Chicago with a commemorative bronze medal and a parchment certificate,” Maureen Ogle notes in Ambitious Brew. “The White City’s purity would thus remain unsullied by undignified brawls for prizes and grubby scrimmages over medals and ribbons.”
For the beer categories, judges were instructed to rate each beer based on purity, color, and flavor, giving a score between 0 and 100. Any beer scoring 80 or higher would earn a medal and certificate. However, things did not unfold as planned once the exposition began, with beer judges creating their own scoring system and awarding ranked prizes based on their own set of categories. The brewers were left to assume that the highest score meant ‘winning,’ even though there was officially no grand prize, and all the medals were identical.
King of Brewers
As the judging neared its end, Anheuser-Busch, leading Pabst by two points, began celebrating prematurely by ordering an award placard for their exhibit and publishing ads in local newspapers claiming victory of the nonexistent grand prize and declaring themselves the 'King of Brewers.' Once the final category was scored, the judges’ table descended into deadlock and infighting, forcing the formation of a special supervisory committee to resolve the issue. Ultimately, Pabst triumphed, finishing just ahead of Busch by a slim margin.
Pabst quickly declared himself the 'grand prize winner,' despite his medal and certificate being exactly the same as those given to other brewers. To celebrate, he had the entire Milwaukee brewery draped in blue ribbon and granted all his workers a day off. Despite the apparent confusion surrounding the prize system among both the judges and the competitors, Pabst continues to proudly claim that their beer was named 'America’s Best in 1893' on every can of PBR.
