Baseball, Beer, and New York: The Story of Ballantine, Knickerbocker, and Schaefer
For roughly two decades in the middle of the twentieth century, New York City was home to three major league baseball teams and three fiercely competitive regional beer brands — and the two industries were so intertwined that you could identify which team a fan rooted for by the beer in their hand. The Yankees drank Ballantine. The Giants drank Knickerbocker. The Dodgers drank Schaefer. Each brand had its own brewery, its own borough identity, its own announcer, and its own piece of New York’s collective memory. When the Dodgers and Giants left for California in 1957, the beer rivalries fractured along with the city’s baseball identity — and within twenty years, all three beers had largely disappeared from the landscape that made them famous. This is the story of beer and baseball in the greatest city in the world, when both were at their peak.
In This Article
- Ballantine and the Yankees — “Ballantine Blast!”
- Jacob Ruppert — the man who owned both a brewery and the Yankees
- Knickerbocker and the Giants — “Have a Knick, feel refreshed”
- Schaefer and the Dodgers — the scoreboard that told the story
- Rheingold — Miss Rheingold, the Mets, and light beer’s secret origin
- When the teams left and the beers followed
- Frequently asked questions
Ballantine and the Yankees — “Ballantine Blast!”
After the Yankees were sold by Ruppert’s heirs to Dan Topping and Del Webb in 1945, a Newark brewery stepped in to fill the sponsorship vacuum at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Ballantine Beer — whose story we’ve told in our Ballantine history piece — became the official beer of the Yankees, and its relationship with the team and with broadcaster Mel Allen became one of the most recognizable pairings in American sports broadcasting history.
The three-ring Ballantine sign went up on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard. Allen, the Voice of the Yankees, incorporated Ballantine into his calls in a way that made the brand inseparable from the experience of Yankees baseball: every time a Yankees player hit a home run, Allen would call it a “Ballantine Blast!” — a phrase that became so naturally embedded in the broadcast that it sounded less like a sponsored call and more like a baseball term of art. The Yankees also had a jingle that played on broadcasts:
For a generation of Yankees fans who grew up solving the pictograph puzzles inside those same Ballantine bottle caps — this was simply what summer sounded like. The three rings meant Purity, Body, and Flavor. Mel Allen meant the Yankees. And the Yankees meant winning. It was a complete world, and Ballantine was embedded in it.
The relationship also had genuine product authenticity behind it: Ballantine IPA, as detailed in our history piece, was at this same time one of the most technically accomplished beers being produced anywhere in the United States — dry-hopped, oak-aged up to a year, brewed with distilled whole-cone hop extract. The beer backing the broadcast was genuinely good. That helped.
Jacob Ruppert — The Man Who Owned Both a Brewery and the Yankees
The most extraordinary figure in the story of New York baseball beer is Colonel Jacob Ruppert — a Hall of Fame baseball executive, a congressman, a successful brewer, and the man who bought Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, built Yankee Stadium, and won seven World Series championships as Yankees owner. He is also the source of the most gloriously ironic subplot in this entire story.
Colonel Jacob Ruppert — The Short Biography
Brewer, congressman, Yankees owner, Hall of Famer
Born in New York in 1867 to a German immigrant brewing family, Jacob Ruppert Jr. inherited the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Company in Yorkville, Manhattan in 1915. He had already served four terms in Congress and been promoted to Colonel in the National Guard. His brewery, whose flagship product was Knickerbocker Beer, operated from a 35-building complex between 91st and 95th Streets on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and produced two million barrels of beer annually at its peak. In December 1914, Ruppert and partner Cap Tillinghast Huston purchased the New York Yankees — then a losing franchise — for $480,000. He bought out Huston in 1922 for $1.5 million and became sole owner. He then purchased Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, built Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds after the Giants’ owner raised the Yankees’ rent, and won seven American League pennants and four World Series before his death in January 1939. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013.
Here is the irony: Ruppert owned both the Yankees and the brewery that made Knickerbocker Beer, but he deliberately kept the two businesses separate. He did not make Knickerbocker the official Yankees beer; he did not cross-promote the two businesses; he kept them at arm’s length from each other. When he tried to name the Yankees the Knickerbockers — which would have doubled as an advertisement for his beer brand — newspaper editors told him the name was too long and unwieldy for sports headlines, and the idea was dropped.
After Ruppert died in 1939, his heirs mismanaged both enterprises. They sold the Yankees to Topping and Webb in 1945 and continued running the brewery poorly until they sold the Knickerbocker brand to Rheingold in 1965. The brewery went out of business that same year. Knickerbocker Beer — made by the man who owned the Yankees — ended its commercial life as the property of Rheingold, where it had been used to sponsor the Yankees’ greatest rivals at the Polo Grounds. Ruppert would not have been pleased.
Knickerbocker and the Giants — “Have a Knick, Feel Refreshed”
While Ruppert was still alive and separating his brewery from his baseball team, Knickerbocker Beer found its way to the Polo Grounds anyway — as the official beer of the New York Giants, the Yankees’ fiercest rivals. The symmetry was accidental but perfect: the beer brewed by the man who owned the Yankees was being advertised at the ballpark of the team the Yankees most wanted to beat.
The Polo Grounds scoreboard featured a large Knickerbocker advertisement in center field — a Knickerbocker-wearing figure holding a beer and advising the crowd to “Have a Knick.” Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges, whose name is immortalized in baseball history for his breathless “The Giants win the pennant!” call after Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World in 1951, delivered the Knickerbocker pitch with a daily prize contest: “Have a Knick, feel refreshed.” Fans would fill out entry forms at their local tavern for a chance to win a prize announced during the game. The jingle ran in the background: “Each home game the Giants play / Someone wins a prize that day.”
Knickerbocker was branded as “New York’s Favorite” — a claim that had some genuine basis in the numbers during the brewery’s peak years, when it produced two million barrels annually. The beer’s name derived from Washington Irving’s famous Diedrich Knickerbocker character — a fictional Dutch chronicler whose name had become New York shorthand for the original Dutch settler identity of New Amsterdam. It was, in its way, the most purely New York brand of the three: its name came from New York’s founding mythology, its brewery was in Manhattan, and its beer sponsored the team that had been in the city the longest.
Schaefer and the Dodgers — The Scoreboard That Told the Story
If Ballantine had Mel Allen and the “Ballantine Blast,” and Knickerbocker had Russ Hodges and the daily prize, Schaefer Beer had something genuinely unique: a scoreboard that reported the official game scorer’s ruling before the announcer did.
The F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company — founded in 1842 by two German immigrant brothers, Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer, and based on the East River in Brooklyn — was the official beer of the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. The Schaefer sign on the Ebbets Field scoreboard was engineered so that the H and the E in the Schaefer name would illuminate separately to indicate the official scorer’s call: H for hit, E for error. Brooklyn fans watching the scoreboard had the ruling the instant the scorer made it — sometimes before Red Barber or Vin Scully mentioned it on the broadcast. It was real-time information delivery through beer advertising, and it made the Schaefer name literally part of the game’s record-keeping in the minds of everyone in the ballpark.
Schaefer’s jingle — “Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one” — became one of the most recognized advertising slogans in New York. It was honest, pragmatic, and perfectly calibrated to its audience: Brooklyn working-class fans who were there for the whole game and intended to drink accordingly. The Larry Kert connection is a footnote that delights people who know it: the young man in Schaefer’s television commercials, hired for his wholesome good looks, was the same Larry Kert who would originate the role of Tony in West Side Story on Broadway.
Schaefer was also the beer of Brooklyn as a place — not just as a baseball franchise. At its peak, the Schaefer brewery on the East River was one of the largest manufacturing operations in the city, employing hundreds of workers, and the brand had the kind of neighborhood loyalty that came from being physically present in the community it served. When the Dodgers left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season, they took that identity with them. Schaefer eventually became the beer of the New York Mets when they launched in 1962, alongside Rheingold.
Rheingold — Miss Rheingold, the Mets, and Light Beer’s Secret Origin
Rheingold Brewery was a Brooklyn institution — founded by German-Jewish immigrant Samuel Liebmann in the 1850s in the Bushwick neighborhood, where an 18-acre complex eventually employed hundreds of workers and sold two million barrels annually. By the 1950s, Rheingold held a 35% market share in New York City — the leading beer brand in the state. It sponsored the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds (distinct from the Giants’ Knickerbocker sponsorship, which was for the pre-Ruppert-heirs era), and when the Mets launched at the Polo Grounds in 1962 before moving to Shea Stadium, Rheingold was there with them — installing the same H-and-E scoreboard illumination system that Schaefer had made famous at Ebbets Field, now reporting hits and errors through the letters of Rheingold’s own name.
But Rheingold’s most famous contribution to American culture wasn’t a beer at all — it was a beauty contest. From 1940 to 1964, New Yorkers voted annually for Miss Rheingold: six women selected from a large field of applicants whose photographs were displayed everywhere Rheingold was sold — in bars, delicatessens, grocery stores, and on billboards from New York to Maine. Voters could cast as many ballots as they wanted at up to 35,000 boxes placed at the ends of supermarket aisles and on bar tops across the Northeast. At the contest’s peak in the 1950s, an estimated 25 million votes were cast in a single year — leading Rheingold to claim, with some credibility, that the selection of Miss Rheingold was nearly as eagerly anticipated as the presidential election. Philip Liebmann, the great-grandson of the founder who conceived the contest, described it as a way to directly engage the public “as a civics lesson.”
And then there is the story of what happened in the Rheingold brewery in 1967 — three years after the Miss Rheingold contest ended and the brewery was struggling. Brewmaster Joseph Owades, a biochemist, developed the first commercially viable low-calorie beer. He called it Gablinger’s. It was brewed at the Bushwick plant, launched under that name, and promptly failed in the market. Owades shared his formulation. Several years later, Miller Brewing Company used Owades’s recipe as the foundation for Miller Lite, launched in 1975, which became one of the best-selling beers in American history and defined the light beer era. The invention of light beer happened in a Brooklyn brewery — and the Brooklyn brewery got none of the credit or the revenue.
When the Teams Left and the Beers Followed
The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. The Giants moved to San Francisco the same year. The city that had supported three simultaneous major league franchises suddenly had one — and the borough identities that had been expressed through baseball and beer were left without their anchor.
The beers followed their own paths to oblivion. Schaefer opened a state-of-the-art plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1972 — a move that signaled the end of big-city brewing economics — and closed its Brooklyn facility in 1976, ending 134 years of New York City brewing. Rheingold, under Pepsi ownership from 1974, had 100,000 gallons of beer poured into the East River when the Brooklyn plant closed in 1974 because boxing it up cost more than it was worth. Knickerbocker disappeared when the Ruppert Brewery sold the brand to Rheingold in 1965. Ballantine’s Newark brewery closed in 1972. All four beers had been gone from their home cities within a generation of the Dodgers and Giants’ departure.
What survived was memory — and in the case of Ballantine, an eventual revival. The three rings still appear on Ballantine bottles. Rheingold has been revived several times, most recently with mixed results. Schaefer is still technically produced by Pabst. Knickerbocker is gone entirely. But the world where three beers and three teams defined the identity of three boroughs and the sound of summer radio — that world exists only in the memory of people who were there, and in stories like this one.
There are people still alive who grew up with those Ballantine bottle cap puzzles. Mel Allen called Mantle’s home runs Ballantine Blasts. Russ Hodges told Giants fans to have a Knick. Red Barber watched the Schaefer H and E light up from his Ebbets Field broadcast booth. The men who called those games and the beers that paid for them were woven together so tightly that one was unimaginable without the other. That’s what regional beer culture at its peak looked like — and it’s worth remembering.
