Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Medal That Was Not a Medal

The story most people know goes like this: Captain Frederick Pabst's brewery entered its beer in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety-three, won the gold medal for best beer, and renamed the product Pabst Blue Ribbon in honor of the prize. This is mostly a good story. It is also not quite true.

The ribbon part is real, and it predates the fair. Pabst had already been tying actual silk ribbons, blue silk ribbons, around the necks of his bottles before eighteen ninety-three. The practice began as a distinctive packaging choice, possibly as early as the eighteen eighties. Customers at bars were asking for the blue ribbon beer before the Columbian Exposition ever opened. The ribbon was a Pabst signature.

The medal part is more complicated. The beer competition at the Columbian Exposition used a scoring system the judges devised on their own. Any brewer who cleared the judges' threshold received the same certificate. There was no single grand prize. Every major brewery that entered received the same award. Recent historical scholarship has challenged the idea that Pabst won anything unique.

What Pabst did win was the naming rights to his own myth. The beer had been called Pabst's Best Select. In the years after the fair, the company changed the name to Pabst Blue Ribbon. The name referenced the ribbons that were already on the bottles, not a medal that may or may not have existed in the form the marketing implied.

The beer sold enormously well. The story was more useful than the medal. Captain Pabst, who had started as a Great Lakes ship captain and married into the brewery, understood something about American marketing that would serve his industry well into the next century: the story is the product.