My wife and I recently finished watching a seven-part crime drama called Mare of Easttown. The show is set in the small community of Easttown, PA. The main character is Marianne “Mare” Sheehan, a police detective, who has to solve a missing persons case and the murder of a young single-mother. Sheehan’s character is played by English actress Kate Winslet. It is a well-made crime drama, with enough twists and turns to keep the viewer engaged and entertained.
The Mare of Easttown is a drama which does a great job of creating what Geographers call a ‘sense of place’ with respect to its setting. According to Geographers Ken Foote and Maoz Azaryahu sense of place is “used to describe the distinctiveness or unique character of particular localities and regions,” Easttown is a gritty, working class, Pennsylvania community which has Rust Belt written all over it. Indeed, in discussing the drama, the show’s creator Brad Inglesby refers to Easttown’s “blue-collar vibe” In making the show, Inglelsby strove to capture the “cultural authenticity of eastern Pennsylvania”.
There are a number of ways in which Inglesby conveys Easttown’s sense of place, one of which is having Winslet’s character talking with an authentic Delco accent. The fictional Easttown is located in Delaware County (aka Delco). The Delco accent is “characterized by its rounded vowels and shortened long-e and long-a sounds” so that the word “water” comes out as as “wooder”. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Winslet said that “It is absolutely up there amongst the top two hardest dialects I’ve ever done”.
In addition to Winslet’s accent, another feature of the show is the fact that the only two beers that the characters seem to drink are Yuengling and Rolling Rock. Both have strong associations with Pennsylvania and both appear frequently throughout the series. Mare’s preference is Rolling Rock. I did find it a little strange that no one in the show drank Budweiser or Coors Light. This surely has to be the result of ‘product placement’, the practice of featuring well-known products in movies and television shows. According to a 2022 article in the New York Times, product placement is a $23 billion industry. It should be noted that in a 2023 survey, a sample of Pennsylvanians identified Yuengling as their favorite beer.
Historically, beers have had a strong connection to place. Numerous examples abound, including Pilsner Urquell (Plzeň, Czech Republic), Newcastle Brown Ale (Newcastle, England) and Guinness (Dublin, Ireland). The surging popularity of craft beer has reignited an interest in sense of place and what it means. Many craft breweries adopt names that they believe connect them with the neighborhood/city/region in which their beer is brewed. Thus, the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter brewed by Great Lakes Brewing Co. in Cleveland, OH makes an explicit connection to the Great Lakes freighter that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10, 1975. The entire crew of 29 men were lost. The use of locally grown hops and other local ingredients are responsible for discussions as to whether beer can have a terroir (a term usually used in reference to wine) which connects it to a specific place. See here and here for contrasting positions on this debate.
A key concept when connecting a beer with a place (or vice versa) is that of authenticity. Authenticity can be defined as “the quality of being real or true”. Dictionary definitions are useful as they provide formal definitions of terms. Equally important, however, are the terms that the average person uses to express ideas such as authentic/authenticity (and their antonyms inauthentic/inauthenticity). The work of Balázs Kovács and his colleagues, which was published in the journal Organization Science, is useful in this regard. In a study of the restaurant industry, Kovács et al. (2013) asked consumers to identify words that expressed authenticity and inauthenticity. Words that consumers most frequently associate with authenticity include genuine, real, and legitimate, while words they most commonly associate with inauthentic include unreal, deceptive, and phony. So what about Yuengling and Rolling Rock? To what extent are they authentic Pennsylvania beers?
The Yuengling Brewery in the small town of Pottsville, PA (population ~13,000) is the oldest brewery in the United States. Established in 1829 by a German immigrant by the name of David Gottlieb Jüngling (anglicized to Yuengling) the brewery today remains under the ownership of fifth and sixth generation family members. While Yuengling is also brewed in Tampa, FL (in a brewery purchased by the family in 1999) and Fort Worth, TX (under contract with MolsonCoors) it remains loyal to its Pennsylvania roots. It is an authentic Pennsylvania beer.
The same, I would argue, cannot be said for Rolling Rock. First produced in 1939, this American Lager was brewed by Latrobe Brewing Company in the small town of Latrobe, PA (population ~8,000 and the birthplace of golfing legend Arnold Palmer and children’s television presenter Fred Rogers). In 1987, the brewery was purchased by Labbat Brewing Company. Further mergers and acquisitions occurred and, by 2004, Labbat (and Rolling Rock) was owned by InBev. In 2006, Anheuser Busch purchased the Rolling Rock brands from InBev for $82 million. Shortly after the purchase, production of Rolling Rock was shifted from Latrobe to Newark, NY where it was brewed in an Anheuser-Busch facility. Rolling Rock had left Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
When it was brewed in Latrobe, part of the branding of Rolling Rock highlighted the fact that the water used to brew it came from nearby mountain springs. Latrobe sits at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains. Writing for The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, Nick Stumpo noted that the taste of the beer changed “ever so slightly . . . from year to year due to the sediments that run off the hills into the mountain streams that feed the main brewing reservoir”. This is effectively an argument for terroir. After the transfer of production was announced, one resident asked, “So will Rolling Rock now taste like the swamps of Jersey (with apologies to the Boss) rather than the mountain springs of Old Latrobe?”. Another stated, “If it ain’t from Latrobe, it ain’t Rolling Rock.” When the shift to Newark was announced, Anheuser-Busch brewmaster Doug Muhleman, stated, “we locate our breweries where we know we have an excellent source of fresh water. And, of course, Newark is no different. We are very confident we are going to produce a beer that is indistinguishable from the beer that is produced in Latrobe.”
When news of Rolling Rocks imminent departure became known, there was significant local backlash. Consumers like Michael J. Pleva vowed “never to drink Rolling Rock again”, while local bar owners reported patrons shifting to other brands. In the State’s House of Representatives, House Resolution 798 was introduced. It read:
“A Resolution urging Pennsylvania residents to boycott Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc., by discontinuing the purchase of all Anheuser-Busch products if Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc., proceeds with its plan to close the Rolling Rock Brewery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.”
These responses are understandable. Nick Stumpo suggests that Latrobe “owes its identity and national recognition” to Rolling Rock, a beer “embraced by mill and steel workers who shared pints after long days on the job”. Local restaurant owner Joyce Stern referred to Rolling Rock as “an icon. It’s the identity of this town.” Dave Taylor of Taylor Brand Group, described Rolling Rock as beer with a “blue collar following and steeped in the appeal of small town authenticity”. It was an identity that Anheuser-Busch tried to leverage after it moved production to New Jersey. They did so by creating and using the slogan “Born Small Town” to brand the beer.
So, to use a soccer analogy, did the creators of Mare of Easttown score an own goal when using Rolling Rock as a symbol of small-town Pennsylvania? If you wanted to make that case, there is certainly enough supporting evidence. However, I am going to give the creators of the show a pass here. Even though I know that Rolling Rock is no longer brewed in Pennsylvania, my subconscious mind immediately jumps to the the Keystone State (and specifically Latrobe) whenever I hear the beer’s name. It may no longer be brewed in Latrobe or Pennsylvania, but it’s identity is still strongly tied to both the town and the state.