No matter the outcome of negotiations that would keep the brewery in Latrobe operating, the fact remains that Rolling Rock is gone. Don Russell – Joe Sixpack – visits the town to report on just what that means to the town.
“You think of Latrobe,” said Steve Kittey, editorial director of the town’s daily newspaper, the Latrobe Bulletin, “you think of Rolling Rock beer.”
“It’s like Hershey and chocolate,” said Ed Maher, a Latrobe Brewing employee whose father and grandfather both worked at the town’s famed brewery. “They’re inseparable.”
Were insperable.
Those of us in the midwest thought of LaCrosse, Wisconsin as synonymous with Old Style and Special Export, too. Same old story. Crawl the web and read about what happened to institutions like Falstaff, Black Label, and others, and the people who brewed those brands. I’d be more surprised than not to find out that we’ll soon have a Latrobe Lager, in the vein of LaCrosse Lager, that does a better job of maintaining Latrobe’s brewing tradition than InBev did or (shudder) A-B will. The loss of the union scale wages that RR paid will be painful, but City Brewing’s rates will still be far better than what Sprawl-Mart pays its greeters, and its a job to be proud of.