Well, at risk of incurring the wrath of some people I know who read
this group...
I always was partial to Rainier Ale as a "Supermarket Beer".  That is,
something you pick up when you only got a few bucks on you (just made
your car or computer payment) and want something with a hint of flavor.
It's gotten a bad rap for two quasi-well-deserved reasons -
1) It comes is a green bottle
2) It's not an ale
and a third one, *usually* irrelevant us to natives-
3) Heileman, who once owned Rainier, also brewed it at the National
brewery in (forget the city), Arizona, and that product tasted rather
like Henry Weinhard's "Ale".  I know because in the early 80's, our
local Rainier distributor (Cammarano Brothers) "accidentally" brought
up a trainload of "Arizona Ale" in lieu of Mickey's, and it took 6-8
months for it to work its way out of the distribution system. ---Less
than 40 miles from the Rainier brewery!  I got this info from the
brewmaster at Rainier, whom I called to complain to about the situation.
The people at Rainier are still very accessible and quite decent folk,
like most northwest brewers.

But to tie all this together...  You can do a lot worse than Rainier
Ale when you only have ~$4.00 for your sixpack (lets see... Budweiser,
Miller, Coors, anything Mexican, anything sold in the US as Canadian,
anything with more than one city on the label, anything that advertises
on television, anything marketed to an Inner-City Target Group, Schiltz,
Blitz and/or Weinhard's, Killian's, any beer that your parents drank
when they were your age...)  Who DARES dispute this?!? :-)

--
David Breneman               #################            Kill Jim Harriot
The Spud Goodman Show         ####### #######             before he
d...@rosedale.uucp              #####   #####              creates another
...uunet!camco!rosedale!dcb         (_)  - - - Ciao.      Dan Lewis