I'm another enthusiastic beer memorabilia person. Also, a v-e-r-y longtime beer fan as well. Seeing the Miller High Life stories above brings back a tale y'all might enjoy.
I'm in my late 20's, a fresh-scrubbed and enthusiastic but inexperienced dock supervisor at a pretty good-sized LTL trucking company. At this point in life I had respectfully imbibed any number of cases of Miller, as it's tasty and economical. Elsewhere in the company, there is a terminal manager vacancy. My local manager thinks he knows who will get the job. A very close friend of his, also a terminal manager in yet another location, disagrees. A wager ensues - the loser will send the winner two cases of Miller High Life. Unbeknownst to my manager, his friend had the inside edge in corporate politics, so knew ahead of time who would get the job. My manager now owes his buddy two cases of beer.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the manager finds out I brew my own beer. Which means I own a bottle capper. Which means, when he starts digging around at ideas, that yes it is entirely possible to empty a bunch of beer bottles and refill them, then recap them with the original caps if you wish. If done carefully, the caps will show no signs of previous removal.
This translates into my manager, my assistant manager, and myself sitting at my dinky kitchen table opening two cases of Miller (very carefully so the caps don't appear to have been used) and drinking them. This is three guys, downing two cases of beer, in a couple of hours. Erk! As the lightweight in the crowd, I was surely floating.
Kids, don't try this at home.
But, in the 80's this was not a real stretch. The master plan was to drink the Miller (accomplished!), then refill the bottles with rot-gut to pay off the debt to the cheater that had the inside track. So, we took two cases worth of Blatz, Buckhorn, and Falstaff, mixed them together in a big popcorn bowl, refilled the empty Miller bottles using a turkey baster, and recapped the bottles.
It worked like magic. The winning recipient, having inhaled enough Miller to float a battleship, never said one tiny little peep about what the heck was in those bottles of Miller High Life. We never told him. As we're all retired now, the statute of limitations says it's OK to share the story.
