While researching the TU archives for a few stories I'm working on, I came across this 1996 article about Jax Beer. The article claims that Jax Beer was the first company to sell and market a "six pack."
Jax Beer: The Old Milwaukee of another era in Jacksonville
The Florida Times-Union - Saturday, June 1, 1996
Author: Bill Foley, Times-Union staff writer
Consumer Reports magazine says this month the best-tasting mass-market beer sampled by 17 qualified beer-tasters is Old Milwaukee, a second-tier suds precisely in the spirit of the beer that made Jacksonville famous.
Old Milwaukee was picked over such stalwarts as Budweiser and Miller, as well as a host of cutesy brews for people in short pants. Its victory recalls the dominance enjoyed by Jax Beer in the heyday of the Southern honky-tonk.
Between the repeal of Prohibition and the year I got out of high school, Jax Beer was as much a part of the Southern saloon as punchboards and pig's feet.
In such major markets as Long's Bar, Friendly Billiards and the Toot and Tellum, Jax regularly prevailed over Bud, Blatz, Pabst and other quality brew worthy of white socks.
It was a favorite in Jacksonville partly because of its name, which was emblazoned in neon lights and screen-door stencils wherever the eye would roam. But mostly because it was cheap, usually about a nickel cheaper than the "major" brands.
Jax Beer cost in the year of its demise, as I recall, 20 cents, or, in the calibration of the true beer drinker, five for a dollar.
Like Old Milwaukee, Jax was a kind of beer you didn't mind spilling, which if you play enough 9-Ball and listen to enough hillbilly music in the course of an evening, you are bound to do.
Jax was a beer of the common man and the woman who smoked menthols, of the bon-vivant in a blue collar and the siren in Evening in Paris.
Jax Beer was a holdover from the horse-racing meets at Moncrief racetrack circa 1910-11.
The track drew stalwarts of the Sporting Life from all over America. With them came William Ostner, a brewmaster from St. Louis.
Ostner opened a brewery on West 16th Street, but the racetrack soon closed, a victim of public outrage, fire and the Florida Legislature. Prohibition followed. The brewery became the Jax Cold Storage Co. After repeal, Ostner's sons, J.F. and W.A. Ostner, went back in the beer business.
Between 1933 and 1956, the ubiquitous Jax Beer label and its trademark cockatoo proclaimed Jacksonville to the South. For many, other than those deeply into naval stores and Swisher cigars , Jax Beer was Jacksonville.
Awkwardly, Jacksonville's Jax Beer was not the only Jax Beer. Another Jax Beer was made in New Orleans. It was made by the Jackson Brewing Co., which took its name from Jackson Square.
The rival breweries split the South; Jacksonville's Jax Beer was sold east of Mobile, Ala., New Orleans' Jax Beer west of Mobile. There was plenty of thirst to go around.
When the Ostners stopped making beer in Jacksonville, the right to the Jax name went to the New Orleans company, which eventually passed it on to the Pearl Brewing Co. of San Antonio, Texas.
One residual contribution to society made by Jax Beer was the arguable invention of the six-pack. When disposable bottles became common after World War II, the Ostners bought 100,000 durable sacks from Towers Hardware, emblazoned Jax Beer on them and sold beer six to a sack. The idea caught on and the rest is history.
J.F. Ostner said 20 years ago that World War II and the disposable container pretty much did in Jax and other regional beers.
"The boys got back from somewhere they hadn't been before, and that's when the nationals began to take over. Then cans came in and the national companies could absorb the cost of cans -- the cans cost more than the product -- by charging them off to freight."
Sounds reasonable, but personally I think the decline of punchboards and pig's feet had something to do with it, too.
