New Ulm Beer

New Ulm Beer, March 21, 2025

I’ve had a lot of cheap beer in my life. Poverty limited my choices of a froth & slosh in my youth. I’ve had Buckhorn, Schmidt, Red, White, & Blue (cheap Pabst), and New Ulm Beer (cheap Grain Belt) which won the Worst Beer I’ve Ever Had category.

New Ulm, Minnesota is the most homogeneous community in the USA. It is 100% German ancestry. The town of about 14,000 sits on the Minnesota River where it meets the Cottonwood River.

New Ulm sits SW of the Twin Cities. The Minnesota River Valley is notorious for flooding and tornadoes, blizzards and other storms. It’s not a lucky spot to be.

In May of 1990, David Jones, the Hollywood stunt pilot, and aerial coordinator, hired me to go to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to check out the DeHavilland Beaver he’d bought to fly in the film “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” This will be filmed in Belem, Brazil. That’s a long way from Minnesota.

I flew in to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport from SeaTac. I was told to find the truck in an aircraft parking lot owned by the owner of St. Cloud Aviation and drive it to St. Cloud.

All I was told was that the truck had a new paint job. That was my only clue to finding the damn thing in one of the five airport parking lots.

Fortunately, I got lucky. The airport shuttle dropped me off in the right lot. I found a newly painted truck and the key taped to the gas cap. I was on my way to St. Cloud.

I checked into the motel, had a beer in the bar, which was full of Minnesota Twins baseball memorabilia, and went to bed.

The next day, I drove to St. Cloud Aviation and checked out the Beaver. It was okay, not great. I wanted to rebuild the thing; it needed it, but the plane was airworthy. A Beaver will fly after tons of abuse. It’s the best bush plane ever built.

It turns out that the owner of St. Cloud Aviation (a bit of a wheeler-dealer) also ran a car rental business. I rented a car and decided to surprise my Grandma Edna (my Mom’s mother) and her husband, Roy, who lived nearby in Montrose.

I drove through the rolling countryside of farms and towns coming to life in late May. It was a beautiful drive.

I asked at the Post Office in Montrose where Roy and Edna lived. Told the clerk I was Edna’s grandson. She pointed to a large white-frame house a block away.

Roy answered the door. Edna was out playing cards with her lady friends. Edna loved to play 500.

Roy loves to talk and tell stories. He’s a German and worked in the cement business doing construction work. Roy gave me a New Ulm Beer.

It was in a brown returnable bottle and had a green label. Roy proudly told me it cost fifty cents a bottle. The average six-pack back then was $5. New Ulm six packs were $3. I could taste the difference right away.

But I drank them as Roy told me story after story. George H. W. Bush was President then, and Roy told me a story about George H. W. Bush.

In WWII, Bush went into the military as soon as he graduated from Phillips Academy, a very prestigious New England school. He became one of the youngest pilots in the military at 18.

Bush flew off of the small aircraft carrier San Jacinto. He fought in the Pacific against the Japanese. Bush flew the TBM Avenger which had a pilot, tail gunner, and bombardier as crew.

Roy told me that he had a cousin who worked on the San Jacinto’s flight deck in WWII, and he knew Bush. The young pilot, nicknamed “Skin” because he was so thin, insisted that all enlisted men call him by his full name, George Herbert Walker Bush.

The crew didn’t think much of Bush. After his plane was shot down and the other two crewmen died, Bush was rescued by a US submarine. The crew thought even less of Bush after that.

During one battle, a Japanese Zero came in low on the San Jacinto. The crew thought the Japanese pilot was going to kamikaze into the ship. The Zero flew down the whole flight deck but did nothing. Its gear was down.

Roy’s cousin thinks the Japanese pilot might have been trying to land on the carrier but changed his mind or discovered it was an American carrier and not a Japanese. It was dusk, and visibility was poor. In any event, as the Zero headed out over the bow, the carrier’s gunners blew it out of the sky.
I finished my New Ulm Beer. Edna came home. Saw me. Cried. We talked briefly. Edna was flustered. I should have called first. Then, I drove back to the motel. I flew home to SeaTac the next day.

TJM