It hasn’t always been easy for Seattle fans of Rainier Beer.

There were the traumas of the 1970s, when the quintessential Seattle company was sold to the first in a string of out-of-state beer conglomerates. Then Rainier’s landmark brewery near Boeing Field was closed in 1999, and the actual brewing of the beer was outsourced — eventually to a facility near Los Angeles owned by former rival Miller.

Even the iconic “R” was ripped from Seattle’s skyline in 2000 and replaced with a replica more than a decade later.

But now, Seattle’s Rainier faithful must confront the ultimate outrage: a partial outage of the pale lager that has idled local taps and laid bare the byzantine realities of the macro-brew industrial complex.

Yes, Seattle, we’re out of draft Rainier. Though bottles and cans of Vitamin R remain as plentiful as starlings, kegs of Rainier have been unavailable since late March, according to proprietors and customers of sundry Seattle-area watering holes.

“We ran out two weeks ago,” said Tylor Dows, co-owner of Touchdown’s Sports Bar & Grill in Shoreline, where draft Rainier is, or was, the most popular of a dozen tap beers.

Likewise at Al’s Tavern in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, where Rainier accounted for maybe 70% of tap sales and where manager Percy Weintraub had to pivot with extra cases of Rainier tallboy cans, which his regulars “blew through in, like, two days.”

“We have no kegs at this time,” confirmed Lindsi Taylor, spokesperson for Columbia Distributing, the largest distributor in the Pacific Northwest.

Substitutes have been suggested. At Al’s, bartenders offered up Pabst Blue Ribbon draft, but that led at least one Rainier man to walk out after just two sips — and “he won’t come back until there’s Rainier here,” cautioned fellow customer John Smith, who was in attendance Thursday afternoon.

Just how long that might take is far from clear. In a terse email, Sean McKillop, a spokesperson for Rainier’s Los Angeles parent company, Pabst Brewing, said that “our intention is to be at full supply of Rainier as soon as possible,” but offered no time frame.

Also unclear are the reasons for the shortage, with various explanations pointing to a strike at a Texas beer brewery, hiccups in the supply chain and strains on the system of contract brewing that produces a lot of today’s “macro” brews, including Rainier.

Getting ‘their spot back’

In the context of the national beer economy, the impact of a temporary shortage of Rainier draft is pretty small beer.

According to estimates by Beer Marketer, Rainier’s total 2023 output was around 165,000 barrels. That’s about 5% of Pabst’s volume — and less than 0.1% of total U.S. output of 196 million barrels, said Beer Marketer.

But in Rainier’s home market of Washington, Steinmann said, Rainier might account for 2%-4% of beer sales. (A 2017 Beer Marketer estimate listed Rainier as the No. 3 “volume brand in Seattle/Tacoma food stores by volume.”)

Those volumes appear to be growing: Rainier sales increased 3% in each of 2022 and 2023, even as total U.S. beer sales fell 5% last year, according to Beer Marketer estimates.

Growth has been the trend at Al’s Tavern. Prior to the recent supply issues, the self-styled dive bar was plowing through four and a half to five Rainier kegs a week, up from three kegs in 2019, said bartender Karl St. Mary.

Going from five kegs to no kegs overnight has required some adaptation.

Weintraub, Al’s manager, ordered extra Rainier tallboys from his supplier, but in the meantime had to plead for cases from other bars, including the Pine Tavern in Ballard.

“That’s the beauty — everybody helped me out, no questions asked,” Weintraub said.

At Touchdown’s Sports Bar, the shortage of Rainier led Dows to bring back Miller draft, though he promises that Rainier “will get their spot back” when supplies resume, whenever that is.