The Seattle Brewing and Malting Company was founded in 1893 by the merging of three Georgetown neighborhood breweries, the oldest of which had been founded in 1883 by Andrew Hemrich (1856-1910) and John Kopp (1853-1935). The company began production of Rainier, a lager-style beer, in 1893, and by 1904 was the largest brewery west of the Mississippi River. After the end of the Prohibition era, Fritz Sick and his son Emil Sick (1894-1964) bought the brewery, and the rights to use the Rainier brand. Emil Sick purchased the Seattle Indians baseball team in 1937, beginning Rainier Beer's long association with Seattle baseball. The Indians were renamed the Rainiers, and the team went on to earn several Pacific Coast League championships, including the 1941 championship represented on the baseball in the ad pictured here. "The Beer of Summer" is a play-on-words of the phrase "The Boys of Summer," which refers to professional baseball players.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rainier ran a number of memorable television ads in the Pacific Northwest, largely conceived by noted Seattle designer Terry Heckler and his staff at Heckler and Associates, especially Ed Leimbacher, who wrote and produced Rainier print, radio, and TV ads for a dozen years.

Handwritten in black ink on mat verso: Poster / Ad (Program).
Printed on sticker attached to verso of mat: Heckler Associates, communication design and marketing, 2717 Western Avenue, Seattle 98121.

Caption information source: "Terry Heckler, who drew Starbucks mermaid, can't stop sketching," The Seattle Times, September 19, 2011. Business Northwest.
Caption information source: "Beer and baseball: Why they go way back in Seattle?" The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 17, 2010, Section: The Big Blog.
Caption information source: "Rainier Beer-Seattle's Iconic Brewery," by Peter Blecha, HistoryLink.org Essay 9130.