Riunite with ice...that's nice.

Canei?? Yes you can :D

That may have been Ralph's ( Cal Supermarket) plain wrap, all of there generic products were in a white container with the product name in blue.
Not just beer but Scotch, Tequila, etc. along with grocery items. And yes it was used on lots of tv shows and movies.

As for lousy cheap beer I vote for Lucky Lager, it was 2.49 a 12 pack when I was in college, it came in bottles though and had a concentration type puzzle under the cap. The beer itself wasn't that bad but the hangovers from it were horrendous

I always thought there were two from "back in the day" that were pretty awful....Red White & Blue and Buckhorn (from Pabst and Hamms respectively). Milwaukee's best is another that I always considered nasty, but which still survives. And for some reason, I could never get into Miller Lite, although I like MGD and MGD lite (at least for big-mass marketed stuff).

Three that were trashed here earlier, I always thought were actually pretty good....

Watney's Red Barrel....nothing special in the bottled version but a great draft. I was really sad to see them go under.

Stag...before it got "dumbed down", this had a unique, crisp "dryness" that I liked. A very flavorful "blue collar" brew.

Carling Black Label....A little on the sweet side, but usually very drinkable.
(Not to be confused with Carling Red Cap, which was truly great stuff...especially the Canadian version).

My Two Cents
 

As a Notre Dame alum, I am an expert on cheap, nasty tasting beer.

Buckhorn would have to be at the top of the list. So would something called "Hi-Brau" (which tasted like rotten potato peels). The 1970s formula for Old Milwaukee was pretty nasty also.

There was a California based beer called Brew 102 which was right down there in the sewer with Buckhorn and Hi-Brau.

On the good tasting side, Falstaff was OK (ND's late and lamented Senior Bar served it for a quarter a draft).

When I moved to Washington in 1976, a liquor store on Connecticut Avenue near my apartment sold something called Old German by the case of 24 - 12 oz. stubby bottles for $2.99 (bus fare in DC was 30 cents per ride back then, to put perspective on the price). Old German was put out by Yuengling's, which is a quality outfit--they have since sold the brand to the brewers of Iron City, and are concentrating on quality popularly priced brews like Traditional Lager and Black & Tan.

My favorite cheap beer today is Genesee Cream Ale, which you can find around for as low as $10.99 per 30 pack.

I love calling Bud Light "Diet Budweiser" - always makes the bartender pause a second while he/she figures out what the hell i've said.

Glad to see someone mention Red White and Blue, it was terrible.
Others:
Wiedemann (best when frozen and consumed by someone else)
Goebel
Harley Davidson Beer (I don't know who made it)

On the good tasting side, Falstaff was OK


Ah yes...."Fall-flat". The choicest product of the brewer's art. And not bad at all, considering how cheap the stuff usually was.

About 16 years or so ago, we would get beer called Home Beer. Simple, white label that said "Home"- I think it was $6 for a case of bottles. The beer distributor that we got it from also gave cash for empty cans, so we'd save all of the empty cans from various parties and crush them. Periodically, we'd throw a rock in the can before crushing it to boost the weight (they paid by the pound). We would get a couple dollars each time, so effectively our case was about $2 or $3. I think I am still hungover 16 years later!

A decade ago both Carling and Molson reformulated their excellent beers to appeal to a wider market and ... made them taste more like Bud. Very strange strategy, no idea how well it worked for them (in either gaining market share or reducing their production costs), but I stopped drinking them as they lost a lot of taste. Blandness does seem to be a desired characteristic in mass-market beers (usually called "easy drinking", as in water).

Old Milwaukee in a can tastes like the can.

And don't get me started on Schlitz.

Olympia, it's definitely the water, yargh.

Schlitz was once a fine beer....outselling even Budweiser. Never one of my personal faves, but still fairly decent. A little less sweet than most of the big national beers.

Unfortunately around the early 1970s, some corporate suits thought they could cut costs with a new "streamlined" brewing process. The rest, as they say, is history....or more correctly, "infamy"!

Then in the late '70s, they came up with the "Drink Schlitz or I'll kill you" ad campaign.

They never recovered.

Lowenbrau comes to mind as another beer of that era that got "hijacked" by the corporate bean counters. Someone decided that it would be okay to produce what had been a noble and truly outstanding German beer at Miller facilities in Texas and elsewhere "for the American pallate".

They also never recovered.

Tuborg, as well. :td:

I know one customer that Molson lost as a result. The original had a flavor reminiscent of Welch's grape juice. I miss that and no longer buy Molson Canadian.

Iron City Beer -- "a rusty nail in every can" --

(from Pittsburg, PA, of course)