Pabst Blue Ribbon Pursues Purloined Pints
By Thom Watts·September 8, 2026
Pabst Blue Ribbon is looking for someone who apparently decided one 12-pack just wasn’t going to cut it for Labor Day Weekend.
About 40,000 pounds of PBR—roughly 50,000 cans—disappeared from a distribution center in Montclair, California. That’s 1,600 cases of beer, worth around $25,000, and enough to make every backyard barbecue in a three-state radius very suspicious.
The beer was picked up using what police say may have been fraudulent trucking paperwork. And there may have been another cargo theft that same day, so this feels less like a random beer run and more like Ocean’s Eleven: The Tailgate Edition.
PBR first gave the thieves a no-questions-asked deadline to bring it back. That deadline came and went, so now the company is offering a $20,000 reward for information.
One little hiccup: Pabst keeps calling it a stolen truckload, but police say the truck itself wasn’t stolen—just the beer.
So somewhere out there is a whole lot of missing PBR, hopefully being kept cold.
Photo by Joel Moysuh on Unsplash