Pabst Brewing Company has cast the disappearance of its beer as an unusually public recovery effort, while Montclair police are treating it as a potentially linked pair of cargo-theft cases involving fraudulent paperwork.

The contrast is central to a theft that turned a routine distribution pickup into a broader investigation: a brewer is using humour to draw attention, but investigators are focused on who collected the loads and whether the incidents were coordinated.

Police say the two pickups occurred on 17 August at an Anheuser-Busch distribution centre in Montclair, east of Los Angeles. In the first case, a shipment valued at about $45,000 and bound for Tucson, Arizona, was collected but did not reach its destination. Roughly an hour later, a purported subcontractor allegedly presented false documents and took a further $25,000 shipment destined for San Diego.¹

The combined losses were estimated at $70,000. A police report cited by one account put the haul at about 34,000 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and non-alcoholic Old Milwaukee beer, or more than 1,500 cases. Investigators have identified discrepancies in information supplied about the trucking company, driver and vehicles, and are examining whether the two thefts were part of the same fraudulent cargo operation.²

Pabst’s public response has been markedly less formal in tone, even as it stresses that the loss is genuine. In a social-media appeal, the company told the person responsible: “we don’t fault you for wanting to brag to your friends how much PBR you have, we just wish you obtained it the honourable way.”¹ It said the missing cargo weighed about 40,000 pounds and offered an unspecified reward for information leading to its return.

The company also set an 18-day, 44-minute deadline — a reference to its 1844 founding — for a no-questions-asked return. Its lighter messaging does not resolve the central question facing police: whether the Arizona shipment contained Pabst products and whether both collections were arranged by the same people.¹