Wetzel Kangaroo Beer

Drew Vics and his friends were standing around talking about cryptids and microbrews when they founded a whole new form of higher intellectual understanding of the universe. They have combined an interest in cryptozoology with a love of home brewing and the results are cryptobrewology.

Vics’ new study is more about sightings of rare beers, including Sierra Nevada’s famous barley-wine style ale, Bigfoot, but there is a subform of their pursuit that, for me, has been totally about cryptozoology and a little about the beer.

I’ve been gathering very specific cryptozoology-oriented empties, as cultural artifacts, for decades (despite the fact I don’t drink). These include bottles and cans for Bigfoot Ale, Yeti Ale, Shaftbury Cream Ale (with an image similar to Ogopogo in the midst of BC), and, of course, Kokanee beer (with a tiny Bigfoot image on skis coming down a BC mountain). The collection includes, as well, a neat plastic Kokanee cup with Rene’ Dahinden’s image on it, and around its back, info about Dahinden inside a picture of a Sasquatch plaster cast.

I also own a set of four glasses from the Lang Creek Brewery of Marion, Montana, with a beautiful cryptid illustration etched on the glasses, linked to the product’s name, Flathead Lake Monster Ale Amber.

But there remains one prize that is an elusive stranger to my collection. It is a beer with a name-game cryptozoology story behind it.

Charles Wetzel, at the age of 70, was at his Platte River cabin, near Grand Island, Nebraska, on the 28th of July, 1958, when he observed a mystery kangaroo that was seen but never caught. Wetzel was operating a brewery in Grand Island at the time of his sighting. He was so obsessed with his bizarre experience, he named one of his brands “Wetzel Kangaroo Beer.” With the arrival of eBay a few years ago, I contacted and talked to beer can and bottle collectors in Nebraska. They have seen the Wetzel beer collectible, they tell me, but it remains absent from my crypto-collection within this special subfield of ritual objects.

Another Charles Wetzel, of course, saw a strange leafy Bigfoot or Lizardman creature near Riverside, California, in 1958, that has become famed in cryptozoological archives.

Anyone have an extra container that once held Wetzel Kangaroo Beer in your collection?

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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