I think it was the Reader that used to rank beers by categories in order to award prizes in various divisions. We kept a close eye on the list of beers that had the highest alcohol content and Special Export was always among the leaders. Special Ex (also known as "green death") became the Butanes' beer of choice.

The brewery decided to investigate the wild spikes in demand for their product at clubs where we performed and stumbled across the fact that we often cajoled people to drink Special Ex along with us. We requested it on our contract rider and made people send up rounds of the stuff at any club that was too cheesy to pop for drinks. The director of sales could often be found buying rounds for fans as it was in his job description to get people to try the brand and we soon came up with a plan to mimic the successful Miller Beer Network. The label would allow us to design a poster and the J-card for our cassette, have it printed on the presses they had in La Crosse, Wisconsin that made the cartons and other promotional items for the brewery and all we had to do was put the Special Export logo on the poster.

We soon found out that the La Crosse presses were unable to print our project (too busy and/or too inept) so the brewery paid to have our items printed here in Minneapolis. The deal almost fell apart when Heileman wanted to put a Special Export Light logo on the poster. Their reasoning was that both brands, Special Export and Special Export Light, would be implied by the Light logo. I immediately said no. We were, and are, against light beer. We would not help promote, in any way, Special Export Light. The company was totally confused by my stance but finally gave in.

Around this time the Special Export director of sales was to be married. He wanted the band to perform at his wedding and offered to pay the band in beer. We took a vote, decided to do it, had a ball and drank plenty of Special Export at the reception. A short time later a beer delivery truck pulled up in my south Minneapolis alley and delivered one hundred and twenty cases of Special Export beer (as I recall it was a pallet and a half) to my garage. The delivery man unloaded it all into the stacks you see in the photo. John had his camera along for the historic event and we pulled a stack of cases away from the rest, set his camera atop the stack, sighted his camera sat atop the beer thrones and began to test the product to make sure we could truthfully sign that the beer had arrived "safely."

Ultimately one hundred cases of beer was paid to the individual band members for playing the wedding. The remaining twenty cases was stacked in my basement where we used to infrequently rehearse. Every rehearsal we would open a case of beer (at least) so we never rehearsed more than we did that spring and summer. The posters came out looking beautiful thanks to Marc Norberg's photographs and Chuck and Tina Anderson's art direction and keylining but were never popular with the clubs. They complained the posters were too big or did not have enough color or... Well, most of those clubs are long gone, Special Export changed it's recipe and was bought out but we still play occasionally and still ask that the beer with the highest alcohol content be placed, on ice, in our dressing room.