Oh. This sorta explains it. But not really.

The Marketing of No Marketing But the growth started and is most pronounced in Portland -- a city best known in the cosmology of beer as a haven for fancy microbrews -- where most agree that bike messengers have been in the P.B.R. vanguard. The lowbrow brew has risen to the No. 5-ranked beer in town and is still the fastest-growing of the top-50 domestic beer brands. In local supermarket sales it trails only Coors Light, Budweiser, Bud Light and Corona.

Of course, not even bike messengers can drink enough beer to explain this. So what does? At first, even the people at Pabst -- which has barely advertised for more than 20 years -- were at a loss. But any trend with even the slightest commercial implications in the American marketplace immediately becomes subject to two iron laws. The first is that it will attract a swarm of consultants, marketers and journalists, trying to deduce the trend's origins. Second, efforts will be made to amplify and prolong the trend, profitably.

The most interesting theory is that P.B.R.'s fan base grew not despite the lack of marketing support, but because of it. The beer industry as a whole spends about $1 billion a year to pitch its product. Most of this advertising, through huge TV campaigns and relentless logo-slathering, is devoted to image-building (not surprising, since Consumer Reports concluded a few years ago that even devoted fans of the megasellers Budweiser and Miller Genuine Draft could rarely tell them apart by taste). Long-neglected P.B.R. had no image. It was just there.