No Hippie Punching In The Comments, Please!

Dogfish Head Brewing is issuing a special 50th Anniversary commemorative label for their "American Beauty" beer. The Grateful Dead are celebrating 50 years together this summer. The beer is brewed using almond honey granola and hops. The beer haz 9% ABV which is enough to whack a polyp. The new label is supposed to look like this:

Link to original

I've always liked the iconography associated with the band, along with some of their music. I've only seen them twice though--not enough to qualify as a Deadhead. The Dead (the ones who aren't dead-dead) have been together 50 years, since the halcyon days of the San Francisco hippie scene.

According to the late Hunter S. Thompson, 1965 was the best year to be a hippie:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.  Link