If you remember any part of the period from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s, you may remember the beerball. (Although if you drank from a beerball, it is possible you don’t remember it).

The beerball was a hard plastic container, perfectly round, that held a little more than 5 gallons of draft beer (more than two cases of 12-ounce cans or bottles). Attach a tap, give it a few pumps, and wait for the foam to blow off. Then have a ball.

Beerballs seemed to be everywhere a party was happening.

“I remember a lot of guys in the early ‘80’s always having a tap for them in their car trunks,” said David Rivers, who grew up in Liverpool, where he worked and sold beerballs at the Galeville Grocery run by his father, Bernie. “If you were going to a party, instead of 2 cases of beer we’d grab a beerball … And someone always had a tap.”

The original beerballs were made by the F.X. Matt (Saranac) Brewing Co. in Utica, starting around 1976. It took a few years, but rival breweries like Coors and Genesee jumped in. By the 1980s, the beerball craze had swept the nation.

Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser and Bud Light, also rolled out the beerballs. Lore has it that A-B’s big brewery near Baldwinsville was the last place in the U.S. to produce beer balls, ending production possibly as late as 2007.

So the comet-like fad of the beer ball started -- and may have ended -- in Upstate New York.

For the beerball’s many nostalgic fans, especially in Upstate New York, there are two eternal questions: Why did beerballs go away? And: Could they come back?

Before tackling those questions, let’s dive a little deeper into the beerball’s origins and its sudsy heyday.

The beerball takes off

Fred Matt, now Matt Brewing’s president, was in high school and working at the family business when the beerball made its debut. He believes it was the brainchild of his uncle, J. Kemper Matt Sr., who would go on to found Dupli Graphics, a paper product company in Syracuse.

“My Uncle Kemper saw it as a great container to fill with beer,” Fred Matt recalled. “I believe he got a good deal on the plastic. Really, it was a tremendous idea. They were light and portable.”

The beerballs became a vehicle for the now discontinued Matt’s Premium Lager. (The Matt brewery is now best known for the Saranac line of craft beers).

The beerball was primarily a party package, used in place of a standard metal keg. The ball came in a cardboard box, and the easiest way to use it was to open the box top, fill the area around the ball with ice and get down to business.

“You got a relatively large amount of crappy beer for not too much money,” remembers long-time Syracuse radio personality Jim Reith. He recently posted a nostalgic item on Facebook about beerballs (and another old school beer choice, OV Splits). “It had to be consumed in a field, the woods, or in someone’s basement.”

One complaint was that the taps, which were reusable but had to be purchased separately, could be a bit wonky. But there were solutions to that.

“If the tap didn’t work, you got a screwdriver and just popped the top off and dunked your glass in,” Fred Matt said.

Or, as one beerball fan posted on a nostalgic thread at BeerAdvocate.com:

“Tap?, we didn't need no stinkin' tap... Me and my fellow underaged friends drank plenty of Matt's beer balls in high school and we just cut the top out with a sharp knife and dipped our cups in. Best part was spraying the first timers with beer who excitedly stood near the beer ball when you first jabbed it with the knife.”

That pretty much sums up a beerball party right there. So does this, from a story titled “What Ever Happened to the Beer Ball?” at a blog called theforemostauthority:

“When the beer level got low, it was traditional to remove the tap, cut a hole in the top of the ball, drink the dregs and wear the empty ball around like an astronaut helmet.”

Benefits of the beerball were its lightweight portability and the ease of cleanup -- and you didn’t have to return it to get your deposit back. They were also reusable: Stories abound of people cutting up and reusing the balls as storage containers or summer camp lampshades, for example.

And there was the price: A 1987 Post-Standard story indicated Matt’s Beerballs were selling for $15.89 each at the Party Source Beverage Center in Syracuse, while the rival Genesee Draft Balls -- containing either Genny Cream Ale or Light -- sold for $18.49 each.

In the late 1980s, Matt started pushing its beerballs with an ad campaign produced by Eric Mower & Associates of Syracuse. The slogan was “Play Ball” and the campaign featured billboards, radio ads, signs towed by airplanes over summer events and even a mascot dressed in costume: A human beerball.

Meanwhile, Genesee had begun a similar campaign for its Draft Balls.

For a few years, “we had no competitors,” Fred Matt said. “Genesee was next after us, and then Coors and Bud.”

Here’s a vintage ad for Coors’ version of the beerball, which it called the Party Ball:

Matt Brewing at one point sold beerballs as far away as California. They were especially popular all along the East Coast in summer, since they were perfect for beach parties, Fred Matt said.

“I like to say we sold 10 million of them,” Matt said. “But, really, we sold a ton.”

It was fun while it lasted. So what happened?

The end of the beerball era

“In my opinion they were always a niche product,” said David Rivers, who first sold them with his father at Galeville Grocery and then for ten years while working for a beer distributor in Buffalo.

Later, David Rivers founded an online beer accessory and party supply company called KegWorks, based in Amherst near Buffalo. His site sold beerball taps until those containers disappeared, and has since become a leading online retailer for today’s hot draft beer system, the kegerator.

The beerball was a victim of simple economics, Rivers said.

“To make it worth it for the big guys (brewers and distributors), they needed volume and many beer wholesalers just didn’t want to bother with them,” Rivers said. “They also took up a lot of valuable supermarket cooler space.”

The 1987 Post-Standard story, written during the beerball’s heyday, bears that out. It contains this observation:

“Of the 187.5 million barrels the beer industry brewed in 1986, said Jerry Steinman, publisher and editor of Beer Marketer's Insights, an industry newsletter, ‘I would be surprised if beer ball sales were over 100,000 barrels.’ “

The 1987 story quotes Terry Gras, then serving as Matt’s public relations manager, saying beerball sales accounted for less than 15 percent of the brewery’s total sales.

Brad Wladis, then co-owner of the Party Source, told the Post-Standard writer the beerball was never the best bargain. “If you compare it dollar for dollar, a quarter or a half keg is a much better buy," Wladis said.

Fred Matt cites several reasons for the decline, starting with the price. Initially, Matt Brewing had a good deal on the plastic, but later that got more expensive. As plastic prices rose, so did the cost of the beerball.

“When the price was, say, $14.99 for a beer ball -- for 55 12-ounce beers -- well that was a pretty damn good deal,” he said. “But when the price broke the $20 marker, it became cost-prohibitive.”

Another factor, for Matt Brewing at least, was the surge in the then-relatively new phenomenon of light beer. “We didn’t have a light beer to put in that package, and that’s what people wanted,” Matt said.

That old beerball nostalgia

Decades after it disappeared, the beerball still evokes fond memories and periodic calls for its return. In the summer of 2016, for example, the Utica area country station, Big Frog 104, tried to rally the Mohawk Valley into demanding a return of the beerball.

Just last month, Matt (Saranac) posted an item to Facebook for #tbt (Throw Back Thursday): “Round. Portable. All-American. Does anyone miss the Beerball? We do.” The brewery has also tweeted about it:

Also in April, former Syracuse broadcasting personality Jim Reith sparked waves of nostalgia with his Facebook post: “Anybody wanna go in on a Matt’s beerball and a case of OV splits?” (OV splits are whole other story).

In one of the many responses to Reith’s post, Daniel MacAlpine commented: “Just throw some J. Geils in the 8-track player, fire up the Olds 442 and I’m there man.”

But could the beerball make a comeback?

Matt Brewing/Saranac, the originator, has considered it, but hasn’t pulled the trigger, Fred Matt said.

“There’s certainly a lot of nostalgia -- it was an item that people loved,” he said. “So, yeah, we’ve looked a bringing it back, but probably in a much smaller package and lower price point. But, you know, it’s not going to make any money.”

Despite the nostalgia, Matt said, the times have changed. One reason is that modern parties feature so many more options than beer.

“You go to a party now, there’s seltzer, light beer, imports, craft beers, maybe some wine,” he said. “The days when everybody at the party stood around the same keg all drinking the same beer -- that doesn’t happen any more.”

Yet there is always hope.

“I think some of the craft breweries could do a nice business in them if the empty balls and tapping equipment were to be made again,” David Rivers of KegWorks said. “Those things were always great for parties in so many ways.”

Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.