Male and female adolescents ages 12-18 recruited through public schools (n=401) each viewed four beer advertisements from a pool of 48 randomly selected from national television. They judged the ages of the youngest persons shown using the product in the ad. Almost 40 percent reported that the youngest person was under 21 years old in at least one of the four ads viewed. Amount of alcohol use interacted with junior versus senior high school status in predicting whether or not participants reported one or more underage persons in the beer ads; the relationship between alcohol use and such perceptions was positive for junior high and negative for senior high school students. Identifying underage persons in the ads was not related to polarity of responses to the ad. Results suggest that beer industry guidelines are not achieving their stated goal of ensuring that persons shown in beer advertisements appear consistently to be age 21 or older. More tentatively, this failure may be associated with inappropriate drinking decisions by younger adolescents. 2 tables and 21 references