A ‘Correct’ Quaff : Beer: Rhino Chasers bills itself as an environmentally aware brew. The African Wildlife Foundation gets 51% of the profits, which are used to help protect endangered species.

In the good old days, the only social choice a barfly needed to make was whether to ask for a glass or to drink directly from the bottle.

Beer, after all, was meant to be served up in a musty tavern by a guy named Rusty whose shirt is stained. How politically correct can one be while quaffing a brewski?

But now there is Rhino Chasers, which bills itself as an environmentally conscious brew. Each bottle carries the logo of the African Wildlife Foundation, and 51% of the profits go to that Washington organization for preserving the rhinoceros and other endangered species.

W. Scott Griffiths is the man behind Rhino. His amber ale is concocted at the Angeles Brewery, a claustrophobic place behind a transmission repair shop in Chatsworth.

Having hit the market a year ago, Rhino Chasers sells about 3,000 cases a month in selected restaurants and stores in seven states from California to Florida. And Griffiths is now adding a lager to his line.

Griffiths chose to blend a taste of philanthropy with the hops and malt at the suggestion of a friend. “It seemed like a good cause,” he said. And, being a career marketing executive, he recognized a gimmick when it rumbled across the jungle at him.

Championing an environmental cause couldn’t hurt with the tony Westside drinking crowd. The stance also lent itself to several of the slogans that advertising people thrive on:

“Tastes Great. Less Killing.”

“Buy a Rhino. Save a Rhino.”

As for the beer, Rhino Chasers has received favorable reviews from that curious breed who call themselves beer connoisseurs.

Michael Jackson, author of “The New World Guide to Beer,” paid tribute to “its perfumey maltiness of aroma and palate; its smooth, quite full body and its satisfying balance of hoppy dryness in the finish.”

Added James D. Robertson, the beery scribe who wrote “The Connoisseur’s Guide to Beer”: “Bright amber, big head, light citrus-ale aroma . . . bright and complex, dry hop aftertaste, good body, a pleasure to sip.”

These guys wouldn’t last five minutes at a fraternity chug-a-thon.

Even Griffiths distances himself from such pomposity.

“That’s the difference between wine and beer,” he said. “Beer isn’t snobby. Beer is fun.”

In fact, Griffiths wasn’t even thinking of heavy-set, horned and endangered mammals when he came up with his brew. Something of a beer aficionado, he merely wanted to pay a microbrewery to whip up a dozen or so cases of special beer each year for his marketing company softball team.

Matching wits with Angeles’ brew master, Dick Belliveau, Griffiths came up with an ale that he liked and named it in honor of a clan of Hawaiian surfers who call themselves Rhino Chasers because they ride a particularly ferocious wave--shaped like a rhino’s horn if viewed from the side--on Oahu’s famed North Shore.

The beer was such a hit with friends and co-workers that he began marketing it for retail sale.

“But it got difficult explaining the surfing heritage of the name,” Griffiths said.

That’s when his friend, a public relations man, came up with the African connection.

At present, Rhino Chasers is available at stores such as Vendome and Pavilions in the San Fernando Valley. A six-pack costs around $8.

The label has yet to turn a profit. But because he agreed to help out the wildlife foundation, Griffiths recently donated $2,000. “My hand shook violently while I was writing the check,” he recalled. Rhino Chasers also sent along $3,000 worth of beer for the foundation’s fund-raising parties.

“A brewery is not the sort of thing one would usually be associated with when one is a conservation organization. If Schlitz or Miller had come to us, we would have said no,” said Diana E. McMeekin, the foundation’s executive vice president. “But all Scott’s intentions seemed so very good. And it is a very small brewery.

“It would be rather churlish not to accept his generosity,” she said.

Griffiths, for his part, says he has discovered that “it’s not that hard to do something positive. I joke about my hand shaking, but it actually felt good.”

Fine. But does he realize that the pressure he has put on bar-goers?

When you have to be conscientious about your beer guzzling, something’s amiss in the land of sky-blue waters.