Pabst Brewing Company has discontinued Schlitz Premium, a beer brand that traces its origins to a Milwaukee tavern in 1849 and was once the best-selling beer in the world. Pabst confirmed the discontinuation after Wisconsin Brewing Company announced it would brew a final batch of the beer at its Verona, Wisconsin, brewery this week, according to Milwaukee Magazine.
“Unfortunately, we have seen continued increases in our costs to store and ship certain products and have had to make the tough choice to place Schlitz Premium on hiatus,” Zac Nadile, Pabst head of brand strategy, said in a statement to Milwaukee Magazine. “Any brand or packaging configuration that is put on hiatus is still a cherished part of our history and hopefully our future.”
Wisconsin Brewing brewmaster Kirby Nelson said he learned of the brand’s discontinuation from Jerry Glunz, general manager of Louis Glunz Beer in Chicago, whose family has distributed Schlitz since the late 19th century, according to Milwaukee Magazine. Nelson said he wanted the brand to go out with “dignity and respect” and received permission from Pabst to brew a final batch.
The farewell batch will use a composite recipe built from brewing logs dating to 1948, when Schlitz was the top-selling beer in the world, according to Milwaukee Magazine. The beer will be available for pre-order on May 23 on Wisconsin Brewing’s website, with a limited release scheduled for June 27.
A tavern brewery in Milwaukee, opened by August Krug in 1849, marked the beginning of what would become the Schlitz brand. After Krug died in 1856, bookkeeper Joseph Schlitz took over the business. An early turning point came with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, according to Fox Business: With Chicagoans cut off from safe drinking water, the brewery seized the moment by shipping supply directly into the stricken city. By 1934, just after Prohibition ended, Schlitz had become the top-selling beer in the world, according to Milwaukee Magazine.
What unraveled the brand was a series of decisions made in the early 1970s, according to Milwaukee Magazine: reformulation efforts aimed at reducing costs produced a beer that tasted so different from the original that drinkers abandoned it en masse. The Uihlein family, which had owned and operated the company for decades, sold Schlitz to Stroh Brewing in 1982. When Pabst relaunched the label in 2008 — nine years after acquiring it — the new version was pitched as a return to the beer’s 1960s character, yet it never managed to break out of niche appeal and recapture a mainstream audience.
Pabst has been discontinuing several of its nostalgia-driven brands as part of a broader culling of its portfolio, according to Milwaukee Magazine.
