
The Fall of Schlitz: How Milwaukee’s Famous Beer Became Infamous (2010) - vezycash
https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-famous-beer-became-infamous
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RickJWagner
I remember when Schlitz was on top, along with Hamm's (love the blue colors on
the can) and Pabst Blue Ribbon. If you lived west of the Rockies, you could
get Coor's (giving it a forbidden-fruit magnetism for everyone else.)

And the great jingles with the beer commercials: "When you've got the time,
we've got the beer", "From the land of sky blue waters", etc.

Times gone by. In retrospect, they were good.

~~~
kevinmchugh
The appeal of Coors was so great that the 2nd highest grossing film of 1977,
behind only Star Wars, was about a smuggling run to bring Coors to Georgia.
It's kind of shocking that was big enough to be the premise of a film.

~~~
antonvs
> It's kind of shocking that was big enough to be the premise of a film.

I don't think most people at the time were really aware of Coors smuggling
being "big enough." I know I wasn't. It's just that it provided a premise for
an illegal trucking run. Here's some background, from
[https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/smokey-and-the-bandit-and-
coo...](https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/smokey-and-the-bandit-and-coors/) :

"Turns out the plot of Smokey and the Bandit is centered on one lovable
tycoon’s deep-seated thirst for Coors. ... The back story of how Smokey got
made is a bit more interesting: prolific Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham was
working on the set of Gator and was given a gift of (illegal) Coors.

"You read that right. Coors, ubiquitous potion of good time brohood, was once
illegal in certain states. The movie was made in the late ’70s, and at that
time, Coors was actually a regional product. It was made in Colorado, but
because it wasn’t pasteurized and contained no preservatives, shipping could
get a little tricky. Coors didn’t get national distribution until 1986. Which
is why, in the 1970s, Coors wasn’t actually licensed to sell east of the
Mississippi, making it, briefly, a rare and sought-after product.

"Coors’ cachet aside, Needham wasn’t a big beer fan, but he did notice that
the Coors would disappear out of his trailer in small increments. Finally he
figured out the maid was stealing two bottles a day. Realizing how important
this beer was, to some anyway, he thought “bootlegging Coors would make a good
plotline for a movie.”

"So in between being thrown around and set on fire and stuff, Needham actually
wrote the script for Smokey and the Bandit. He showed it to his roommate at
the time, who thought the dialogue was “horrible” but the plot was good
enough. We’ve all had opinionated roommates, but Needham’s roommate was
actually Burt Reynolds, the number one box office star at the time, and the
inspiration for many a misbegotten mustache. Reynolds helped Needham get the
movie made, and the rest is Dixie car chase and Coors history."

~~~
donarb
I recall when Coors pushed distribution out to Seattle. It was a rare treat
and some stores overstocked, storing the beer on the floor outside the
coolers. That beer went bad pretty quick and killed the mystique for quite a
few customers.

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qbaqbaqba
Some paragraphs seems to be swapped: the one introducing ABF comes after the
one describing it's impact.

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oblib
I remember Shiltz but never tasted it. Old Style was another good beer that
mucked with their recipe and chased their base away.

Quite a few good beers have been mucked up over the past ten years of brewery
buyouts. Boulevard Brewery and Goose Island are two that I used to love that
got ruined that way.

~~~
kevinmchugh
Which boulevard and goose products have decreased in quality? I have a friend
who managed to tell by tasting blindly when they moved Honker's production to
New York, and even he said it got back to normal a month or two later.

Duvel is absolutely a best-case scenario for a brewery purchase and it seems
like Boulevard has been able to continue doing what they do well.

Ballast Point is one of the only breweries I have lost all interest in post-
buyout.

~~~
monksy
GI 312.

~~~
kevinmchugh
What changes do you perceive? I've had a lot of 312 before and after the sale
and I've always found it a pretty mild wheat ale.

~~~
monksy
The taste is different and isn't as wheaty/hefewiesen-like as it was before.
This was reported by many people.

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Animats
What tech companies come to mind for this?

Myspace.

Hewlett-Packard.

Symantec.

~~~
adventured
Gateway, Zynga, Groupon

AMD has had a few cycles of it over their history.

There was a stretch of bleak years where Adobe's reputation had become quite
bad (not least of which was their software becoming one of the biggest
security risks).

Microsoft for the better part of a decade had burned its reputation, between
some really bad security problems and Vista. If you had polled most techies
about Microsoft in the midst of Vista, the resounding view would have been
that they had a dim future. It has taken many years to recover some of that
lost reputation.

Electronic Arts is a company that has managed to remain quite successful over
time despite becoming belligerently infamous at times for their product
quality and corporate behavior. They had some very bad financial performance
years, but have somehow managed to recover from that despite not really
improving their reputation. Probably the benefits of being one of the few
companies left standing capable of putting out hyper expensive tier one
titles.

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topmonk
The thing that seems to be missing from this article is that even if existing
customers didn't notice the gradual decline, how would they ever expect to get
new customers?

~~~
mikestew
And that’s precisely it: by the time I got to drinking in the early 80s,
Schlitz was known as a shit beer. But to answer your question, the article
concludes that there was no plan to get new customers. It is argued that
C-levels knew AB and Pabst were going to nibble away at them, so they went for
short-term profits, at the expense of a long-term they didn’t feel was going
to exist.

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itronitron
The contemporary Schlitz mistake for the big companies now seems to be the
gradual transition of consumers from customers to product. It is hard for me
to believe that Schlitz was ever a dominant brand so I am interested to see
how many years the current batch of internet companies have left in them.

~~~
nerdponx
They've learned some lessons. Just look at what happened to Myspace, nobody
wants to be that again.

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cafard
When I started to drink beer in the mid-1970s, Schlitz was pretty terrible. I
don't know that it had that reputation--it was in a lot of stores and on tap
in a lot of bars. However, even in a world of undistinguished lagers, it stood
out as bad.

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philjohn
There's a line in "The American Dream" in the musical Miss Saigon that goes
"Schlitz down the drain / POP / The Champagne" which always amused me - even
the lowly Engineer who idolises America knows that it's not a great drink to
be serving in his dream "Club thats 4 star"

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gooseus
My only knowledge of Schlitz was from Super Troopers:

Farza: Gimme 6 Schlitzes!

Bartender: We don't have Schlitz...

Farza: Yeah, whatever's free.

~~~
S_A_P
minor quibble

Farva..

as in "Just get a large Farva" 'No I dont want a large Farva, I want a liter
of cola'

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lamarpye
Schlitz tastes (a lot) better if you are on boat.

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partycoder
Cutting quality is tactics, preserving quality is strategy.

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CyberDildonics
This probably didn't help

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCOSejS1SSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCOSejS1SSY)

~~~
biounit
Schmidt's was the sportsman's beer. Different than Schlitz.

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jandrese
Middle managers kept cutting costs at the expense of quality, eventually
putting out a product that was noticeably worse than its competitor Budwieser
and not that much cheaper.

The result is pretty much what you'd expect. People ditched the inferior
product, although they did make some nice profits for a few years before the
business imploded. No doubt some middle managers got some nice fat bonuses.

~~~
djrogers
This was absolutely not a failure of ‘middle management’ - this was a top-down
strategy to increase profits and the efficiency of their breweries. The
Uihlein family owned the brewery and made the calls to gradually change the
brewing methods and ingredients hoping people wouldn’t notice the incremental
changes.

The owners of a company are generally not referred to as ‘middle management’.

~~~
acjohnson55
It's interesting to me consider why it is that middle management is considered
so reviled in our culture. It's kind of like, people want to punch up, but not
so far upward to put themselves at risk of angering ownership. I also suppose
that in a culture that idolizes both ownership and manual labor, people
leadership at the scale of middle management is poorly understood and
undervalued.

~~~
philwelch
Historically, middle management was the dumping ground for people who had
enough tenure that you had to promote them somewhere, but weren’t trusted to
actually run the company. They also serve a strategic “bad cop” function at
times, letting upper management remain likable and respected.

