THE BEER THAT MADE MILT FAMY WALK US. Milt's File picks up an essay suggesting that (real gusto in a great light beer) Schlitz destroyed the meaning of "gusto." The essayist's preferred connotations for the word appeal to a company only slightly less refined than those who know how to use "if and only if" correctly. That strikes me as a somewhat more plausible explanation than a 40 year ago marketing campaign destroyed by the company's misguided effort to achieve greater "productivity" by adding accelerants to the wort.

Soon after, the brewery adopted something called ABF, accelerated batch fermentation, which allowed them to brew more beer more quickly and which soon enough would be adopted by all other giant breweries. But it turned out that the Schlitz faithful didn't like the change in taste ...

And a friend of the family with a Ph.D. in biochemistry was instrumental in fostering [groan] this technological blind alley.

One hopes the essayist knows more about art than he does about business.

Worse, Schlitz appeared to be compromising quality in order to increase profits.

The market grades on a somewhat more stringent curve than I do. Schlitz sold out to Stroh in the middle 1980s, one of the few corporate expansions in Detroit in the past quarter century.