THE BEER THAT MADE MILT FAMY WALK US.

Poor Schlitz, for the past forty years an orphan brand.

Once upon a time, Schlitz sold Old Milwaukee at a lower price than "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Furious" as a subtle form of price discrimination.  A few locals were in on the secret.

More recently, Miller Coors leased excess capacity at some of their plants to produce all of the other Great Milwaukee beers: draft-brewed Blatz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and for all I know Meister Brau and Braumeister.  (Well, at least Old Milwaukee, see above, and Lone Star.)

It's now come down to Miller Makes It Wrong.  " Pabst Brewing Company and MillerCoors are going to trial, with hipster favorite Pabst contending that MillerCoors wants to put it out of business by ending a longstanding partnership through which it brews Pabst’s beers."

The dispute involves the profitability of Miller's excess capacity.

The mind boggles at a single company brewing Miller Lite (they took out a trademark on the mis-spelling) and Coors Light, which is academic at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, where Budweiser is for cooking whilst Sprecher or Spotted Cow or whoever's local Marzen is on offer is for drinking.

The mind also boggles at Pabst being located in San Antonio, which used to be where Pearl Brewery switched its works with a home-built flat car motor.  As close as Miller was to Cold Spring Shops, they never had an in-house plant railway, relying on The Milwaukee Road, as did Schlitz, which had rail-served facilities at both the Chestnut Street and the North Milwaukee end of the Beer Line.  But I digress.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN. I've put up a few posts about the misguided efforts by the late Schlitz Brewing Company to boost productivity by the use of chemical additives in their beer. It killed the company, which is now a division of a reconstituted Pabst Brewing Company. At one time, Schlitz was property of Detroit's Stroh Brewing, and after years of false steps, the real Schlitz is back in the Motor City.

Schlitz's Classic 1960s beer is back on shelves after nearly three decades, prompted by demands from aficionados here and across the country hankering for the maltier, full-bodied lager. The beer was altered in the late 1960s and 1970s to meet changing consumer tastes and boost production.

"Our goal was to bring back the taste of the 1960s when beer wasn't watered down," said Brad Hittle, chief marketing officer at Schlitz. "The response has been overwhelming, and we're proud to bring back the beer that generations of Schlitz lovers enjoyed over the years."

It wasn't "watered down, it was "chemically enhanced" by some highly credentialed biochemists brought in to "improve" on centuries of Bohemian and Bavarian traditions.

The first cases of the classic 1960s formula, based on the original recipe, arrived in Metro Detroit a few weeks ago. Schlitz, now owned by Pabst Brewing Co., officially kicks off the beer's return to Metro Detroit today with deliveries to several bars and stores. The brew has been available in Chicago, Minneapolis and Milwaukee, where Schlitz was founded in 1856.

The classic Schlitz should be welcomed by today's beer drinkers, who are more choosy than previous generations and drink different kinds of beers on different occasions, said Julia Herz, spokeswoman for the Colorado-based Brewers Association.

Speaking of "choosy," today was the last day of classes, which is occasion to draw down the inventory of Sprecher chilling in the garage. When that runs out, I'll make do with Guinness. There is Pabst in the larder, but that's to strengthen the chili.

The story of the return of the original Schlitz recipe to production is a canonical example of the folly of downsizing.

The company decided to go back to the 1960s recipe a couple years ago after being inundated with phone calls and letters from customers who wanted to share their thoughts and memories of the original Schlitz beer.

The recipe, however, was never documented. So in 2006, the company's award-winning brewmaster, Bob Newman, interviewed former brewmasters to piece together the classic recipe. A year later, Newman had enough information to re-create the formula, and the first batch of original Schlitz beer was distributed to stores and bars in Minneapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee to rave reviews.

The beer is more expensive because better quality ingredients are being used.

"It's maltier, hoppier and more full-bodied," said Justin Kelly, brand manager for Schlitz.

If not for the lateness of the hour and the knowledge of a busy work day tomorrow, that would be occasion for yet another Sprecher. Roll out the barrel!

REAL GUSTO IN A GREAT LIGHT BEER. A gentleman who attended my parents' church earned a lot of money using his biochemistry degree to accelerate the action of enzymes in beer brewing. The accountants called it productivity gains. The drinkers used less generous verbiage. Forty years of mugging by reality later, the original Schlitz formula is back.

Within days of the Schlitz 1960s formula being brought back to Milwaukee, the beer was largely sold out - snapped up by both older guys who remember the beer from back in the day, and younger drinkers curious about the fuss.

What intrigues is the corporate incest that has transpired.

Pabst Brewing Co., which owns the Schlitz brand, is expanding production based on the heavy demand in Milwaukee ...

That "owns the Schlitz brand" is not excess verbiage.

Compared with the Schlitz sold in cans, the reformulated Schlitz in bottles has a more full-bodied taste. Pabst, based in suburban Chicago, owns dozens of brands but doesn't operate any breweries. Classic Schlitz is brewed under a contract arrangement by MillerCoors LLC at its Eden, N.C., brewery.

Go figure.

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.

THE VAPIDITY OF CULTURE STUDIES.

Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, I give you "Making an Old-world Milwaukee: German Heritage, Nostalgia, and the Reshaping of the Twentieth Century City," a doctoral dissertation submitted by one Joseph B. Walzer to the history faculty at Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  The opening paragraphs of the abstract spell out The Narrative, while ticking all the Proper Boxes.

This dissertation examines the importance of white ethnicity, and especially Germanness, in the “civic branding” and urban restructuring efforts of city officials, civic boosters, and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Scholars have increasingly identified the significant roles the “revival” of European ethnic identities played in maintaining white racial privilege in response to the Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s. I contribute to these new veins of scholarship by tracing the continued and evolving prominence of Germanness in the Midwestern city of Milwaukee, long after common assumptions of ethnic assimilation might have expected such nineteenth century German ethnic identities to have “melted” into American society. My research in civic and community organization records, as well as local newspaper stories, reveals the active, yet often-uncoordinated efforts of various cultural agents and power brokers to maintain white ethnic, German hegemony in Milwaukee between the 1920s and 1980s. The combined crises of World War, National Prohibition, and a perceived weakening of German influence in the diversifying city prompted civic boosters and business interests who relied on the privileged place of Germanness in Milwaukee’s social order to secure German hegemony in nostalgic memories of “Old Milwaukee” in the 1920s through 1940s. These narratives offered carefully crafted visions of Milwaukee’s Germanness as productive, pragmatic, yet fun, and characterized German cultural contributions—especially the festivity and hospitality associated with gemütlichkeit—as essential to the city’s nineteenth century development and charming Old World character. As working class politics, growing racial inequality, and civil rights movements challenged Milwaukee’s prevailing social order in the decades following the Second World War, business leaders, developers, and pro-business public officials deployed these narratives of heritage and nostalgia in their efforts to reimagine the city as a post-industrial tourist and entertainment destination. In the process, such constructions effectively secured white ethnic claims to power and privilege in urban space.

That's not what the ensuing analysis of public records shows: there's a bit of discussion about whether all of North Third Street should be renamed for Martin Luther King, or whether the section just north of downtown with Usinger's and Mader's and the remnants of the railyards for loading beer could be Old World Third Street.  (It's now King Drive from Wisconsin Avenue north.)  The business efforts to create entertainment space along Brady Street (once a hang-out for the counterculture) and in Walker's Point (now that the foundries and coke works have closed, there are taverns to repurpose) are more or less standard case studies in the tussle between existing residents and gentrifiers, and at best tangentially about any "privileged place of Germanness."