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.

Pabst apparently licensed a Verona, Wisconsin craft brewer called Wisconsin Brewing, who do contract production for a number of labels, to brew a ceremonial final batch of Schlitz.

Now that it's clear – after a lot of confusion about whether it was being discontinued only in cans or entirely – that Pabst Brewing Company has ceased making Schlitz, the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous appears kaput after 177 years.

But Wisconsin craft beer legend Kirby Nelson has gotten permission from Pabst to brew a batch of the now-defunct Schlitz at Wisconsin Brewing Co. in Verona using a recipe based on Schlitz brewhouse operations logs from 1948.

“Since Schlitz is ‘The Beer that Made Milwaukee Famous,’ I decided to brew a beer that would be representative of the time Schlitz was on top of the brewing world,” says Nelson. “This brew will represent The Golden Age of Schlitz.”

Starting Saturday, May 23 you can pre-order 16-ounce four-packs of Schlitz online or via QR code in the taproom. The beer must be picked up at the brewery in Verona on or after Saturday, June 27.

It's prudent of the brewmaster to use the 1948 recipe.

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.

That accelerated batch fermentation might have pencilled out well in the accounting office, but drinkers hated it.  And thus Schlitz went from sponsoring the Milwaukee Circus Parade, complete with a steam train to move the wagons, to selling out to Stroh's to becoming a label without a brew-kettle to its name, even with the restored recipes.  Note that in the early years of Milwaukee Hamilton, the senior class chant was "PBR the best by far."

All of which prompts Pajamas Media's David Manney to offer a lament for Industrial Milwaukee of the American High.

Schlitz's timeline reads like a survey course in American history with a bar tab attached. When [August] Krug started brewing in 1849, the California Gold Rush was pulling dreamers west, Zachary Taylor sat in the White House, and the United States was still a young republic learning how large and relentless it wanted to become. [Joseph] Schlitz later watched the country split during the Civil War, survive Reconstruction, absorb waves of immigrants, and grow into an industrial power. Milwaukee's breweries weren't side notes in that story; they were part of the muscle, sweat, and appetite of a nation building itself by the barrel, railcar, and factory whistle.

Schlitz endured the Great Chicago Fire era, the rise of the railroads, two world wars, the Great Depression, and Prohibition, which shut down legal brewing from 1920 to 1933.

Ah, yes, those pre-air conditioning summer evenings, when the church chimes and shift change whistles would reach our house successively from West Allis, West Milwaukee, and the Valley.

The 1960s, though?  It wasn't only railroading that suffered through an era of E-T-T-S moments then.

Bowling alleys, corner bars, union halls, hunting cabins, and Friday fish fries in Wisconsin's ubiquitous supper clubs formed their own social network long before anybody needed a password.

Schlitz was still part of American life when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in [1969]. It kept going through Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, the Reagan years, the Berlin Wall's fall, 9/11, the internet age, smartphones, and every other modern miracle that somehow made life faster and less relaxing.

The fall came slowly, then all at once. Recipe changes, labor trouble, shifting tastes, and corporate sales chipped away at the old giant. Stroh bought Schlitz in 1982, and Pabst acquired the brand in 1999, reviving the classic formula in 2008.

The fish fries and supper clubs remain, and it is again tailgating season at what used to be Miller Park.  The spent brewing grain adding its nutrients to Milorganite, not so much.