The beer that made Milwaukee famous just got killed by a warehouse bill.
Schlitz Premium, which has been on US shelves since 1849, is being discontinued by parent company Pabst Brewing. Pabst told Milwaukee Magazine that the brand is being put "on hiatus" because the cost to store and ship it kept climbing.
That's the part worth pausing on, since sales didn't drop off a cliff. The brand got too expensive to keep on shelves long before it ran out of drinkers.
Schlitz traces back to August Krug's tavern brewery in Milwaukee, with Joseph Schlitz taking over after marrying Krug's widow and turning it into one of the largest beer brands in the world.
The slogan "the beer that made Milwaukee famous" wasn't an exaggeration. Schlitz was once the biggest brewery in the country, bigger than Anheuser-Busch, until Anheuser-Busch overtook it in the late 1950s.
The beer rose to prominence in part because of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, when the brewery shipped beer to Chicago residents who couldn't access clean drinking water. That history still pulls customers in today, with Joseph Conforti, general manager of Milwaukee Brat House, telling ABC7 Chicago the brand keeps its draw on nostalgia alone.
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Schlitz lost its mojo in the 1970s after a cost-cutting recipe change altered the taste, and the brand then changed hands twice, sold to Stroh's in 1982 and acquired by Pabst in 1999.
But this isn't the end of a 50-year demand slide, since Pabst explicitly cited storage and shipping costs in its statement. The reason: logistics costs climbed faster than the brand could absorb them.
Pabst's head of brand strategy, Zac Nadile, said the company has seen "continued increases in our costs to store and ship certain products." Pabst left the door open to bringing the brand back if costs ease, but freight prices have been unpredictable since 2022.
For investors, this is the small-cap consumer story playing out in real time, with logistics inflation squeezing every legacy brand that doesn't have the scale to negotiate cheaper shipping. The second- and third-tier brands inside big portfolios are the first to get cut.
Wisconsin Brewing Company is brewing "the last Schlitz" on May 23 in Verona, Wisconsin, with a limited release hitting shelves June 27. Local bars and breweries in Milwaukee are planning farewell events for that final batch, which WBC brewmaster Kirby Nelson said the brand "deserved a proper sendoff" for.
After 177 years, that sounds about right.
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