Schlitz Shelved After 177 Years As Demand For America’s Working Man’s Beer Drops

If you’ve got an unopened can of Schlitz on the kitchen shelf, hire a Brink’s guard – it’s now a collector’s item.

“The beer that made Milwaukee famous,” as a longtime TV commercial went, is going bottoms up.

Wisconsin Brewing Co. and Milwaukee Brat House are planning farewell events for the beer later this month.

What now turns out to have been the largest Schlitz going-away party was the most-recent national GOP convention in Milwaukee, which Schlitz hosted.

Wisconsin Brewing released its final batch on May 23.

Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, based in Milwaukee and founded in 1849, was once the largest producer of beer in the U.S.

Schlitz was later bought by Stroh Brewing and then by Pabst Brewing.

The company was founded by August Krug in 1849, but ownership passed to Joseph Schlitz in 1858 when he married Krug’s widow.

Schlitz first became the largest beer producer in the U.S. in 1902 and enjoyed that status at several points during the first half of the 20th century, exchanging the title with Anheuser-Busch multiple times during the 1950s.

An often-circulated story of Schlitz donating thousands of barrels of beer to Chicago residents after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was finally proven to be a myth.

But it also became a great marketing tool for the company, fiction or not.🍺