Does pabst own any actual brewing facilities or do they contract brew? Having this discussion with a coworker and can't find anything readily apparent via google. THanks!
No, but they are supposed to open one for small volume offerings this year in Milwaukee. MillerCoors brews most of their beer and has done so since the late 90's.
Pabst was bought by Heileman in 1982, which took some of Pabst's best selling brands (Lone Star, Henry Weinhard) and breweries (Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, OR, Lone Star in San Antonio and Pabst's most modern brewery in Pabst Perry, GA) and spun-off a "new", much weaker Pabst --- Heileman's way around an anti-trust ruling by the DoJ (the 3rd largest brewery buying the 4th largest in the US wasn't going to be approved). That is when Pabst first started having some of their brands contract-brewed by Heileman, for regional markets where they no long had breweries. That "new" Pabst was eventually purchased by the S&P Corp. (General-Falstaff-Pearl) a few years later and by the 1990s, all their brands and breweries were folded into "Pabst", owned by the successor to S&P, Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust (Paul Kalmanovitz, S&P's owner, died in the late 80s). By 1995, Stroh bought Heileman and continued to brew some Pabst brands, picking up more Pabst production when they closed the flagship and largest brewery in Milwaukee. After Pabst moved most of their contracts to Miller, contributing further to Stroh's decline, Stroh shutdown and their brands and some breweries were divided up among Pabst and Miller. Miller even bought Pabst's Olympia brewery in WA and ran that for a few years. Pabst was stilling operating both their Pearl brewery in Texas and Stroh's old Schaefer brewery in eastern PA (which they bought when Stroh closed in '99) up to around 2002, when they became what they themselves proclaimed to be a "virtual brewery". Besides Miller (and, eventually, MillerCoors) Pabst has also contract-brewed some of their over 45 brands at The Lion, City-La Crosse, Cold Spring, F. X. Matt and Wisconsin Brewing Co.
In the past wasn't Pabst known for being rather ruthless for buying and closing breweries or was that another brewer? Cheers and GREAT info!
Yeah, that was pretty much S&P/Paul Kalmanovitz's business model - they probably closed more breweries than any other company. But Heileman probably was up there, too, if you add in the ones they spun-off, and those that wound up with Stroh (only to be closed, as well).
Empires rise and fall.....bet they were rolling over in their graves when MillerCoors bought them out! What comes around goes around!
Jess - great read as always. I love when I see a topic like this because I know you will be in there and I know I will read a great story. Thanks.
MillerCoors didn't buy Pabst out (if that's what you meant by "them"?). They continue to contract-brew most of the Pabst brands and even had some ability to "approve" the two purchases noted below (according to some news reports at the time), given their reliance on the contract deal which accounts for around 8-9% of the beer brewed at MC breweries. The successor to S&P, Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, was finally able to sell Pabst - more than a decade after being ordered to by the IRS since a "charitable" organization (which in their case was really just a tax dodge) by law can't own an operating, profit-making business - to the Metropolous family in 2010. They turned around and sold it to a former Stroh and Russian beverage company executive, Eugene Kashpar, along with the TSG Consumer Partners equity firm, in 2014. Despite all the nonsense about the "revival" of the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand (which, at around 2.7 m bbl., is still nowhere near what it sold at it's peak in the pre-Heileman buyout period - over 10m bbl), the actual Pabst Brewing Co., in the period after they bought most of the Heileman-Stroh brands in '99 and eventually closed their last two breweries, has lost more than half its sales - going from selling 14 million barrels of beer in 1999 to 5.8 million in 2014. Even more amazing is that, if one looks at their brands' history together (i.e., most of the portfolio of Schlitz/Stroh, Heileman, Olympia, S&P and Pabst) - combined they were selling 60-70 million barrels of beer in the late '70s-early '80s (the period before the 1982/83 Heileman-Pabst deal, which included Pabst buying Olympia/Hamm at the same time) - more than #1 Anheuser-Busch.
Hamm's---back in 93 you could buy a monstrous bottle of the slightly salty libation (from memory mind you) for 99 cents at the local shop and rob. In your opinion can these brews be revived and improved upon like say Hudephol did----and VASTLY improved the recipe with their amber lager which is delicious compared to old "HUDY"? Moerlein did about the same as well with a re-branding and updated recipe as well as a lot of new recipes that are solid. https://www.facebook.com/hudepohlamberlager/ Cheers
Yeah, it's now a Miller brand - but as I understand it, the brand had limited, upper Mid-West distribution for most of the time as a Miller brand - but I've recently seen it in NJ, so I guess they're putting some effort into it. Hamm in the mid-50s-early '70s was among the Top 10 brewers in the US (peaking at #5 in 1956-57), and, beside their home brewery in St. Paul, MN, owned breweries in Texas, California and Maryland. One of the strangest parts of that 1999 deal when Stroh shutdown and sold it's brands to Pabst and Miller was that, as part of the deal, Pabst sold the Hamm's and Olde English 800 brands (and the Olympia brewery in WA) to Miller. The initial thought was "Well, why did Miller want those two brands from Pabst, when the Stroh-Heileman portfolio they were dividing up had several other popular malt liquors and countless mid-West based AAL's?" Pabst had owned Olde English since buying Blitz-Weinhard in 1979 and Hamm's since buying Olympia (which owned Lone Star & Hamm) in the winter of 1982/3 during that complex 3-way deal with Heileman that resulted in the "new" Pabst. The Oly brewery in Tumwater, OTOH, seems to have been part of the agreement that Miller take-over Stroh's contract to brew BBC's Samuel Adams beers for West Coast distribution. Stroh had been doing them at the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland, but that closed with the end of Stroh. A few years later, Miller closed Tumwater anyway and got into a lawsuit with BBC over the contract. That incident, and the collapse of 3 of the big 6 brewers in the country (Stroh, Heileman & Pabst), owners of multimillion barrel breweries with enough unused capacity for BBC (along with the financial problems ownership changes at Genesee/High Falls), probably led to them to eventually buying the multi-million bbl. capacity former Schaefer-Stroh-Pabst-Diageo brewery in eastern PA.
Overall, what is the taste opinion of the Pabst fans here today vs 80's or 90's brew? I had a PBR last nite and it was great for a adjunct. I never drank it 20 yrs ago.
I used to drink Christian Moerlein lager a lot back in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was a great beer and the beer that turned me on to better beer. In my opinion it was better than the updated recipe Helles lager CM now sells, though I agree that the updated CM offerings are solid.
Same here-----loved it back when it had the old man on the front, and that recipe seems lost to the ages. It was strong, malty, and had a nice herbal hops kick (from memory). A solid brew. They also had a honey brown, but never was much of a fan of that one.
