I just purchased a 12 pack bottles of Schlitz beer and noticed it has an ABV of 4.6% vs the 1960’s formula which was at 4.7%. The Schlitz logo on the bottle is smaller too. It doesn’t taste nearly as good either. What are they doing?!!
The Schlitz I've seen here in the Twin Cities is coming out of La Crosse, instead of Milwaukee or wherever MC was brewing it previously. I imagine the ABV and label change was from changing the brewing location. I had a six-pack of Special Export a few weeks ago that was also out of La Crosse. I think it was 4.6% too. Probably the same beer as Schlitz just in a different package. I should check the ABV on Old Style next time I'm at the liquor store. Maybe it's all the same beer. The 1960's Schlitz "Gusto" hasn't been available in over a decade.
What I'm doing here is acknowledging a beer I haven't thought about in thirty plus years. I recall it was fondly referred to as schitz. So, they may have addressed a couple percentiles the TTB picked up on.
The last time I purchased special export, it was in brown bottles. I actually liked the green bottles better.
Thanks for posting this. A lot of breweries went belly up in the 70’s including Ballantine ,Rheingold,Piels,and Schaefer in and around NYC .
UPDATE: The La Crosse Old Style is also 4.6% ABV. The 30-packs of Old Milwaukee and Schmidt here were still out of Milwaukee.
The Schlitz Gusto and Olympia 95% Malt were seriously 2 of my favourites of the style whilst I was able to buy them. That reminds me. Beer For Drinking (BFD) from Sierra Nevada was also a favourite back in the day.
I thought it was understood - or maybe Pabst actually noted it? - that once the 60s recipe/Gusto replaced the economy recipe Pabst inherited from Stroh in every regional market, there would be only 1 Schlitz on the market in the US, the new revised Gusto recipe. IIRC not every MillerCoors brewery was set up to brew the new Schlitz (can't recall the specifics - maybe because it used a corn adjunct that wasn't corn syrup or it could have been the use of hop pellets vs hop extract?) the first batches came out of the now-defunct Eden NC. Later MC renovated Milwaukee to allow a broader range of recipes and Pabst did some promotion on Schlitz "returning to Milwaukee". Addendum - Here's one article. 1/29/2009 Schlitz again being brewed, bottled in Milwaukee
Could be. I seem to remember the '60s Gusto packaging disappearing in the early 2010s and went back to the plain Schlitz packaging. It was around the same period the Twinkie people that owned the Pabst labels at the time stopped all the Pabst label "upgrades" that the previous owners had tried (e.g. krausened Old Style, 95% malt Olympia, those Ballantine revivals) so I just assumed it was back to the old pre-Gusto Schlitz.
Yeah, well - either way, another dumb move dropping the "Gusto/60s recipe" labeling if that's all they did. It did have some cachet (now, did that result sales increases?). But, then, Pabst under the last 5 owners (McGowen & Smith [agreed to the Heileman takeover and spinoff], S&P, Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, Twinkie dudes, Blue Ribbon Partners) they've done a lot of stupid stuff and the few successes they've had - PBR revival, becoming the #3 US brewery due to the failure of #4 Stroh & #5 Heileman - weren't really their doing. (Although some claimed that moving Pabst's contract from Stroh to Miller is what pushed Stroh over the edge. ) Ahhh... I'd have to check on some of those failures, but I think for some of them your chronology is off. Metropoulos ownership of Pabst was 2010 - 2014, but pretty sure the Ballantine revived ales (IPA, Burton, Brewers Gold) were post-Twinkie, released and killed by the current ownership group. Plus you forgot the revived Pearl, Primo and Lucky Lager (maybe Jax, too?) but it was easy to miss them if you blinked.
This is funny and well written. Everybody loves a nice Parody and more. This is interesting research. and a perfectly long-winded monologue.....Monty Python is alive..
