When Paul Kalmanovitz bought Pabst in a hostile take over , he had no plans to keep the brewery alive. He gutted the staff, stopped all advertising, and finally closed the brewery and let it rot rather than selling. Here`s a video of how it looked after decades of abandonment. Here`s how it looks now as a Hotel and restaurant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUUe_j3jlBQ ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvKsXUCmKY
Well, as a drinker of the Ballantine ales as well as some other ales and porters coming out of the Falstaff-owned Narragansett brewery, I've a long history of being no fan of Kalmanovitz but... Who would have bought it? Australian-owned Heileman had collapsed, sold (again) in 1994 to a Dallas investment firm and then bought by struggling Stroh, which only had 3 more years to go before it left the industry, too, in part due to S&P moving their contracts from Heileman/Stroh to the Miller Brewing Co. Not all - he paid for this self-congratulatory ad in the New York Times. He then closed that same Pabst brewery the next year, gutting it and shipping much of the equipment to China.
When I said it let it rot, I was referring to the fact that after closing the brewery he he just put up a chain-link fence around it and let the entire Pabst complex deteriorate. Did no maintenance , and refused to sell it to investors that wanted the buildings and land for other developments. ' The stuff left behind could have literally been worth millions. These videos are 12 years old. Imagine what the items in that brewery would go for today! ' ***************** ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QLfwFnsbfk ' **************************** ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhkc3ZAGyuU
Yeah, when Kalmanovitz was still alive, he closed the New Orleans Falstaff brewery and (according to some reports): The above from an unfortunately now defunct Falstaff "fan" website, which once also had photos of some of the Pabst brew kettles from Newark and other cities that were sent to China sitting in a field, covered in weeds, long unused. Pretty sure the number of breweries closed under S&P Corp. ownership - General-Lucky Lager / Falstaff [inc. Narragansett] / Pearl / Pabst [inc. Olympia] - is around 2 dozen.
I was told that Kalmanovitz fired August Pabst III without any warning, and had armed security guards escort him out of his office, out of the brewery and all the wat to his car. What a way to end a family legacy.
The Milwaukee beer line was once a grandeur location. Blatz, Schlitz and Pabst all on the same railroad line, serviced by the once great Milwaukee Road.
' From his office in the brewery, Fredrick Pabst was actually able to actually look out his window, and see the Blatz Brewery.
Pabst (# 11 at the time) bought Blatz (#13) in 1958, but the DoJ objected on anti-trust grounds. It would take over a decade for them to sell it to Heileman (after Stroh and Associated were rejected). 30 years later, when Stroh shutdown and sold the Stroh+Heileman portfolio of brands, Pabst regained the Blatz label - no one objected (well, maybe a few Blatz drinkers with long memories who didn't want to drink a Miller-brewed beer did?). And Gettleman and Miller where next door neighbors on W. State Street.
According to reports at the time, his father, August U. Pabst, had backed the Kalmanovitz offer over Heileman's. (The U. for "Uihlein", the family that controlled Schlitz for most of its history, his grandmother was a Uihlein). Kalmanovitz wasn't too kind to members of the founding Greisedieck family executives still at the Falstaff Brewing Corp. when he took over that company in the 1970s.
Apparently, the forward looking individuals downsizing government programs have studied and adopted some of the techniques that have been common in parts of the brewing industry.
