Schmidt vs Hamm's vs Grain Belt (Breweries)

I saw a couple of Hamm’s promo videos a while back. One was probably from the 50s, and it gave a pretty detailed tour of their compound, and procedures. I was surprised to learn that they open fermented their beer. Another was from the sixties I believe, and stared a very young Nick Nolte. He got his start acting in the Twin Cities. Oddly enough my uncles used to party with him, and his younger brother was a customer at my family gas station.

 

Contrary to common belief (and current practice) lots of large brewers, both ale and lager, were still open-fermenting in the first few decades after Repeal in the US, including Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Ballantine
- Open Fermentation

The Hamm brewery in St. Paul was also one of the few US breweries which operated their own, adjacent malt house after Repeal, which continued to be run by successor companies Pabst and Stroh. (Some reports had Stroh briefly continuing to make malt there even after closing the brewery in 1997).
Page down about 1/3 to "Hamm Brewing Co., St. Paul Malting Plant" at Brewery Malt Houses.

 

The Hamm's video is a bit unclear on the specifics but it seems to me that the narrator is describing a three step process of open starting tubs, enclosed fermenting vessels (in order to capture co2 I would imagine) and then transferral to the stockhouse/cellar (at least the video is showing two types of enclosed vessels). From what I've read it sounds like this was a typical process for US beer brewers. For ale brewers using a top fermenting yeast and who employed skimming during primary fermentation it would make sense to use open fermentation throughout the primary fermentation, exemplified by those huge wooden vats of fermenting ale which can be seen in jesskidden's pictures (though most of the pictures might well show beer fermentations of course).

 

I was in one of my locals in Central WI about a month ago and was shocked they now offered Grain Belt. The owner of the bar is a Bears fan and the wife a Packers Fan so they have fun with the "house divided" stuff, so was doubly shocked to see it offered. I had a few and enjoyed them.

Special Export is a shell of its former self which is a shame as that was one of our splurges back in college.

 

I still buy a can or two when I’m out at a certain dive bar, but I agree.

It’s lower in alcohol than it used to be, also. So when I see those 30-packs at $17.99 vs. the $12.99 Hamm’s, I just shake my head.

 

30 packs of Hamm's are always in my fridge.

 

Here’s a long read pertaining to “ancient” Minnesota advertising mascots (I reckon that the geezers among us will appreciate it more than the young people). As per the origins of the Hamm’s bear and the eventually iconic ad campaign, look for the Pillsbury doughboy on page 8:

http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/57/v57i01p023-035.pdf

Back in college I learned of this from one of my art history professors, Karal Ann Marling, and much of it (especially the Walt Disney connection to the Hamm’s Bear, and that the drums and music for the Hamm’s jingle were adapted from the ‘Dagger Dance’ sequence in Victor Herbert’s opera Natoma) rings a bell in retrospect. But it’s easy to forget it after thirty years.

 

How did you get that to pop up? That's where I originally noticed the two Schmidt's a couple years ago. The website doesn't seem to link to anything anymore.

 

Old screen shot. The Pabst websites are so full of errors*, change so often and sometimes just disappear, that when I see something of interest, I save it.

* Like what? Oh, they used to misspell Schaefer as "Schaeffer" and they used to talk about "Ballantine Beer" (which they haven't brewed since the mid-1990s) on a Ballantine Ale page. One of their individual brand sites says that Pabst bought Heileman in the 1980s, while it was actually the other way around.

 

I wondered whether this horse was dead, yet.

Anyhow, this February, 2018 piece in the local, free arts and culture paper of record might shed no new light on the OP’s original question. But it makes me wonder whether it and similar pieces weren’t somehow incentivized by whichever parent corporation (I’ve lost track) owns the brand. And of course this makes me wonder about the “organic” (c.f. hipsters or cheapskates?) nature of Hamm’s sales resurgence.

 

Yeah, it's kinda suspicious - and it's MillerCoors that's owned the Hamm's brand since 1999. Previously there were also these 2 Chicago Tribune articles:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/dini...-tasting-winner-food-0712-20170707-story.html (IIRC there's a few errors in this one).
https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/foodfocus/ct-macro-beer-tasting-food-0712-20170706-story.html

It's kinda weird. Hamm's had been a Pabst brand since 1982-3, when Pabst bought Olympia. Olympia had bought Theo. Hamm in 1975, after the failure of that group of distributors (inc. John Lenore) who tried to operate it since buying it from Hublein in '73.

Then, when Miller and Pabst were divving up all the Stroh and Heileman brands in '99, Miller walks away with Hamm's. Huh? All those great mid-western and regional brands, and Miller buys Hamm's from Pabst (ditto for Olde English 800, another brand Pabst had owned for quite a while, after buying Blitz Weinhard in the late '70s)?

I think what MillerCoors is doing with Hamm's is what Pabst has WANTED to do with every "revived" brand since that period - make it appear that the "PBR miracle" happened again organically, driven by consumers not the brewery.

Pabst couldn't pull it off with Kraeusened Old Style, Schlitz Gusto, Primo, the Ballantine Ales, McSorley's Cream Ale, National Bohemian (I leave any out?) but MillerCoors has done it with Hamm's - and it appears that the geekery thinks they "discovered" Hamm's all on their own .

 

Didja get Olympia 95% Malt, sonny boy?

In my perfect pipe dream world, Hamm’s would’ve forever remained truly local. But as it stands, its growth within the segment is enough to provoke the curiosity of both longtime buyers and the newly legals.

 

I have always been interested in the old retro beers and what they tasted like back in the 50's and 60's. I remember drinking Hamms back in the late '70's for $3.99 a case. Was pretty good beer. Better than it is today. Especially at that price.

When Pabst took over all the retro labels I think they made the recipes for most of the beers close to being the same if not the same altogether. That way they didn't have to use multiple kinds of different grains and hops. They could just use one kind and maybe vary the amount of the ingredients a little for each brand thereby cutting costs. Even PBR tastes different than it did back in the '70's.

 

Well, it took 35 or so years for Pabst's parent company, S&P Corp./Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust to collect all those labels and now-closed breweries - Lucky Lager/General Brewing in the 1960s, Falstaff (w/Narrangansett & Ballantine), Pearl in the 1970s, Pabst (w/Olde English 800, Olympia & Hamm) in the 1980s and finally the bulk of the Stroh/Heileman portfolio in 1999.

During the same period, some were sold off (Narragansett, Piels and Haffenreffer to new companies / Henry Weinhard, Lone Star to Heileman / Hamm and Olde English to Miller, etc) and many were simply dropped (Lucky Lager, Falstaff).

MillerCoors now brews most of Pabst's "retor" brands (previous to '98 Heileman>Stroh brewed some of Pabst's much smaller portfolio) and there have been some unofficial reports that many of the beers are the same or blends or simply "adjusted" with the help of post-fermentation hop extract or, possibly, varying the percentage of water added to high gravity brewed beers.

A retiree of the Miller brewery's lab in Ft. Worth TX who used to post on these forums reported that "Stag... Old Milwaukee,Schmidt's (and) Black Label. As of a few years ago they were all the same beer." It is also interesting that many of Pabst's brands suspiciously have the exact same ABV (4.6%) or vary ± 0.10%.

 

Irwin Jacobs (1941 - 2019).

 

Jacobs - eventually known within the industry as "Irv the Liquidator" - was also involved in the long, complicated battle with both Paul Kalmanovitz (of S&P - General/Falstaff/Pearl) and Heileman for control of Pabst Brewing Co. in the 1980s - which also involved Olympia (Hamm & Lone Star) and Pittsburgh Brewing (Iron City).

After Heileman "won" the first time (keeping some brands and breweries and spinning off a "new" Pabst which included parts of Olympia), Jacobs then fought it out with his former "take-over partner" Kalmanovitz. The latter eventually gained control of Pabst.

 

I know that many thought very poorly of him over the years, owing to the Grain Belt sale, and even to this day I’m sure that’s true.

But I would think that he was a fairly complex person outside of his business deals. As he matured, I suspect that he came to view a number of his business dealings differently in retrospect - there’s an interview segment with him here, (almost thirty years old, now) which provides some insight.

 

A lot of people think poorly of him currently for, you know, murdering someone.