Ever wonder what happened to Schlitz beer, which was a titan through the '70s, and then abruptly vanished in the '80s?

[Dan Druff]

This commercial happened:




This poor man's Denis Leary pissed off viewers, as it seemed he was threatening to have his cougar kill anyone who tried to serve him another beer.

I found the commercial to be stupid, but honestly it wouldn't have been memorable to me, had I been an adult in the '70s.

Regardless, this went over so badly (as did a similar commercial involving a boxer) that people started abandoning the Schlitz brand in droves, and eventually they sold the entire company to Stroh Brewing Company.

I remembered seeing Schlitz everywhere as a kid, and I heard a reference to it on "F is for Family" (set in 1974), so I decided to look up what happened to it.

[MrTickle]

I’m pretty sure everyone’s answer to this is no

[Jayjami]

Probably vanished because it was a shitty beer, and did not have the advertising budget that Budweiser had.

[Sanlmar]

I have no idea why Schlitz sold/failed but I guarantee it wasn’t a pair of bad television ads. This notion is such a phenomenon of our Facebook/social media times.

Tomato worthy fake news

Sonatine would have you believe it was Leonid Brezhnev.

What would be an interesting retro idea would be beer cans that required a can opener like the old days.

[Sanlmar]

I love Guinness. Darker the better.

If Guinness ran a commercial that said they were now the official beer of the Dodgers I’d still drink it cause I love it.

Appears Schlitz fucked with he ingredients and how they brewed the product nearly exactly when this ad ran.

Corn syrup and silica gel. Yum.

If it doesn’t taste the same why would I continue drinking it?

Ascribing too much importance to media is the filter through which you view history Druff - just like the rest of the idiotic social media masses

[DonaldTrumpsHairPiece]

Schlitz is alive and well... errr it's alive.

Very long history and a couple wild stories of family fortunes made and lost along the way.

They should make a movie tbh.

[Crowe Diddly]

Late high school/early college years, I was at my girlfriend's family christmas party, and her dad was a cheap beer and Kools guy. An uncle or someone was grabbing him a beer, and the choice was between Schlitz and some other similar, maybe like Meister Brau or something. His response was "Doesn't matter, comes from the same bathtub."

[Gordman]

Schlitz didn't fail because of the advertising. It may have played a small part in it in the end, but the primary reason was because they fucked with the formula too much over the years as well as implementing tons of other tiny cost cutting measures. This whole fail is dubbed in the business world as "The Schlitz Mistake"


Schlitz was the #1 best selling beer during the 40's and most of the 50's but was constantly being threatened by Budweiser for the #1 spot. After 57' Budweiser became #1. Schlitz response? They started making a broad series of terrible decisions to cut costs.

For example, they "salami sliced" their way to where they would get more beer from the same plant. Then over time they added corn syrup, substituted the quality of hops, as well as other ingredient alterations. They did all of this in small increments over time because the owners believed that the consumer wouldn't notice the changes this way.

Any self respecting beer drinker knows that if you start messing with a formula - even once, you're going to likely piss off and drive away at least some of your client base. The owners were warned about this but they didn't listen; they proceeded full steam ahead constantly changing things over time to save more money.

By the mid 70's consumers were complaining of a haze forming in the can when the beer was chilled. Schlitz added silica gel in an attempt to stop the haze. This was followed by even more cost cutting measures including changing the fermentation times to brew the beer quicker. Later they substituted a different unnatural product from the silica gel which gave the end result of some gross white shit in the can that sometimes even looked like mucous.

All this while Anheuser-Busch and now Miller were huge and threatening competition for Schlitz. The ridiculous ad campaign was probably the last nail in the coffin for them, but the writing was on the wall long before this and they were already on life support by this point. Stroh's and then ultimately Pabst acquired Schlitz and the rest is history

I mean, imagine picking up your favorite drink, whether it be soda, beer or whatever, and practically every time you take a sip, something just seems...off about it. Sooner or later you're going to be completely turned off from the product.


I remember when i was a kid, my dad had told me there was a line everyone used about the beer back in the day which was something like "Schlitz gives you the shits".

[Dan Druff]

The formula change for cost-cutting reasons definitely seemed to contribute to the beer's downfall, but the commercial series was known to be the factor which really sent it into a tailspin.

It's possible people were already getting turned off to the brand because of the beer starting to taste shitty, and then the commercial sealed the deal.

They did notice an abrupt decline in sales right after the commercials aired.

[Zap_the_Fractions_Giraffe]

another shitty product that was hurt by commercials

[BCR]

The lionshare of the Schlitz/Strohs type beers sales that were discontinued were blue collar working man’s beer. Their decline can be almostly directly correlated to the decline of labor in the US. They were generational brands that guys were almost indoctrinated into new hires when they went into mills, factories, etc. It wasn’t advertising or formulaic changes. It was attrition through death and no new converts .

[GambleBotsChafedPenis]

The lionshare of the Schlitz/Strohs type beers sales that were discontinued were blue collar working man’s beer. Their decline can be almostly directly correlated to the decline of labor in the US. They were generational brands that guys were almost indoctrinated into new hires when they went into mills, factories, etc. It wasn’t advertising or formulaic changes. It was attrition through death and no new converts .

couldn't agree more BCR...add PBR to that list...those beers were staples in the Midwest...

[GrenadaRoger]

Schlitz joke I remember:

the college sorority held beer bust at a nude beach...the party was ruined when the girls got sand in their Schlitz


during the 1960's - 1970's beer was a low growth industry that consolidated from several regional brewers into a few national brands...industry competition was scale based, with major brands buying up small ones to lower unit costs/take advantage of economies of scale...

beer is consumed mostly by males aged 18-35, and older persons experience discomfort from the bloating of the stomach cause by beer...for that reason after age 35, increasingly people drink hard liquor or wine...as the US population average age increased during that period, beer sales went flat

around 1969 Phillip Morris (the tobacco company) bought Miller Brewing, which then acted to popularize Miller Lite beer by using ads with ex-athletes to remove the stigma of unmanliness associated with lite beer (remember Less Filing v Taste Great)--their ads had beefy men (Boog Powell, John Madden, Micky Spillane, etc) drinking lite beer in bars, saying things like can drink more without getting filled up, and doing guy things like arm wrestling...lite beer was the fast growing segment of the market for years


during the 1980's, imports and micro brewing further segmented the market by introducing premium brands.

Schlitz was a victim of the industry consolidation that occurred during the 1960-1970's--progress threw sand in the gears of that business

[MumblesBadly]

Druff, this article pretty much mentions how the bad advertising campaign was a failed hail mary attempt on a brand that had already been severely damaged by the lowering of the quality of its product mentioned by others.

https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles...ecame-infamous

And it surely sidn’t help to have it’s main competitor for the #3 spot (Coors) featured prominently in the plot line of a summer blockbuster that same year. Two points if you can guess which movie that was.

[Dan Druff]

another shitty product that was hurt by commercials

Wow that hurt to watch.

I can't believe Atari signed off on that.

[ErickAA]

Adam Carola talks about this topic a lot. According to him, TV generally (the shows themselves and the commercials) was pretty much universally horrible during the 70s, but it didn't matter because there was no competition from anything good. It was basically a complete monopoly of horrible products. I am guessing those commercials were representative of the times, and not some horrible outlier that sunk the brand.

[Sanlmar]

Druff, this article pretty much mentions how the bad advertising campaign was a failed hail mary attempt on a brand that had already been severely damaged by the lowering of the quality of its product mentioned by others.

https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles...ecame-infamous

And it surely sidn’t help to have it’s main competitor for the #3 spot (Coors) featured prominently in the plot line of a summer blockbuster that same year. Two points if you can guess which movie that was.

Druff was wrong but I learned something.

(That Druff was wrong)

[Sanlmar]

I missed your trivia question Mumbles about the Coors movie product placement.

Too focused on Druff being wrong and then doubleing down on being wrong.

We will get back to Druff being wrong later, I’m sure and why he would think the media had that much influence.

At that time, it was my understanding that Coors was not distributed east of the Mississippi. Kids in the Southwest would drink Coors cause it was cheap.

When Coors was released to the East Coast it assumed a position or perception as a somewhat premium brand. If only for a while cause it was novel.

Was this true?

[donkdowndonedied]

Druff, this article pretty much mentions how the bad advertising campaign was a failed hail mary attempt on a brand that had already been severely damaged by the lowering of the quality of its product mentioned by others.

https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles...ecame-infamous

And it surely sidn’t help to have it’s main competitor for the #3 spot (Coors) featured prominently in the plot line of a summer blockbuster that same year. Two points if you can guess which movie that was.

It is very hard to believe that commercial could have done too much. However, if the quality of the beer had been going downhill and changed repeatedly over the years, the "my gusto" or whatever the guy talks about is plainly laughable to every retard, I'd think. You don't want to be a joke by drinking your own beer.

Now had that commercial worked with a solid brand etc, it might not even have had a negative outcome.

This is all just a guess from my reading of this thread...

[Dan Druff]

Adam Carola talks about this topic a lot. According to him, TV generally (the shows themselves and the commercials) was pretty much universally horrible during the 70s, but it didn't matter because there was no competition from anything good. It was basically a complete monopoly of horrible products. I am guessing those commercials were representative of the times, and not some horrible outlier that sunk the brand.

TV and commercials were both different in the '70s, but not necessarily horrible.

The '70s featured a lot of good TV shows. Yes, there was also a lot of crap, but that can also be said today. It's true that TV was less developed in those days, but they were far enough along (about 2 decades) to where they were able to put out some quality programming, even if some of it would seem antiquated by today's standards.

Some of my favorite shows are from that era.

Commercials were a different story, as the '70s were still stuck in the "pitchman talks to the viewer as if he's pitching something" phase, rather than keeping it more in plain language, as we see now. The commercials featuring acted-out "real life" type situations were often poorly written and acted, thus looking foolish by today's standards. However, they did have some clever/effective commercials at the time. This one was not typical. It was cringeworthy even in 1977.