It took a lot of bad management to ruin the Schlitz brand. A lot. From Wikipedia
n 1953,
Milwaukee brewery workers went on a 76-day strike. The strike greatly impacted Schlitz's production, including all of Milwaukee's other breweries and allowed Anheuser-Busch to surpass Schlitz in the American beer market. The popularity of Schlitz's namesake beer, along with the introduction of value-priced
Old Milwaukee, allowed Schlitz to regain the number-one position. Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch continued to compete for the top brewery in America for years.
By 1967, the company's president and chairman was August Uihlein's grandson,
Robert Uihlein Jr. Faced with a desire to meet large volume demands while also cutting the cost of production, the brewing process for Schlitz's flagship Schlitz beer was changed in the early 1970s.
The primary changes involved using corn syrup to replace some of the malted barley, adding a silica gel to prevent the product from forming a haze, using high-temperature
fermentation instead of the traditional method,
and also substituted less-expensive extracts rather than traditional ingredients. Schlitz also experimented with continuous fermentation, even building a new brewery specifically designed to use the process in
Baldwinsville, New York. The reformulated product resulted in a beer that not only lost much of the flavor and consistency of the traditional formula, but also spoiled more quickly, rapidly losing public appeal.
In 1976, concern was growing that the Food and Drug Administration would require all ingredients to be labeled on their bottles and cans. To prevent having to disclose the artificial additive of the silica gel,
Uihlein switched to an agent called "Chill-garde" which would be filtered out at the end of production, so it would be considered nondisclosable. The agent reacted badly with a foam stabilizer that was used and Schlitz recalled 10 million bottles of beer, costing it $1.4 million. Schlitz was further hurt by the rise of high-volume light beers such as
Miller Lite and
Bud Light, a direction Schlitz did not aggressively pursue – although
James Coburn appeared in commercials for the short-lived
Schlitz Light in 1976.
As part of its efforts to reverse the sales decline, Schlitz launched a disastrous 1977 television ad campaign created by
Leo Burnett & Co. In each of the ads, an off-screen speaker tries to convince a Schlitz drinker to switch to a rival beer. The Schlitz drinker then talked about how they would never switch and jokingly threatened the person trying to persuade them away from their favorite beer. Despite the tone of the campaign intending to be comedic levity, audiences found the campaign somewhat menacing and the ad industry dubbed it "Drink Schlitz or I'll kill you." Schlitz, unwilling to endure more bad press, pulled the campaign after 10 weeks and fired Burnett.
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They didn't test the chill-garde and foam stabilizer before bottling it? WTF?
