The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous

Joseph Schlitz arrived in Milwaukee from Mainz, Germany, in eighteen fifty as a bookkeeper. He went to work for a brewer named August Krug. Krug died around eighteen fifty-six, and two years later, in eighteen fifty-eight, Schlitz married his widow and inherited the brewery. He was good at it. By eighteen seventy-four he had incorporated and was expanding aggressively. Then in eighteen seventy-five, on a voyage back to Germany to visit relatives, his ship went down off the coast of Cornwall, England, and he was lost. He was forty-three.

The brewery that bore his name survived him by a century. The slogan the beer that made Milwaukee famous came, according to the company's own telling, from the years after the Great Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy-one, when Schlitz shipped hundreds of barrels of beer to the devastated city and Chicagoans began asking for it by association with its city of origin. Whether or not that story is precise, the slogan made official at the Columbian Exposition of eighteen ninety-three stuck permanently.

What made Milwaukee a beer city was not one man but four dynasties: Schlitz, Pabst, Miller, and Blatz, all founded by German immigrants in the years between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty. The German community that came to Milwaukee after the failed revolutions of eighteen forty-eight brought with them a culture in which beer was a civic institution, not merely a commodity. The beer garden was a political meeting place. The brewers built halls, funded bands, sponsored parks.

By nineteen fifty, Schlitz was again the largest brewery in the United States, shipping more than five million barrels a year. Pabst was fourth. Miller was eighth. Blatz was ninth. Milwaukee had the largest brewing capacity of any city in the world.

The beer changed. The city did not.