In 1950, #1 was Schlitz, with Anheuser-Busch right on their tail. In 1960, it was A-B followed by Schlitz. In 1970, it was A-B, followed by Schlitz. In 1980, Schlitz had fallen to #4. F&M Schafer Brewing company was #5, #8, #5, and out of the top ten in those four respective years. Note that this is by brewery, not individual beers, and the numbers are based by barrelage, not world sales (although one would expect those two numbers to be closely correlated.)
Yes, but in the US, I get the impression (as a non-drinker) that craft beers, those meant to be sipped and tasted, are a relatively new phenomenon. Prior to the recent microbrew movement, were there many people who savored their beer?
It’s entirely POSSIBLE that Schaefer was America’s top selling beer in the Sixties., though I can’t confirm that. Certainly, it SEEMED to be the most popular beer in the New York City metropolitan area when I was a kid, followed by Rheingold (the official beer of the 1969 Miracle Mets), Ballantine and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
But as others have noted, being the “best selling beer in the USA” didn’t mean as much in the Sixties as it does now. Most major breweries were REGIONAL in nature, until a few decades ago. That is, you had Schaefer in New York, Coors out West, Budweiser in the Midwest, and other beers in other regions. NONE of them was sold, let alone immensely popular, nationwide.
Budweiser and Miller, among others, expanded their distribution networks drastically, pushed their products nationally, and in the process killed off a lot of the major regional breweries.
Microbrews are a return to the older tradition of having many local breweries creating a range of tastes and styles. Prohibition forced most of those out of business, but many came back and the consolidation of the industry was just starting in the 50s. Check pulykamell’s link. In the 1950s the top ten brewers held 38% of the market. By the 1980s it was 93%. Premium beers existed in 1950s just as much as today. It was only that middle period around the 1980s that they were hard to find.
If you put beer ads 1950’s in Google Images you see that most advertising stressed the taste. They weren’t stupid - they knew that beer drinkers were grabbing sixpacks. That was a downmarket image of fat stupid drunks that even the consumers weren’t happy with. It was that image that BBDO’s slogan genius Jim Jordan was attacking when he created the proper code that gave them permission to do what had been downgraded earlier. Which wasn’t till 1961 and IIRC more of a television campaign. It’s the 80/20 law: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers so keep them and make them happy.
It also may not be possible to determine exactly what the #1 beer sold in the 60s was. You have to determine what #1 means. Is it the most frequently order beer, or the most sales in dollars, or sales in terms of bottles, or kegs, or any other metric. Look at TV. Tons of shows are listed as the #1 show, with some qualification: #1 hit comedy, #1 new comedy, #1 primetime show, #1 Thursday night show, etc. That’s what marketing is all about.
What I meant is that it sounds to me that wherever you heard it, it sounds like something that should be more likely attributed to Schlitz, and not Schaffer. I’m not saying that you literally wrote the wrong name of the beer. Note that the Wikipedia link is completely unattributed (yes, I realize that’s why you’re posting here), but it sounds like a factoid that would more likely be attributed to Schlitz. (And even then, it appears to be incorrect, although closer to the truth. Perhaps Schlitz had the #1 selling individual beer of the time vs A-B. I could believe that.)
I worked in a convenience store for a while in Las Vegas in the 80s, and there were quite a few customers who would buy one bottle of good beer and a 12 pack of Schaefer every day or night, when they got off their shift. I asked a couple of them about it, and they always said that they liked the taste of the good beer, but Schaefer was our cheapest beer, especially in the 12 packs, so they’d have the one good beer to taste, and then the 12 pack to get a buzz.
And there’s plenty more if you search for “best selling beer” “schlitz” in Google books. I’m trying to find hard data on individual beer brands, but the best I could find is that Schlitz was the #1 beer brand from ??? until 1957, after which Budweiser took over. Schlitz stuck close to Bud (#2) until the mid-70s. I can’t find any mention of Schafer having that much presence.
That may have helped (as did the Busch families’ onwership of the St. Louis Cardinals), but LOTS of ber companies ahve long used sports to sell their products.
In Babe Ruth’s day, the Yankees were owned by Jacob Ruppert, one of the leading beer makers in the Northeast (Ruppert’s Knickerbocker was still a very popular beer in New York, when I was a kid).
And as I said, you couldn’t watch a Mets game in 1969 without seeing 20+ Rheingold commercials.
Everybody who watched the Yankees in the early Seventies learned to sing the Schaefer song by heart, or to call out “Heeeeeey, get yer cold beer” in honor of Ballantine.
So, Bud wasn’t alone in marketing its beer to sports fans on TV. They may well have been ahead of the curve in marketing to sports fans NATIONWIDE, while others were advertising mostly within their established zones. That is, Schaefer didn’t work as hard to sell beer in St. Louis as Anheuser-Busch did to sell Bud in NewYork.