Old Style beer has always been somewhat popular in the Chicago area. Maybe not THE most popular, but going back as far as the 60’s I can remember it being considered a “Chicago beer”. They even ran commercials for it starring former Chicago cop Dennis Farina (“it’s our great beer and they can’t have it!” It’s at 4:50 on the video.)
What perplexes me is, up until rather recently Old Style was brewed by Heileman way up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Quite a ways from Chi Town. So how did it catch on down yonder?
I can’t answer your question, but I remember that ol’ Cecil mentioned a fondness for Old Style in a Straight Dope column fifteen or twenty years ago.
They haven’t sold Old Style here in Utah for years (they brewed a 3.2% version that was sold here back in the 1970’s and 80’s) but I always really liked it, (at least as far as an American pilsner or lager goes) along with Rainier and Henry Weinhard’s, which are two more regional brews no longer sold here.
Yeah, but how the heck did a brewery from La Crosse, Wisconsin end up doing that? It’s not like there aren’t brewers in the Chicago area. Did you get a chance to watch the commercial I posted? They would have one believe the stuff was made in Chicago.
FYI Old Style is no longer brewed in La Crosse. It’s now made in Milwaukee by Miller who is doing it under contract for Pabst who bought Heileman. There are no Pabst or Heileman breweries anymore. They just exist on paper and all their brews are made by other brewers (mostly by Miller) under contract.
I think you answered your own question PK. Advertising. It’s the same reason Budweiser is the most popular beer in America. The same reason Schlitz used to be #1 in Chicago and Schaeffer’s was “the” beer in New York. They bombard the airwaves and print media with advertising and people who don’t know any better buy their crappy beer.
That’s not a troll response, it’s a factual answer.
But that’s a bit of apples and oranges. You’re comparing a vast area while I’m just talking about just one demographic. (Schlitz, BTW, was the #1 brewer in the world at one time.)
Back in, let me think, 1979, I did a project for Anheuser-Busch that included crunching sales data from key markets. When we got to the Chicago market, the marketing guys told me, “if you have to say anything about Old Style, blame it on the strike.”
Some time in the previous few years (they never told me exactly when) the Budweiser distributors in Chicagoland had been hit by a strike, causing a boycott. According to the Anheuser-Busch interpretation, that allowed Old Style to grab the #1 spot.
Although it’s my understanding that back then, Schlitz and Old Style were THE brands in Chicago, even if neither of them were brewed there.
If you go back a few decades, Chicago probably had a few noteworthy regional breweries (Meister Brau comes to mind), but they likely met the same fate that many regional beers / breweries met through the 1960s-1980s – they either were bought by a bigger brewery, or went out of business. And, that’s why the popular brands in Chicago for decades have either been from Wisconsin (Old Style, Miller Lite) or Missouri (Budweiser / Bud Light).
The only brewer bigger than a microbrewery which calls Chicago home now is Goose Island, and they were only founded in 1988.
Pure brewed, double brewed, all the way from God’s Country. Old Style–the only American beer that’s fully krauesened. Because when you brew a beer once, you’ve got a great beer. But when you brew a beer twice, you’ve got a great, light beer.
–I don’t even drink beer, but growing up I did used to watch and listen to Cubs games, and the above is the result: all these years later and those commercials are in there practically word for word. So, yes, advertising certainly helped. Old Style was definitely the brew of choice among my uncles and cousins, some of whom were Cubs fans. My uncle in Michigan used to buy caseloads of it whenever he came to visit–apparently at that time you couldn’t get it in Michigan at all.
To be fair, we also had strong family LaCrosse connections. Which helped, I’m sure.
Regarding Chicago-based breweries: not sure where Falstaff was headquarted (“we’re all in this together, it’s time we made it clear, falstaff is America’s premium quality beer”), but they had a large facility in NW Indiana just over the state line, and they used to sponsor the Sox games. (Radio, anyway. Not sure about tv as Sox broadcasts were on channel 32 or maybe 44 and were therefore unwatchable if they were gettable to begin with.)
The interstate was busy Memorial Day to Labor Day as the Chicago tourists drove up for the weekend and back for work. They drank a lot of beer too. Any common Wisconsin beer would have been well known in Chicago.
I think it was after the great Chicago fire. Heileman’s brewery sent barrels of drinking water to Chicago. I am trying to find confirmation of this now. Thats how I found this thread. I think I saw something about this on maybe the History channel
There’s a super article on the local beer wars in the Chicago Tribune of June 18, 1980. It suggest that “adverse publicity” about the taste of Schlitz had hurt that brand. The article also said that Heileman had “37% of the market, up from 24% two years ago.”(1978)
Another article said that Schlitz was the number one brand in the US in the late '50s, but killed their product by changing the formula in the mid-'70s.
1966 figures for beer sales(barrels) in Chicago(approximate)–
Anheuser-Busch 1,600,000
Schlitz 1,200,000
Meister Brau 620,000
Hamm 560,000
Pabst 520,000
Falstaff 510,000
Miller 380,000
Drewrys 350,000
Heileman 320,000
Carling 225,000
Canadian Ace 140,000
While looking for info which I posted above, I discovered an article about Schlitz doing this. It was written by the Schlitz people, so I can’t vouch for it.
The gist is–after the fire, Chicago was short of water(and beer, as the remaining breweries needed water) so a Milwaukee brewery, the August Krug Brewing Co., sent a barge full of beer down Lake Michigan to Chicago. Joseph Schlitz was the head of the Krug brewery and renamed it for himself in 1874.
in 1972 I had one truck, selling beer for old style… in 1976 bUD WENT ON STRIKE FOR THREE MONTHS. THE STORES WERE EMPTY i TOLD THEM TO FILL UP THE SPACE WITH OLD STYLE TIL THE STRIKE WAS OVER IN 1978 I HAD 50 TRUCKS SELLING 7 MILLION CASE A YEAR