Business Blooper: The Beer That Made Milwaukee Infamous

Some business mistakes happen fast. This one took about fifty years to finish playing out.

On June 27, 2026, Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona, Wisconsin sold the last Schlitz ever made, eighty barrels brewed from a 1948 recipe, available only in person, only while supplies lasted. It was a proper sendoff for a brand that had once been the largest brewery in the world. The story of how it got there runs through a series of decisions made in the early 1970s, when Schlitz CEO Robert Uihlein Jr. authorized accelerated batch fermentation, cheaper ingredients, and cost-cutting shortcuts that the company assumed its customers would never detect. They detected them immediately. A 1976 recall of more than 10 million cans and bottles, a 1977 ad campaign so aggressive it was nicknamed "Drink Schlitz or I'll Kill You," and a collapse in market share that ended with the sale of the company to Stroh Brewing in 1982 followed in sequence. When Pabst attempted a revival in 2008, the original recipe had to be reconstructed from scratch because it no longer existed anywhere in the company's records.

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