USA TODAY International Edition
True Milwaukeeans: ‘ PBR us ASAP’
Pabst Blue Ribbon is coming back to my hometown. Sort of.
You might have thought Brett Favre was coming back to Green Bay or something, the way the local press carried on about it. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett held a news conference Wednesday to announce the “prodigal son” coming home to open arms.
For the first American brewery to produce a million barrels of beer a year and once brewed 15 million barrels yearly, this homecoming is a bit modest — a microbrewery staffed by maybe a half- dozen workers in a building that wasn’t even part of the original plant. But, what the hey. It’s PBR. Big Blue. Back in Brew City, the way it’s supposed to be.
Like Favre’s induction into the Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame on Saturday night before 67,000 fans at Lambeau Field, this whole Pabst thing is a little complicated.
Milwaukeeans — Wisconsinites, for that matter — are intensely proud of where they come from. I tell anyone who will listen it is one of the most underrated cities in the country.
It is also one of the most de- fensive. Like Philadelphia to New York, Milwaukee will always be Chicago’s overachieving little brother.
Almost the entire list of famous people born in Milwaukee — Spencer Tracy, Gene Wilder, Steve Miller — went someplace else to become famous.
Milwaukeeans content themselves with celebrities who don’t leave home. Like Bo Black, whose claims to fame are posing in the 1960s for Playboy with her clothes on; dating a manager who had one good year for the Brewers; and running Summerfest, one of the USA’s biggest music festivals, for roughly 68 years.
Or Danny Gokey, who earned a day in his honor and a parade
for finishing third in the eighth season of American Idol.
There was a time Pabst was bigger than even Liberace, if you count his birthplace, the suburb of West Allis, as part of Milwaukee. For 100 years, Milwaukee was second to none, particularly Chicago, in brewing beer.
In 1950, four of the 10 biggest brewers in America — Schlitz, Pabst, Miller and Blatz — brewed in Milwaukee. In 1980, Pabst’s last great year, almost 40% of the 176.3 million barrels of beer brewed in America came from Schlitz, Miller and Pabst.
Milwaukeeans were fiercely loyal to their brands. Ours was a Schlitz family. Half a dozen relatives worked at Schlitz at one time or another. Milwaukee then was a Blatz town and, after Blatz was sold, a Pabst town. With the rollout of Lite in the 1970s, Milwaukee became a Miller town.
By 1985, when cranky California millionaire Paul Kalmanovitz acquired Pabst, every Milwaukee brewer but Miller was either in free fall or shuttered. Eleven years later, Kalmanovitz emptied the blackened Cream- City- brick Pabst complex, moved its administration to San Antonio and contracted with Miller to have the beer brewed who knows where.
It seems to me Milwaukeeans are ready to forgive Pabst for running out on them, even if only to brew a tiny fraction of its 2.7 million barrels of beer a year. If the man who chose to throw his last interceptions for the hated Minnesota Vikings can come back, so can Pabst.
I am, however, gravely concerned about Pabst loyalists elsewhere who have courageously ignored the U. S. brewing revolution, resolutely drinking the corporate contract brew from 16- ounce tall boys.
You have to wonder whether craft- brewed Pabst will upset their every notion of non- conformity in their beer- drinking experience. Maybe this is what they mean by hipster irony.
There was a time Pabst was bigger than even Liberace, if you count his birthplace, the suburb of West Allis, as part of Milwaukee.