What I’d prefer to write about today is my recent visit to the Schweizerhaus restaurant and beer garden in Vienna, which serves the finest draft Budvar that is likely to touch your lips any time soon.
By next week, the essay should be finished. My reverie will gradually fade, and then what?
For now, kindly examine the preceding Schlitz advertisement from the early 1960s, then consider this photo, snapped at Schweizerhaus on May 2.
Just look at the heads on those, by which I mean the beers, not two vagrant drinkers.
Conrad Seidl is a Viennese journalist widely known in Europe as the Beer Pope, and I’m an involuntarily (temporarily?) retired Hoosier beer polemicist urging you to abstain from abstention.
Pending next week’s probable Schweizerhaus digression, my point today is that apparently there really was a time long ago when Americans were not bizarrely terrified by beer foam, although in reality, beer foam has always been our friend.
Famously, America’s brewing monoliths devoted endless hours (and money) to determining the chemistry of how to make a their foamy heads appear only briefly, then completely disappear. Presumably, their focus groups decreed it.
Gloriously, that’s not the way draft Budvar is poured at Schweizerhaus (and don’t forget that American mass-market swill is barely drinkable in the first place).
Consequently, at least we won’t have Schlitz to kick around any longer.
Schlitz beer production ends after 175 years, by Francesca Pica (Milwaukee Journal Sentinal)
Pabst Brewing Co. is ending production of Schlitz, which began as a Milwaukee tavern brewery and was once America’s largest brewer. The company, founded in 1849, was bought by Pabst in 1999.
Thus, a critical question remains to be addressed.
If Schlitz is to be discontinued after 175 or 177 years, depending on the breathless internet headline — only when Joseph Schlitz took over the brewery in 1858 was it known by his name, so the proper age since founding is 168 — then is there anything at all about the dying Schlitz brand that remotely resembles the beer of old, when it was in its prime?
During the 1970s, Schlitz remained a contender for the crown of best-selling American beer. However, the recipe’s “modernization” (read: adulteration) goes all the way back...Read more
