When I was growing up in my teens in Central Texas, typical of so many Czech-German Americans, we drank the hell out of beer. This was pre-drug, pre-pot Texas. One saying went: "What is a Czech 7-course meal? .... a six-pack of beer and a kolache (by the way, a kolache is NOT a sausage wrapped in bread dough, that's a klobasnek, but over the past 40 years the word has been corrupted....damned YANKEES!!!):
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/klobasnek-em-sausage-kolaches-em-51230810
I recall going to Houston one weekend with the family to visit inlaws and to experience "The Eighth Wonder of the World" (aka The Astrodome), and being treated to the official beer of the Dome --- Falstaff. Seem to remember if an Astro hit a home run, cups of Falstaff went on sale for 50 cents while the inning lasted.
Although the elders of our families typically drank Shiner (Premium), Lone Star, Pearl, Falstaff, Jax, or other regional beers, we kids preferred Schlitz. It was a bit sweeter, didn't have the "skunky, horse piss" smell (natural aromas of the fermentation byproducts that offgas given time to breathe), and had cool TV ads (sailing ships, hot chicks, "The Beer That Made Wilwaukee Famous"). Budweiser wasn't really in the mix, and Coors was yet to make it south of that gas station/convenience store about 15 miles out of Austin. Miller High Life, "The Champagne of Bottled Beers" was kind of viewed as a sissy beer. Miller's master stroke of "Miller Lite" wouldn't hit national distribution until about 1975.
Shiner used to be "Shiner Premium" and it's kind of weird today to have someone pony up to the bar and ask for a "Shiner" only to be understood it's a request for a "Shiner Bock." Today, when I ask for a Shiner Bock, I ask for a Shiner Bock, not a Shiner. Spoetzel Brewing recently brought back Shiner Premium (white can) and as an adult now I like the beer that I turned my nose up to as a kid (unless it was at a wedding where out of the keg it seemed to taste better to us teenagers. Maybe it was because we could just waltz up to the kegs and fill up pitcher after pitcher to walk around with and fill up everybody's cups and also drink at will ourselves).
In our small town there actually was a Shiner beer delivery salesman, just like a milkman, who had a big flat stakebed truck for his route deliveries. Because so many of the local Baptists didn't want to be seen buying beer, he would drive up and down the back alleys, picking up those wooden cases with 24 empty Shiner (Premium) returnable bottles in them, replace the case with another filled with 24 FULL Shiner bottles, write up a bill on their account, stick it in the case and drive on down to the next Baptist house backyard.
We Czechs and Germans didn't give a ****, mostly Catholics or Lutherans, bought and drank our beer proudly. Remember, when Jesus and his mother Mary were at Cana, celebrating Jesus' cousin's wedding, and they ran out of wine, Mary asked Jesus to turn the urns of water into urns of wine (okay, not beer, but work with me on this), not to purify the water, but to allow for the continued merriment from drinking adult beverages. They were all having a great time drinking wine, dancing in the street, shooting guns in the air (oh, wait, that's Texas).
I remember the fall from grace of Schlitz; never really paid much attention as to why. I moved to Austin at 18 in 1973 to work and go to UT, experience the hippie/redneck fusion birth of Austin's music scene, coinciding with explosive growth and resulting construction boom also gave us the Armadillo World Headquarters, bean/cheese/jalapeno nachos, and the genius stroke of Spoetzel Brewing: "Shiner Bock." That and Lone Star promoting heavily it's "National Beer of Texas", Pearl pushing it's Hill Country roots I guess seemed to push us away from Schlitz.
But the article linked below probably explains an even better reason, Schlitz's classic example of what NOT to do with success (example, their TV ad with gnarly boxer facing camera menacingly challenging the watcher "You want to take away my gusto?" dubbed the "Drink Schlitz or I'll kill you" campaign). That and combined with changing the recipe, using artificial ingredients to allow for faster brewing, shorter lagering period, etc., ultimately killed the No. 2 beer in the U.S. This was long before anyone even heard of the term "craft brewing."
https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-famous-beer-became-infamousClick to expand...
