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Schlitz is an American beer, often considered the archetype of working-class beers brewed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It has one of the best-known slogans in the American brewing industry: "The beer that made Milwaukee famous".
The company was founded by Joseph Schlitz, who came to America from Mainz, Germany in 1850, at the age of 20. Schlitz flourished in the frenzied beer industry of pre-Civil War Milwaukee, where saloons and breweries sprang up by the hundreds, and in 1856 he took over management of the large brewery owned by the recently deceased August Krug. Two years later he married Krug's widow and changed the name to the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co.
The company really began to succeed after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, when Schlitz donated thousands of barrels of beer to that city, which had lost most of its breweries. He quickly opened a distribution point there, beginning a national expansion.
Schlitz died May 7, 1875, when returning to visit Germany. His ship hit a rock near Land's End, England, and sank.
The company flourished through the 1970s, being ranked as the No. 2 brewery in America as late as 1976. But problems with its production, specifically its attempt to cheapen the brewing process by using a high-temperature fermentation, which produced a product that the public deemed inferior, combined with a crippling 1981 strike by workers at the Milwaukee plant, led to serious financial difficulties. On June 10, 1982, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. was acquired by Stroh Brewing Co. of Detroit, Michigan. Schlitz beer is still produced, but in relatively small quanitites.
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