Now Is Your Last Chance To Get Wisconsin’s Schlitz Beer. Maybe.

For 177 years, Wisconsin's Schlitz beer has been something of an institution.

The Schlitz story begins not with Joseph Schlitz, but with a Bavarian immigrant named August Krug, who opened a small tavern brewery in Milwaukee in 1849. A year later, he hired a young German bookkeeper named Joseph Schlitz to help run the books.

When Krug died in 1856, Schlitz stepped in to manage the brewery, married Krug's widow Anna two years later, and renamed the operation the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.

What followed was one of the most remarkable rises in American business history. By 1902, Schlitz had become the largest brewery in the world, selling more than one million barrels of beer in a single year. At its peak in the 1970s, the company was producing more than 24 million barrels annually. Milwaukee was Schlitz, and Schlitz was Milwaukee.

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The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous

After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 devastated the city and destroyed many of its local breweries, Schlitz shipped barrels of beer south to Chicago relief efforts. Whether the story is legend or literal history, Schlitz's beer sales doubled in Chicago in the aftermath, and the company officially unveiled its famous slogan, "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous," at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1912, Schlitz pioneered something the entire beer industry would adopt permanently, the brown glass bottle. Before Schlitz, beer was bottled in clear glass, which allowed sunlight to spoil the flavor.

Schlitz changed that, and now we can thank them for every brown bottle of beer we crack open.

The Beginning Of The End

The fall of Shlitz could arguably be traced back to the 1970s, when company management made the fateful decision to quietly swap out premium ingredients for cheaper ones, corn syrup for malted barley, hop pellets for fresh hops, hoping drinkers would not notice. They noticed.

Marketing also played a role when, in 1977, Schlitz launched an ad campaign featuring men, like a boxer and an outdoorsman with a cougar, who, when asked to switch beers, essentially threatened viewers.

The ad industry promptly dubbed it the "Drink Schlitz or I'll Kill You" campaign. It was pulled after ten weeks. The agency was fired.

A 1981 strike shut down the Milwaukee plant entirely. By 1982, Schlitz, once worth billions, was sold to Detroit's Stroh Brewery for $500 million, having lost more than 90 percent of its brand value in under a decade.

Stroh eventually sold the brand to Pabst in 1999. Pabst revived Schlitz in 2008 using a recovered version of the original recipe, reintroducing it as a nostalgia-driven dive bar staple, the $3 tallboy that regulars at Milwaukee's Wolski's Tavern and bars across Wisconsin have kept the brand going, but it appears the end is very near.

The Final Pour

On May 15, 2026, Pabst officially confirmed it is discontinuing Schlitz, citing rising costs to store and ship the product. So, after 177 years, the beer that made Milwaukee famous will be gone.

However, Wisconsin is not letting it go quietly.

Brewmaster Kirby Nelson of Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona is brewing one final 80-barrel batch of Schlitz on Saturday, May 23, using original brewing logs from 1948, when Schlitz was the best-selling beer in the world. Nelson said Schlitz deserves to go out with "dignity and respect," and called the batch "a love letter to Wisconsin."

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Pre-orders for the final Schlitz open May 23 on the Wisconsin Brewing Co. website, with the beer available June 27.

That same day, Wisconsin Brewing will hold a public celebration event. Nelson will also serve the commemorative Schlitz at Old World Wisconsin's 50th anniversary celebration in Eagle on July 4.

All May Not Be Lost

Not everyone is willing to accept the final verdict. A Change.org petition urging Pabst to keep Schlitz alive is gaining signatures, and beer forums across the country have turned into real-time tracking systems for the last remaining cases on store shelves.

Sean McCarthy, co-owner of Milwaukee's Wolski's Tavern, put it as plainly as anyone: losing Schlitz, he said, is like losing Harley-Davidson or Kohl's, it's that significant to the city's identity. He is planning one final Schlitz celebration at Wolski's before the last kegs are gone.

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Whether the petition gains enough signatures to move the needle or not, it's inspiring that beer drinkers in Wisconsin are fighting until the end of what could be the final chapter of Schlitz beer.