Possibly the return of the CAP

www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-schlitz-beer-returns-chicago-apr4,0,2834589.story
chicagotribune.com

Schlitz hopes it's not out of beer drinkers

By Mike Hughlett
Tribune staff reporter
11:07 PM CDT, April 4, 2008
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"When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of &#8230;" what? Can you remember?

If you said "beer," congratulations, you're the target market for an attempt to revive the once-ubiquitous but now nearly dead beer brand right here in Chicago, where Schlitz once reigned supreme. And yes, it is a long, long shot, beer industry experts say.

Next week, at select North Side outlets, Pabst Brewing Co., current owner of the Schlitz brand, will launch the revamped brew with an old 1960s recipe. That would be the recipe used before the old Schlitz company changed its formula in the 1970s, sending the brew on a path to near oblivion.

New Schlitz will come in traditional long-neck bottles too. Nowadays Schlitz comes only in cans, and they don't exactly fly off the shelves. About as many barrels of Schlitz beer are shipped per year as Bud Light, the leading U.S. beer, are shipped in a day.

And odds of a comeback, in beer marketing circles anyway, are slim. Younger drinkers want to identify with newer, hip brands, and a beer that starts to slip in sales usually has trouble climbing back, if at all.

Nevertheless, Woodridge-based Pabst is trying. To spice up sales, the company revitalized the warhorse and reintroduced it in former Schlitz strongholds. The Minneapolis-St. Paul and Tampa Bay markets were first last year, and now comes Chicago, one of its strongest markets in its heyday.

Pabst is a virtual company, contracting out brewing and bottling to others. Its stated goal with Schlitz: Make a nostalgia play of sorts to Baby Boomers&#8212;guys in their 50s and even late 40s&#8212;who remember Schlitz as a no-nonsense beer of their youth.

"These are the guys who remember how great the brand was and what it means," said Kyle Wortham, Pabst's senior brand manager for Schlitz. "It's guys who were drinking this beer back in the day."

Benj Steinman, editor of industry newsletter Beer Marketer's Insights, was circumspect. In a market clogged with myriad craft beers and rafts of Joe Sixpack standards, is there really a call for 1960s vintage Schlitz?

"I'm guessing there's not a tremendous pent-up demand for it," Steinman said.

Of course, there could be a marketing sleight-of-hand going on here.

Pabst owns a host of once-prominent brands&#8212;Old Style, Black Label, Blatz, etc.&#8212;that are fading or almost derelict. But a few years ago, Pabst's flagship brand suddenly became a big underground hit, an urban hipster phenomenon.

Why isn't exactly clear. Even Pabst's Wortham acknowledged the boom "was a lot of luck." And Pabst, a firm with a meager ad budget, "got out of the way," he said, largely letting the buzz, not ads, sell the beer.

Harry Schumacher, editor and publisher of Beer Business Daily, said that was the right approach. If the firm heavily promoted Pabst, it could have alienated the very youth market that had adopted seemingly non-commercial Pabst. "As soon as you start marketing it to young people, they'll quit drinking it," he said.

The same principle may apply to Schlitz, Schumacher said. Market it as an older guy's beer and it looks genuinely retro to youth; make it a typical promotion and it looks contrived.

The new Schlitz will be available in 6- and 12-packs at 10 North Side outlets beginning next week, with full expansion through the city in 2009, if things go well. Louis Glunz Beer Inc. will serve as its distributor.

The family-owned Glunz firm first supplied Schlitz to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The Milwaukee brand was a powerhouse here for years, and architectural remnants of Schlitz "tied-houses," or bars tied to a single manufacturer, still can be seen around Chicago.

Chicago's Leo Burnett ad agency crafted one of Schlitz's last great marketing slogans, "When You're Out of Schlitz, You're Out of Beer." But within a decade or so after that jingle ruled the airwaves, Schlitz was out of luck.

The nation's second-biggest beer as late as the mid-1970s, Schlitz was sold to Stroh's in 1982. When Stroh's went out of business in 1998, Pabst snapped up the haggard brand.

A return to glass bottles and the 1960s recipe are more evocative of Schlitz's heyday, Wortham said.

But what about the taste?

Well, Wortham said he hears this from people in the first two test markets: "It tastes like the first beer I stole out of my dad's refrigerator." And that, he said, is definitely a compliment.

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