Quite a loyalty

Like at the Schlitz and Miller breweries, Pabst was beloved by its longtime employees, many of whom had been on the job since its heyday in the 1970s. The same could be said of its loyal drinkers, many of whom snubbed Schlitz and Miller the same way Cubs fans don’t root for the White Sox. But all of that love evaporated the day Pabst brewery closed its doors in October 1996. The local taverns started dumping it. Customers started boycotting. The brewer’s union sued on behalf of disgruntled unemployed workers. As Milwaukee historian John Gurda told CNN that month, “The closing of the brewery is more or less like a death.”

That brings us to why MillerCoors started brewing Pabst shortly thereafter, and why, for the last nearly 20 years, Pabst has relied on the larger company.

Pabst today is nowhere near the nadir it experienced after shuttering the brewery in 1996, which has made its desperate-sounding legal battle with MillerCoors seem all the more unusual. According to the Brewers Association, Pabst Brewing Co. was ranked fifth in overall beer sales nationwide in 2017, trailing only Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Constellation and Heineken. At the same time, its growth is also not anywhere near its astounding comeback in the mid-2000s.