Pabst Brewing Co. resurrected its faded brands — not with giant banners or shot-girls sporting logo-branded T-shirts — but through grass-roots and guerrilla marketing efforts, like someone painting a logo on a skateboard, a guy riding up a ski lift handing out free brews and artists incorporating Pabst Blue Ribbon cans into their oil paintings.

"It was what the brand stood for, which was that we embrace people for what they are, their creativity and specialness,'' said Kevin Kotecki, who was chief executive from 2005 until he quit in November.

Now many former executives who helped breathe life into the company's stale brands, such as Schlitz and Old Style, and helped PBR become the fastest-growing national beer in 2009 and 2010, are on a different kind of campaign.

"I want it to fail,'' said Bryan Clarke, former vice president of marketing.

His wrath is aimed at billionaire C. Dean Metropoulos and his two sons, who took control of the Woodridge-based company a year ago. "I hope they lose every dollar they have. If our core PBR drinker knew that what they were drinking is owned by guys like these, it's the last beer they'd want to drink.''

When companies change ownership or direction resulting in the departure of executives, it's not uncommon for there to be some raw emotion or hard feelings. But lashing out publicly against a former employer is rare.

"They know that negative comments will harm them as much as the company,'' said Richard Coughlan, senior associate dean for graduate business programs and professor of management at University of Richmond's Robins School of Business.

Coughlan said it's even more unusual to see more than two dozen executives abandon a company about the same time. But former employees at Pabst say this isn't just about beer. They saw themselves as the protectors of the people who loved their brands, even though 99 percent of Pabst's brands are brewed by Miller Brewing Co. They fear the spirit of the brands will be destroyed under its new owners.

"My job was to protect consumers from the stupid crap that old guys with gray hair come up with," said Clarke. "The brand is the people who drink it. And we treated it well. We were the stewards of it. We did a good job. We tried to keep from selling it out."

In effect, the Metropoulos family proposes a major shift in marketing. The family, whose $250 million bid for the company topped more than a dozen contenders, including a group headed by Kotecki, announced in May that they're moving Pabst's headquarters to Los Angeles. They said they plan to bring glamour and celebrity sponsorships to such Pabst brands as Old Milwaukee, Schlitz and Lone Star.

The family declined requests for interviews for this story.

"Just about everything that I'd been working on or trying to accomplish ended up not being a part of the plan going forward," Kotecki said.

When Kotecki joined Pabst it was owned by a California-based charitable trust and its revenue had not grown in 14 years, he said. Distributors commonly bullied salespeople into selling its beer for less than it cost to produce. "They were almost embarrassed to sell the products," he said.

With Budweiser spending 100 times as much to market one brand as Pabst was on its portfolio of brands, Kotecki needed to get more people to buy more beer at higher prices. Fans of Old Style who were paying $10.99 for a 30-pack, for example, would have to be willing to pony up $16.99 for a 24-pack.

"You can have the greatest beer in the world, but if you sell it cheap, people think it sucks," Kotecki said.

But before they ticked up the price, they needed to bring back the quality. Kyle Wortham, who was marketing director and one of dozens of employees who have left since the new owners took over, bellied up to aging Schlitz drinkers in Milwaukee and asked what had changed since the brand's heyday in the '50s and '60s when it was bigger than Budweiser. They told him it tasted inferior, watered down, worthy of its lowered price tag.

Company executives knew they needed to bring back the quality, but they didn't even have copies of the original formulas.

That's when Pabst's brewmaster tracked down workers who had brewed Schlitz under its original formula in Milwaukee. "He literally woke them up after their early bird special dinners and asked them what was in it because the recipe didn't exist anymore," Wortham said.

The result was a more robust beer, truer to its origins. To Schlitz loyalists, the beer had been reborn.

The company enlisted hundreds of Schlitz drinkers to act as "gusto guys" (an homage to an old tagline) — baby boomers who hosted backyard barbecues, Mardi Gras bashes and block parties, all sponsored by Schlitz.

The idea was to be unpretentious, honest. "Our attitude was if Miller or Coors or Anheuser-Busch would do it, we'd never do it," Wortham said.

B.R. Zoom, a marketing and advertising agency, played a key part in growing PBR. It helped manage a secret band of guerrilla marketers who were paid $35,000 to $50,000 a year to buy rounds of Pabst in places like Portland, Ore.; Seattle; Berkeley, Calif.; Brooklyn; and Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, where bike messengers, hipsters and artists had adopted the brand — a phenomenon that grew out of Portland bars in the early 2000s. Even before Kotecki joined the company, Pabst helped stoke that growth by offering price reductions and sponsoring mini events at the request of PBR drinkers, but the brand's growth had fallen flat again by 2005.

"We wanted people who would walk a mile for a Pabst," Kotecki said.

From 2005 to 2010, PBR brand volume increased 69 percent. Over that same period, said Kotecki, the company's gross margins increased 48 percent, operating profit rose 81 percent and net revenue per barrel increased 28 percent.

The improvements made Pabst an attractive candidate for sale in 2010. The Internal Revenue Service had attempted to force the sale in 2005 because charities aren't allowed to own for-profit businesses, but the owner, Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, of Mill Valley, Calif., claimed it was unable to find a buyer and requested an extension until 2010.

Enter C. Dean Metropoulos, the 65-year-old Greek immigrant billionaire known for savvy dealmaking in the food business, and his two sons.

Daren Metropoulos, 27, is known for buying Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner's former Los Angeles mansion for $18 million and making headlines in 2009 when his Playmate ex-girlfriend filed a $10 million suit in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking a restraining order and claiming he'd choked and beaten her during a vacation in Hawaii. The case was dismissed in December, according to his lawyer.