Pabst Blue Ribbon

Gottlieb and Frederika Pabst and their twelve-year-old son Frederick arrived in the United States in 1848 and settled in Chicago where Frederick eventually found work on the ships of Lake Michigan.[2] In 1862, Frederick married Maria Best, daughter of the founder and owner of the Best Brewing Company, and in 1863 became a brewer at his father-in-law's brewery.[3]

When Philip Best retired to Germany in 1867, Pabst and Emil Schandein - his sister-in-law's husband and the vice-president of Best Brewery - worked to transform the company into one of the nation's largest brewers, capitalizing on, among other things, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that destroyed nineteen Chicago breweries and helped position Milwaukee as the leading beer-producing city in the United States.[4] In 1889, Schandein died, leaving Pabst as president and his widow, Lisette Schandein, as vice-president.[5][6] In 1890, Pabst changed the "Best" letterhead to "Pabst" and the Pabst Brewing Company officially began.

This is the original Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. Nature's choicest products provide its prized flavor. Only the finest of hops and grains are used. Selected as America's Best in 1893.

— Quote from PBR label, referring to the award it received at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.[7]

Brand name

The company has historically claimed that its flagship beer was renamed Pabst Blue Ribbon following its win as "America's Best" at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Whether the brand actually won an award in 1893 is unclear. Some contemporaneous accounts indicate that many vendors were frustrated by the fair's refusal to award such prizes. One account says that the only prizes awarded by the executive committee were bronze medals, in recognition of "some independent and essential excellence in the article displayed", rather than "merely to indicate the relative merits of competing exhibits". However, the beer had won many other awards at many other fairs – so many, in fact, that Captain Pabst had already started tying silk ribbons around every bottle. It was a time when beer bottles were more likely to be embossed than labeled and the ribbons were likely added at great cost to Pabst. But Pabst's display of pride was also a display of marketing savvy, as patrons started asking their bartenders for "the blue-ribbon beer."[8][9]

Peak, decline, and revival

A 1911 advertisement showing a blue ribbon tied around the bottle

Sales of Pabst peaked at 18 million barrels in 1977.[10] In 1980 and 1981, the company had four different CEOs, and by 1982 it was fifth in beer sales in the U.S., dropping from third in 1980.[11]

In 1996, Pabst headquarters left Milwaukee,[12] and the company ended beer production at its main complex there.[13] By 2001, the brand's sales were below a million barrels. That year, the company got a new CEO, Brian Kovalchuk, formerly the CFO of Benetton, and major changes at the company's marketing department were made.[14]

In 2010, food industry executive C. Dean Metropoulos bought the company for a reported $250 million.[15] In 2011, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission forced two advertising executives to cease efforts to raise $300 million to buy the Pabst Brewing Company. The two had raised over $200 million by crowdsourcing, collecting pledges via their website, Facebook, and Twitter.[16] In November 2014, Eugene Kashper, an American beer entrepreneur, and TSG Consumer Partners acquired Pabst Brewing Company.[17][18][19] In 2015, Pabst won the "best large brewing company of the year" award at the Great American Beer Festival.[20]

PBR is now available in several international markets, including Australia,[21] Canada,[22], Ukraine, Russia,[23] and China.[24]

Pabst Blue Ribbon concession stand at Progressive Field in Cleveland

In the mid-1940s, the brand was the titular sponsor of the radio comedy show Blue Ribbon Town, starring Groucho Marx. It later was a sponsor of the radio mystery show Night Beat in the early 1950s.

The beer experienced a sales revival in the early 2000s after a two-decade-long slump, largely due to its increasing popularity among urban hipsters.[25][26] Although the Pabst website features user-submitted photography, much of which features twenty-something Pabst drinkers dressed in alternative fashions,[27] the company has opted not to fully embrace the countercultural label in its marketing, fearing that doing so could jeopardize the very "authenticity" that made the brand popular (as was the case with the poorly received OK Soda).[25][28][29] Pabst instead targets its desired market niche through the sponsorship of indie music, local businesses, facial hair clubs (RVA Beard League), post-collegiate sports teams,[30] dive bars and radio programming like National Public Radio's All Things Considered.[26][31] The company encourages the online submission of fan art, which is subsequently shown on the beer's official Facebook page.[32]

In the 1986 David Lynch film Blue Velvet, the character Frank Booth asks main character Jeffrey Beaumont for his favorite beer. Beaumont answers by saying Heineken, to which Booth gets infuriated; shouting "Pabst Blue Ribbon" at him.[33]

Pabst Blue Ribbon is sometimes featured in the popular TV show South Park.[34]

• Official website
• A souvenir booklet from the Pabst Brewing Company, 1907, Wisconsin Historical Society