I could not have been more surprised if the ghost of Wild Bill Hickok himself suddenly appeared at my side on a dusty side street in Deadwood, South Dakota, and whispered, “Do you remember me?”
Surprised is how I felt when I read a sign above a downtown saloon near the spot where Wild Bill bought a slug in the back during a poker game back in the 1800’s.
Adding insult to injury, at the time he was shot in the back, Poor Bill was holding “a peach of a hand,” as Doc Holliday would have said.
Card sharps around the world have forever since referred to a full house with aces over eights as the Dead Man’s Hand.
But I digress
As I was saying, I couldn’t have been more surprised if I had seen ol’ Wild Bill himself dealing stud over in the corner, his back to the door, when I saw the sign that advertised “Ice Cold Schlitz in the Bottle!” And the sign was real.
What a find! I had long since given up looking for Schlitz at the beer store.
Come to think of it, I don’t know why I ever went looking for it in the first place. It was considered rot-gut beer back in the day, along with such brands as Old Milwaukee, Falls City, and Blatz, the only beer that tastes about like it sounds.
Schlitz was a sponsor of Major League Baseball games on television when I was a kid. I remember Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reece talking about how good it tasted on a hot summer’s day.
My dad occasionally kept some Schlitz in the refrigerator. And I think I drank a few cans when I was first starting out, though I remember the Schlitz Malt Liquor brand better.
But for some nostalgic reason, I went looking for it in stores across the country a few years back. I gave up on my search, having figured the brand was retired.
But it turns out they still make Schlitz, just in limited batches.
You wouldn’t think that “the beer that made Milwaukee famous” would have fallen from favor so quickly.
Schlitz developed innovative television marketing campaigns in the 1960s with the slogans, “Real gusto in a great light beer,” and “When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer.”
Started in the 1850’s, by the early 1940’s Schlitz was the best-selling beer in America.
But a series of management mistakes started the brand on a nose-dive to the bottom before it was finally acquired by rival Pabst Blue Ribbon in 1999.
Today, Schlitz beer is still brewed in small batches and is therefore extremely hard to find anywhere in the world.
But before you don your Indiana Jones garb and start off on a quest to find the beer that made Milwaukee famous, take my advice.
It still tastes as bad as it ever did.
Unless you are looking to get a nostalgic kick remembering when your dad watched Saturday baseball games wearing his white socks and swilling the stuff, you’d be better off with a cold Michelob Ultra.