Blatz Beer Vintage Beer Ads September 30, 2019

Hey Peeps!!!! Happy Monday to you all. In keeping with the vibe of the last couple of posts, today I'm looking at some vintage beer ads from the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company brewers of the Milwaukee based Blatz Beer. 

Now today when you think of Milwaukee beer, you obviously think of Miller. I mean, the National League Milwaukee Brewers play in Miller Park. But that wasn't always the case. As with the cities of New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, Milwaukee was a beer brewing center up to about the 1960's, The story of Blatz Brewery is told by the article Rediscovering Milwaukee's historic breweries Part I: Milwaukee's downtown breweries by Kevin M Cullen from the Journal of the Brewery History Society: Issue 140:

The origins of the Blatz brewery can be traced to 1846 when Johann Braun opened the City Brewery on Main and Division Streets (N Broadway and E Juneau Avenue). After Braun died his former Bavarian braumeister, Valentin Blatz - who had by then established his own brewery on Market Street in 1850 - married his late boss' widow and merged the two businesses in 1851. In 1875 he contracted to have part of the brewery's output bottled, and soon 2,000 bottles a day were being distributed. In fact, Blatz was the first brewery to establish, own and operate their own bottling department in the city. In 1891, Valentin Blatz sold his interests to a group of London financiers known in brewing circles as ‘the English Syndicate.’Three years later Valentin Blatz died and was buried in one of North America's largest above ground mausoleums in the Forrest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee. The end of the Blatz Brewing legacy came in 1959 when the brewery was bought by the Pabst Brewing Co Today however, the Blatz beer label is still being produced by the Miller Brewing Co in Milwaukee, WI.

I guess most beer roads in Milwaukee lead back to Miller after all. Just like the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company did in the 1940's and 1950's, Blatz would celebrities to advertise their beers. The difference is that Blatz harked back to its Milwaukee and Wisconsin roots by using celebrities that were from the state of Wisconsin. As you can see from the image above, Liberace was from West Allis, Wisconsin and was arguably the most famous Wisconsinites used in the ads. Here are a few other ads from the "Blatz is Milwaukee's Finest Beer" campaign:

You had celebrities such as Liberace, Don Ameche, Fred McMurtry, Alfred Lunt and Groucho Marx. Athletes like Pat Darden, Frank Parker and Dan Marino. Radio personalities such as William Gargan, sculptor Dick Wiken and cartoonist E. Simms Campbell.

For the next post, I'm going back to the Bronx with the second part of the visit to the Gun Hill Brewery. See you soon.

Until Then Happy Drinking,
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