The second thing I notice at the Miller History Center is a glass case holding timeworn, leather-bound pocketbooks and ledgers. (The first is the 4-foot cartoon Hamm’s bear peering out of the archive’s glass door entryway.)
Dan Scholzen, the corporate archivist at the brewery’s parent company, Molson Coors, points to one of the small books, identifying it as a journal kept by Frederick J. Miller, the founder of the historic Milwaukee brewery.
Scholzen carefully pages through the pocketbook – well preserved considering it dates to 1855 – pointing out ornately handwritten shopping lists, business plans and the musings of a budding Milwaukee beer baron.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
This “wow” moment is a great start to the Miller Brewery Archives Experience, a tour of the brewery’s extensive collection of artifacts. It meanders through a labyrinth of subterranean, nondescript rooms filled floor to ceiling with amazing, and at times amazingly odd, pieces of the company’s history.
It’s impossible to miss all the bottles and cans from more than a century of brewing lined neatly on industrial metal shelves. That includes myriad iterations of High Life bottles (from 1904 on), scores of Miller Lite vessels, ancient cans (like Meister Bräu) and a few beers lost to time or questionable marketing decisions – remember Miller Ale or Miller Clear?
Signage spanning decades includes dilapidated metal circles proclaiming High Life “The Best Milwaukee Beer,” a massive square Gettelman sign emblazoned with “Little Hutch” (a nod to a defunct watering hole?) and a pair of 1960s-era pop art (think Lichtenstein) metal signs depicting High Life. There are too many branded tchotchkes to count – generations of beer swag.
The Miller Brewery Archives Experience is offered by request at Miller History Center (38th Street and Highland Boulevard). The cost ($60) includes a one-hour visit to the archives, plus the standard Miller Brewery Tour.
The Girl in the Moon is the grande dame here. Her visage abounds, and she also has a place on the most solemn artifact: a three-foot chunk of ragged silver metal on which the smiling girl sits sidesaddle upon her moon and hoists a pilsner glass. It’s part of the fuselage (and only remnant) of a plane that crashed shortly after taking off from Mitchell Field in 1954, killing four people including brewery president Frederick C. Miller, the grandson of its founder.
Scholzen leads me through a short hallway, adorned with vintage Miller ads and more antique signage, into his office where he shows off more treasured paperwork. An 1841 letter of recommendation praises 17-year-old Fred Miller’s brewing experience in Germany. Miller’s 1888 will includes the wish that his second son, Fritz, “make himself as useful as possible to persons with whom he associates.” Sound advice.
The amiable Scholzen tailors the tour to guests’ interests – you can indicate a topic you’d like to discuss or particular items you’d like to see when you register – and is quick with anecdotes about everything in the collection of thousands of pieces of brewing history. Says Scholzen: “It really is a living, breathing thing.”
A Bright Light
BY: CHRIS DROSNER
ANY DAY NOW, “The Original Light Beer” will be getting its AARP card in the mail.
It’s been 50 years since Miller Lite defined a new category in beer by finding the commercial sweet spot embodied in its longtime slogan: “Tastes Great, Less Filling.” The success helped Miller weather the withering industry consolidation that culminated with it being the last Milwaukee macrobrewery standing on its own by 1996.
Looming large in the brand’s history is its deft marketing, including a who’s who of celebrity pitchmen. Lite, however, didn’t add the crown jewel of that roster, Bob Uecker, until 1984, when his “I must be in the front row!” spot aired. (Four earlier offers to have Uecker join the star-studded spots were rejected because Pabst was the Brewers’ beer sponsor.)
But milestone anniversaries are for roasts, too, so let us not forget the era of the spiral-necked “Vortex Bottle” that began in 2010 and lasted only three years. In 2023, Miller Lite tweeted, “We’re bringing back the vortex bottle.” The date: April Fools’ Day.
