Schaefer Beer is a brand of beer from the United States. Schaefer beer traces its beginnings back to 1842, when the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company which stands for Frederick and Maximilian, the brothers who founded Schaefer. Frederick Schaefer, a native of Wetzlar, Prussia, Germany, emigrated to the U.S. in 1838, was opened in New York, NY in September, 1842[1]. This is not to be confused with Engels and Schaefer Brewing Company of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Schaefer Beer also had a brewing company in Albany New York which closed in the mid-1970's.
Schaefer was, at one point during the first half of the 20th century, the world's best selling beer. By the 1970s, however, it had ceded the top spot to Budweiser.
A popular advertising campaign for Schaefer was the tagline, "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." This was put to music and used as a jingle from the 1950s-70s. The music was written by Jim Jordan of BBDO, on his son's xylophone. Louis Armstrong once performed the jingle in a television advertisement campaign. Music composer Edd Kalehoff also appeared in a 1973 advertisement showing off his Moog synthesizer.
An earlier advertising campaign (about 1959) asserted, "What do you hear in the best of circles? Schaefer, all around!"
In Puerto Rico, Schaefer was one of the top selling beers during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. For a long time, there was a large and quite famous Schaefer beer billboard at the main entrance to the city of Bayamón. The beer, along with the Winston cigarette, was quite famous among Puerto Rican salsa fans and superstars like Frankie Ruiz, Tito Rojas, Lalo Rodríguez and others among the "salsa sensual" movement of the 1980s.
Currently, Schaefer Beer is owned by the Pabst Brewing Company. Pabst purchased the Schaefer label when it bought Stroh's Brewing Company in 1999. The company's preservation society - Team Schaefer, is centered in Long Beach, California.
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New York World's Fairs
Schaefer Beer had major exhibitions at both of New York City's World's Fairs, held in Flushing Meadows Park.
During the 1939 New York World's Fair Schaefer sponsored Schaefer Center a restaurant with seating for 1,600. Many of the dishes used beer as an ingredient. And above the bar, the Fair's largest at 160 feet long, was a mural of the history of beer and brewing.
At the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair, the company again hosted a restaurant and 100 foot bar complex.
An illuminated Schaefer beer advertisement could be seen in the outfield of Ebbets Field; the letter "h" would light up if the official scorer ruled that a player reached base on a hit; the "e" would light up if the player got on base due to an error. The F&M Schaefer Brewing Company would later become a sponsor of the New York Mets.
At one point in the 1970s and through the middle 80s, Schaefer owned the naming rights to Schaefer Stadium, the then home of the New England Patriots. The name was changed to Sullivan Stadium in the mid 1980s when Schaefer did not renew its contract.
The company sponsored the Schaefer Music Festival at Wollman Skating Rink in New York City's Central Park from 1968-1976, hosting some of the biggest names in popular music.
Award Theatre
Schaefer Beer also sponsored a long-running television program of quality first-run motion pictures, titled Award Theatre (also known as Schaefer Award Theatre). The series presented such movies with only four commercial interruptions. In New York City, the program ran several times a year on WCBS-TV from 1959[2] to 1968[3], and was revived briefly (primarily on WCBS-TV) for several months in 1970 with two films shown on WNBC-TV during its second run. [4] Award Theatre also ran in Chicago on WBBM-TV and in Philadelphia on WCAU-TV during this same period. This special series ran in place of the respective CBS stations' usual late-night movie umbrella, The Late Show.
In its initial run, Award Theatre was aired before such major holidays as Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas; during its brief 1970 revival, the show ran once a month.
References and notes
- ^ [1] ""F. & M.", as most breweriana buffs know, stands for Frederick and Maximilian, the brothers who founded Schaefer. Frederick Schaefer, a native of Wetzlar, Prussia, Germany, emigrated to the U.S. in 1838. When he arrived in New York City on October 23rd he was 21 years old and had exactly $1.00 to his name. There is some doubt as to whether or not he had been a practicing brewer in Germany, but there is no doubt that he was soon a practicing brewer in his adopted city."
- ^ NEWS OF TV AND RADIO — INFORMATIONAL by Val Adams. The New York Times, May 10, 1959.
- ^ Schaefer TV Series Ending; Good Films Too Scarce by George Gent. The New York Times, December 13, 1968.
- ^ The two WNBC-TV airings (of Charade and The Birds) were aired in place of that station's late-night weekend movie umbrella of the time, Sunday Film Festival.
External links
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