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.
Schaefer was acquired by Stroh Brewing Company in 1981. Stroh was acquired by Pabst Brewing Company in 1999.
2. Schaefer continues today as a Pabst label. The company's preservation society, Team Schaefer, is centered in Long Beach, California.
