Up Schlitz Creek

I Stole That One
How honest am I*?  As has been my wont of late, I have been listening to tales of grievous entertainment on Youtube, all derived from something called "Reddit", which I have heard of, but know nothing about <Googles> ah, a social network where content gets rated by viewers.  Someone will put a video up on Youtube of various discussions, which are somewhat bizzarely read out by a robotic voice interpreter, which doesn't always get the pronunciation right.

The Reddit icon.  Alien or man with gearstick in his head?  Only you can decide!

     One I found fascinating had the title "People Reveal Worst Corporate Decisions That Completely Ruined The Company".  This is where we get to Schlitz, a South Canadian brewery that was one of the market leaders in the late Sixties.  Art?

"The beer that made Milwaukee famous".
(And then infamous)

    We now begin to witness what naked greed will do to a company and it's product.  In order to cut costs and thus compete with rival breweries Miller and Budweiser, the CEO of Schlitz began cost-cutting measures, beginning with the use of corn syrup instead of malted barley, because £££**.  That was Step One.  Step Two was to use hop pellets, rather than fresh hops.
       
                                                            Hopping mad
     Step Three was to reduce how long the beer brewed for, going from 25 days to 21.  Step Four was to reduce that time still further, down to just 15.  As a comparison, Miller brewed their beers for up to 42 days.  This then brought about Step Five, because the under-brewed Schlitz had to have an anti-hazing agent added, otherwise the beer would turn repulsively opaque when chilled.  Apparently the CEO didn't think people chilled beer very often; he was probably a whisky and champagne man himself.

The original anti-hazing agent, I kid you not

     By this point Schlitz were experiencing what we here in This Sceptred Isle call "Squeaky Bum Time", as they were haunted by the fear that they would have to list the ingredients present in their hideous chemical cocktail beer on individual cans and bottles, which would definitely go down badly with the drinking public.  So they changed stabiliser.  However, Step Six (or maybe Ten by now) had been to add a foam stabiliser to the concoction, and this reacted with the "Chillgarde" stabilising agent, causing proteins to deposit out of the beer.      
     Hot Marketing Tip: Drinkers do not like having a layer of snot floating atop their beer.  They complained, loudly and long, and the brewery had to secretly recall 10 million bottles of beer.
     By now we are at 1977 and Schlitz began to haemorrhage profits, market share and, most importantly, drinkers.  After a couple of CEOs came and went, along came someone who realised, thinking radically and out of the box, that, perhaps, just maybe, going back to the old pre-cost cutting recipe would be a good idea.
     Too late.  Schlitz were bought out in 1982, having lost 90% of their market value.
     Their strategy of reducing product quality incrementally over time is now taught in business schools as how NOT to run a business.  I suppose you could say that, towards the end, they were crying into their beer.

Ouch

     A tale I had never heard of before, yet one which is interesting in itself, and as a window into how the head honcho can completely muck things up.  Your Humble Scribe hopes you found this tale of folly as interesting as he did.
     Motley, shall we go for a swift pint?

     Wow, that was a long Intro.  What's next?

The Book Barn Updated
As you should surely know by now, Conrad loves him some books.  Yes, I know that's ungrammatical; I was being <ahem> "street".  Especially military history works.  Now, at present, Your Humble Scribe's intellect remains unimpaired and I am fairly certain that what I purchase isn't a duplicate, though it has happened on occasion.

One of my six bookcases, a good while ago

     To counter this I keep a Word list of all my MilHist books and am usually up to date with it, except of late I've not been adding in titles.  Hence about an hour spent last night sorting through various piles of books and checking to see if they had been added.

This one caused problems

     I checked using the title - nothing; despite other books bought at the same time already being on the list.  After a couple of minutes I used the author's name and - "BLOD RED SNOW" explained it.  I am now up to 794 MilHist books, with another three in transit.
     This is an insight into how my mind works; doing the above would be seen by many as "Cruel and unusual punishment" but I enjoyed it.
Whilst Banging On About Books -
Here's one of my other interests, being a combination of murder mystery and horror in novel form.  Art?

     Taken at an angle and with desk impedimenta so you can judge how thick this thing is.  I can definitely tell the Peter Straub stuff, as the novel is set in Wisconsin, rather than Maine, which is Ol' Steve's neck of the woods.  I am currently at page 93 of 808, for your information.

Finally -
As I normally type sitting by the window in my Sekrit Layr, I have a good view of two things.
1)  The 409 buses going past like clockwork every 9 minutes, which routine will last exactly as long as it takes me to get to the bus stop.  Then it will be nothing for 20 minutes and two coming at once.
2)  The awful weather.  It is ghastly, gale-force winds, torrential rain and cold as an accountant's heart.  Storm Ciara, apparently.  I normally take Edna for a trot in the afternoon and then lurch unsteadily into Royton; whether my determination is up to it today is quite the question.

     And with that, we are up to the Compositional Ton.  Ta ta!

*  Rhetorical question DO NOT ANSWER
**  It's my blog and I'll use pound signs if I want.