Vintage 1960s Heileman's Old Style Special Export Beer Coaster 🍺 G. Heileman Brewing Co La Crosse Wisconsin Double-Sided Coupon

Remember Heileman's Old Style Coasters? 🍺 Heileman's Old Style and Special Export Beer Coaster, La Crosse, Wisconsin

Size: 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" ~ Never used.

Two great Wisconsin beers on one little coaster. The front says "Pure Brewed From God's Country." in red, over a blue drawing of mountain country: snowy peaks, a castle wall, a stone bridge, and folks sitting together at a table outside. In the middle is the blue Old Style shield: HEILEMAN'S, PURE GENUINE, Old Style, on a red ribbon.

Flip it over for Special Export: "You can travel the world over and never find a better beer." A green sailing ship under full sail and a compass rose sit beside Heileman's in red script and SPECIAL EXPORT Beer in big red letters, with the fine print 0150001, G. HEILEMAN BREWING CO., INC., LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN. It's a thick pulp coaster that never saw a wet glass.

🏞️ From the City Brewery to Old Style

The story starts in 1858, when Gottlieb Heileman, an immigrant from Württemberg, and John Gund from Baden opened the City Brewery in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The partnership split up in 1872 and the brewery took Heileman's name, making about 3,000 barrels a year for La Crosse and the country around it. When Gottlieb died in 1878, his widow Johanna Heileman took charge, and she ran it for decades, one of the first women to head a company in the United States. She and the family, with her son-in-law Emil T. Mueller, incorporated the G. Heileman Brewing Company in 1890.

La Crosse itself got its name from a game. When Lt. Zebulon Pike came up the Mississippi in 1805 he recorded the spot as "Prairie La Crosse," after the stick game the Native people played there, the stick looking like a bishop's crozier, la crosse in French. Nathan Myrick, a New Yorker, built a trading post there in 1841, where the Black, La Crosse and Mississippi rivers come together on a broad plain below the tall river bluffs, and the town grew up around it.

Old Style has a funny start. The company launched a beer called Old Times Lager in 1900, got sued over the name, and changed it to Old Style Lager in 1902. That year they made around 160,000 barrels of it. By 1915 Heileman was selling in more than 30 states. Prohibition shut the beer down in 1920, and after repeal the family sold to the Paul Davis Company of Chicago in 1933, which made it G. Heileman Brewing Company Incorporated, the "INC." on the back of this coaster. Special Export came along in 1934 as the stronger house beer, over 6 percent alcohol to Old Style's 4.

🧢 Cubs, La Croix and a Six-Pack You Can See From the Road

Old Style was so popular around Chicago that it became a sponsor of the Chicago Cubs. Heileman kept growing by buying up other breweries, a plan that started with Roy E. Kumm, a longtime Heileman man who took over as president in 1957 and began picking up struggling regional brewers and their labels, keeping a whole shelf of different brands alive instead of folding them into one, and by 1983 it was the fourth-largest brewer in the country, behind only Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Stroh, making more than 17 million barrels a year. Here's one most people don't know: Heileman is the company that launched La Croix sparkling water in 1981.

Next to the La Crosse brewery Heileman painted a set of storage tanks to look like a giant six-pack of Old Style, the "World's Largest Six-Pack." The company was taken over by Australian raider Alan Bond in a hostile buyout starting in 1987, ended up with Stroh in 1996, and after Stroh was broken up in 1999, Old Style and Special Export landed with Pabst.

It's a perfect piece for a Wisconsin or Chicago bar, a Cubs fan's den or a breweriana collection.