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. After a fire in 1862 the two partners also bought the Augusta Hotel and rebuilt it as the International Hotel. 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. Gund had wanted to put his money into a bigger brewery that could take on the Milwaukee brewers, while Heileman wanted to stay a local brewery, so Gund went off and started his own Empire Brewery. The Heileman motto said it plainly: "We don't aim to make the most beer, only the best." When Gottlieb died in 1878, his widow Johanna Heileman took charge, and she ran it for decades, right up until her death in 1917, 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.

The Germans came in the 1850s. That was the first big wave to reach La Crosse, some of them Forty-Eighters, political refugees from the 1848 revolutions, and some just after a better living, and by 1855 La Crosse Germans had started their own Turnverein, a gymnastics society. Wisconsin had gone out looking for them. In 1852 the legislature created a Commissioner of Emigration who worked out of New York, and he printed pamphlets about the new state, 20,000 of them in German, handing most of the run to newcomers on the ships, in taverns and in hostels and sending about 5,000 over to Europe. La Crosse had what a lager brewer needed back before refrigeration, too: a cool climate with plenty of natural ice, and cheap labor and cooperage.

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.

Kumm also had a hand in La Crosse's Oktoberfest. In 1960 he was one of four golfing buddies, the others from a bakery, a bank and the vocational college, looking for a yearly event to promote the town. Word of the talks got around the brewery, and two men in Heileman's malt house said make it an Oktoberfest. One of them, John Dickow, had been to Munich's fall festival while the army had him stationed in Germany. The first Oktoberfest, USA, ran October 13 to 15, 1961, right in the years dealers date this coaster to. The state registered the name in 1962, "Oktoberfest, USA" became a federal trademark in 1963, and in 1964 Kumm was Fest Master himself and tapped the Golden Keg to open it. La Crosse still throws it every fall. When Kumm took over, Heileman was the 39th-largest brewer in the country, and when he died in 1971 it was 15th. His son-in-law Russell G. Cleary, who had come to work there in 1960, took over as president and kept right on buying: Associated Breweries in 1972, Rainier and Grain Belt in 1977, Falls City in 1978 and Carling National in 1979.

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.