Pabst Brewing Company, the fifth largest brewing group in the United States which owns and sells legacy brands Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR), Old Milwaukee, Lone Star, Rainier, Stroh’s, Old Style, Schaefer and Schlitzmoves its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles, California, to San Antonio, Texas.
It’s now the second time that Pabst will have its registered office in San Antonio. In 1996, after Pabst shuttered its brewery which was located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin since its foundation in 1844, Lutz Issleib, then Pabst's president, led the relocation to San Antonio where he lived.
In 2006, Kevin Kotecki became new CEO of the company and relocated Pabst’s headoffice to Woodridge, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. At that time around 40 to 50 employees in the finance, accounting and legal departments remained in San Antonio.
In 2011, one year after investor Charles Dean Metropoulos, an American billionaire investor and businessman of Greek descent, purchased Pabst from the Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, the headoffice was again relocated, this time to Los Angeles, California, where it remained until this year.
In recent months, Pabst has been renovating two complete floors for its 115 to 120 employees in a building in San Antonio where the company once operated a small field office. Remaining offices in Los Angeles and Chicago will be closed and the company is currently hiring new employees for those who turned down the offer to move.
The relocation was delayed by the Corona pandemic. “We were dealing with crisis management in March and April, so we delayed announcing to everyone that they had to relocate,” Matt Bruhn, general manager at Pabst Brewing Company was quoted by the San Antonio Report.
The nationwide lockdown of bars, clubs and restaurants had a severe impact on the brewer. Pabst lost about 27 percent of its business during the pandemic. “It decimated us – we got hit really hard,” Bruhn said. However, this has not changed the plans for a relocation.
