Olympia Brewing Company - History

History

Leopold Schmidt, a German immigrant from Montana founded The Capital Brewing Company at Tumwater Falls on the Deschutes River in the town of Tumwater, near the south end of Puget Sound. He built a four-story wooden brewhouse, a five-story cellar building, a one-story ice factory powered by the lower falls, and a bottling and keg plant and in 1896, began brewing and selling Olympia Beer. In 1902, the firm became Olympia Brewing Company and chose the slogan "It's the Water" to promote its flagship product. Statewide Prohibition, which began in January 1916, four years before National Prohibition, ended beer making operations. After Prohibition ended, a new Olympia Brewery was erected just upstream from the original, and Olympia beer went back on sale in 1934.

Olympia Beer was a very popular regional brand in the Pacific Northwest for half of a century. It eventually expanded nationwide, repositioned as a low-price lager. During the 1970s, Olympia acquired Hamm's and Lone Star. Olympia Brewing also produced Buckhorn Beer, which had previously been a product of the Lone Star Brewing Company. The beer declined increasingly in sales when the president of the brewery was caught engaging in a homosexual act, and was therefore publicly outed in the early 1980s. The Schmidt family, which owned and operated the brewery and company, elected to sell the company in 1982. Olympia was subsequently purchased by G. Heileman Brewing Company in 1983. G. Heileman Brewing Company was sold to Stroh Brewery Company in 1996. In 1999, Pabst Brewing Company bought most of the Stroh Brewery Company brands including Olympia Beer.

As with many other regional breweries, ownership of the Olympia Brewery eventually passed through several corporations including Pabst, G. Heileman, and Stroh's, until the brewery was eventually purchased by Miller Brewing Co. For a time, the Olympia brewery took over the brewing of other Pacific Northwest brands as their original breweries were closed one by one, including the Lucky Lager brewery in Vancouver, Washington, the Henry Weinhard's brewery in Portland, Oregon, and even the brewery of its arch-rival, Rainier Beer, in Seattle. In 2002 SAB bought out Miller brewing Co. SABMiller closed the Olympia Brewery on June 27th, 2003 citing the unprofitability of such a small brewery.

Pabst still owns the Olympia label, and beer marketed under the Olympia Beer name continues to be manufactured by MillerCoors at a plant in Irwindale, California.