Meister Brau

Peter Hand, a German immigrant, founded the Hand Brewing Company (later Meister Brau Brewing Co.) in Chicago in 1891. His Meister Brau brand of beer was a local favorite, and the brewery was able to emerge from the woeful Prohibition era with relative strength. As this company continued on into the 1970s, however, the brutal competition of the beer wars began to take its toll, and by 1972 the business was weakened enough that it allowed itself to be acquired by Miller Brewing Company (Philip-Morris). However, before this buy-out, Meister Brau introduced a product that revolutionized brewing and reverberates to this day. Meister Brau/Hand Brewing had a portfolio of beer styles, but the roll-out in 1967 of its diet beer, Meister-Brau Lite, soon changed everything. Miller Brewing, apparently sensing a gold mine with Lite, much like their sniffing out the wildly successful trade for the Stroh/Pabst malt liquor (and Hamm's line) brands in 1999 (Mickey's and Old English 800), which was parleyed into a very strong niche segment, snatched up the entire company in 1972, and the last brewery in Chicago was shut down.