It took four generations to build Stroh's Brewing into a major player in the beer industry and just one generation to tear it down. Stroh's was founded in Detroit by Bernard Stroh, who had emigrated from Germany in 1850. Bernard took the $150 he had and a cherished family beer recipe and began selling beer door to door. By 1890, his sons, Julius and Bernard, had grown the family business and were shipping beer around the Great Lakes region. The family business survived prohibition by making ice cream and maple syrup. After World War II ended, the business grew along with the Industrial Midwest, seeing its sales surge from 500,000 barrels of beer in 1950 to 2.7 million barrels in 1956. The firm succeeded by following a simple business recipe: catering to the needs of working class tastes by brewing a simple, drinkable, and affordable beer and treating its employees well. Following this business blueprint, the company found success and growth, resulting in a business that was worth an estimated $700 million in the mid-1980s. A little over a decade later, the firm was out of business. Its rapid descent from a successful and growing firm to failure is tied to a series of disastrous decisions made by Peter Stroh, representing the fifth generation of the family to lead the firm, who took on the role of CEO in 1980. Rather than stick to the tried-and-true business plan of catering to the needs of the Midwest working class, Peter stepped out to build a larger, national beer empire. He purchased F&M Schaefer, a New York-based brewer, in 1981. He followed this up in 1982 by purchasing Joseph Schlitz Brewing, a firm that was much bigger than Stroh's. To undertake this acquisition, Stroh's borrowed $500 million, five times the value of Stroh's Itself. Peter's acquisitions hampered the firm in two key ways. First, working to combine the firms distracted Stroh's from seeing the evolving needs of customers. Most notably, it completely missed the most significant shift in customer tastes in a generation--the emergence of light beer. Also, the heavy debt load taken on to finance the acquisitions left the firm with little money to launch the national advertising campaigns needed to support a company that was now the third-largest brewer in the United States. In the words of Greg Stroh, a cousin of Peter and an employee of the firm. "We made the decision to go national without having budget. It was like going to a gunfight with a knife. We didn't have a chance." Stroh's tried various tactics to improve its situation. It tried undercutting the price of its major rivals, Anheuser-Busch and Miller, by offering 15 cans of beer for the price of 12. It laid off hundreds of employees to save on cost. It then changed course, raising prices and nixing the 15-pack containers. Customers rebelled, pushing sales down 40 percent in a single year. The firm was left with 6 million barrels of excess brewing capacity. Finally, the firm took on one last, disastrous acquisition. Stroh's purchased another struggling brewer, G. Helleman, for $300 million, saddling Itself with even more debt. While the firm struggled in its core beer business, Peter tried to diversity Stroh's into biotechnology and real estate investing. The almost inevitable end came in 1999 when Stroh's assets were purchased by Pabst Brewing for $350 million-$250 million of which went to the debtholders of the firm, Discussion Questions 1. Why were the acquisitions so debilitating for Stroh's? 2. What would have been the likely outcome for Stroh's if it hadn't purchased other brands