In the city of La Crosse, you’ll find the a sextet of beer storage towers decorated to resemble the city’s favorite beer that’s known as the World’s Largest Six-Pack.
A Brief History of Old Style
In 1858, German immigrants John Gund and Gottlieb Heileman started brewing beer at the City Brewery in La Crosse. But after only a few years, the pair had a falling out and Gund sold his shares to Heileman. Gottlieb then changed the name of his now solely owned company to the G. Heileman Brewing Company.
Mr. Heileman died in 1878, leaving the entire operation the hands of his widow, Johanna Heileman. Not only did this make Mrs. Heileman a contender for the world’s first female CEO, but it allowed her to show the world she knew how to run a business. Under her management, G. Heilman Brewing exploded and became a nationally known brand.
In 1900, the company started brewing a new beer they named Old Times Lager. But in 1902, in the wake of a lawsuit from competing brewer with a similarly named beer, Old Times Lager became Old Style Lager.
This, of course, was the world-renowned beer known as Old Style. The “lager” was dropped in 1957 at the behest of the company’s then-president Roy Kumm (who also came up with the idea for La Crosse’s annual Oktoberfest USA).
Any Wisconsinite growing up in the 1970s will most certainly recall the television commercials for Old Style that included the taglines, “virgin pure water from underground springs,” “still brewed in the old-world way called kraeusening,” and “pure brewed in God’s Country.” For some of us, these lines, as well as the tones of the opening horn, live forever in our brains.
God’s Country meant the La Crosse area and the unique topography of the surrounding Driftless region. Kraeusening refers to a German secondary fermentation technique where actively fermenting beer is added to a tank containing another batch that has completed fermentation.
Building the World’s Largest Six-Pack
OR: “Where do we store all this beer?”
By 1969, G. Heileman, now a full-on stock-issuing corporation controlled by a board of directors, was brewing so much Old Style they didn’t know what to do with it all.
So some mad genius in the G. Heileman hierarchy had the idea to build a series of storage tanks — six in all — right across the road from the brewery. These tanks would be used to hold 22,200 gallons of Old Style.
And that mad genius (or perhaps another inspired individual in the G. Heileman ranks) said, “Hey, let’s paint those tanks to look like giant cans of Old Style.”
So they did.
And thus the World’s Largest Six-Pack was born.
The above is a recent image. Visit the Wisconsin Historical Society to see an image of the monument from 1977 as photographed by Lee Melahn.
A sizable plaque standing in front of the 54-foot-tall tanks explains just how much beer the World’s Largest Six-Pack can hold. The photo below sort of sums up, but it’s worth pointing out that these tanks collectively hold enough beer for one person to enjoy an entire right-sized six-pack of Old Style every day for 3,351 years. That’s a lot of beer.
The monument quickly turned into a tourist destination for beer lovers around the world, an icon indelibly inked across countless postcards from the city of La Crosse.
From Old Times to Hard Times
After a decade of explosive growth and consolidation, by 1983 G. Heileman had become the fourth largest brewery in the United States. And while that distinction held a measure of success, it also resulted in the brewery becoming targeted by a series of corporate-raider types.
In 1987 G. Heileman was acquired in a hostile takeover by Alan Bond, an Australian brewing magnate. Mr. Bond made some risky business deals to raise capital for the purchase, and the whole ordeal ended when G. Heileman, once an American brewing powerhouse, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1991.
The company was purchased by a private equity firm in 1994, then re-sold to Stroh’s in 1996. Then Stroh’s failed, and the company’s assets (including Old Style) were acquired by the Pabst Brewing Company in 1996. (Pabst still owns the Old Style brand today.)
New brewery owners
In 1999, the old G. Heileman brewery on 3rd Street was purchased by an investment consortium and re-opened as the contract brewer City Brewing Company.
Side note: In 2007, City Brewing also purchased the glass-lined tanks of Old Latrobe, where Rolling Rock, another regional favorite, was brewed once up a time (although the Rolling Rock beer is now owned by Anheuser-Busch and brewed in New Jersey).
Loss of a local legend
So, in the wake of the brewery’s new ownership, in 1999 the Pabst ownership decided to consolidate production of Old Style with the bulk of its brands and moved operations from La Crosse to Milwaukee. After 97 years of near-constant production in La Crosse (we’re skipping over Prohibition here), Old Style was gone from its city of origin.
This move was seen as a betrayal by the good citizens of La Crosse. Almost overnight, a great many of the local taverns removed Old Style beer from their taps and Old Style neon signage from their windows. Even Kramer’s Bar, right next door to the brewery and the somewhat unofficial Old Style tavern, stopped selling the iconic beer.
By the year 2000, the Old Style styling of four holding tanks (the four most visible from 3rd Street) was stripped away. The giant cans sat stark white for a few years.
Then in 2003 those four tanks (the three facing 3rd Street and the one on the corner of 3rd and Mississippi Street) were wrapped with a vinyl covering to look like cans of La Crosse Lager, one of the new beers brewed at the City Brewing facility across the street.
The triumphant return of Old Style
But the story doesn’t end there. In August 2023, after a 24-year absence, Pabst decided to move production of Old Style back to La Crosse’s City Brewing Company.
And now that Old Style was back in town, not only did the beer return to the taps and signage of many a local tavern, but that also meant the World’s Largest Six-Pack, which had been showing some serious neglect for the past 10 years or so (see the photo above), would be rebranded from La Crosse Lager to showcase Old Style once again.
And in September 2023, in anticipation of the town’s favorite beer returning, the tanks that make up the World’s Largest Six-Pack were re-dressed as cans of Old Style.
Though it is worth pointing out that this new styling is just a vinyl wrap, whereas the original Old Style branding was painted on. You can’t have everything.
The Pabst deal with City Brewing is in place until 2040. So locals and visitors alike can look forward to seeing a properly branded World’s Largest Six-Pack for at least the next 15 years.
Setting the record straight on this claim
Before we sign off here, a quick note to all those Buffalonians in New York crying foul. Yes, we know Buffalo has a giant six-pack of its own. And while Buffalo’s Labatt’s six-pack is technically larger (each one stands at 100 feet), these are just decorated grain silos. They don’t hold any liquid.
Contrast that with the six-pack in La Crosse that actually holds beer. And since any six-pack of beer, by definition, should contain beer, the World’s Largest Six-Pack in La Crosse holds onto this crown.
World’s Largest Six-Pack
- 1055 3rd Street South, La Crosse, WI 54601
- GPS Coordinates: 43.802845, -91.253423
- What3Words: ///trader.legs.holds
