Life, 1907-09-26 · page 24 of 24
Life — September 26, 1907 — page 24: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a **Schlitz beer advertisement** from September 26, 1907—not satire or political commentary. The "Could You See" headline is a sales pitch inviting consumers to imagine the brewery's production process. The ad emphasizes purity and cleanliness as selling points: filtered air rooms, glass-lined tanks for aging, white wood pulp filtration, and sterilized bottles. This reflects early 20th-century marketing that capitalized on germ theory and sanitation anxieties—relatively new scientific concerns that made "cleanliness" and "purity" powerful consumer appeals. The phrase "biliousness" (digestive upset) addresses a real concern about beer quality at the time, when inconsistent brewing could cause illness. The decorative hop motifs and tagline "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous" position Schlitz as a premium product worthy of verification (note the instruction to check the branded cork). This is purely commercial persuasion using period health-consciousness language.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
How Schlitz beer is brewed, you would never buy any other. You would see plate glass rooms, filled with filtered air, where we cool it. You would see glass-lined tanks where we age it so long that it cannot cause biliousness. How we filter it through white wood pulp. How we sterilize every bottle. How cleanliness is carried to extremes. You would realize better how much purity means if you saw the methods we use, and the amount that we spend to attain it. ; Ask for the Brewery Bottling. See that the cork or Th e B e e r crown is branded Schlitz. That Made Milwaukee Famous. PRESS OF REDFIELD BROTHERS, NEW YORK comicbooks.com