Gottlieb and Frederika Pabst and their twelve-year-old son Frederick arrived in the United States in 1848 and settled in Chicago where Frederick eventually found work on the ships of Lake Michigan. In 1862, Frederick married Maria Best, daughter of the founder and owner of the Best Brewing Company, and in 1863 became a brewer at his father-in-law's brewery, which established in Milwaukee in 1844.
When Philip Best retired to Germany in 1867, Pabst and Emil Schandein - his sister-in-law's husband and the vice-president of Best Brewery - worked to transform the company into one of the nation's largest brewers, capitalizing on, among other things, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that destroyed nineteen Chicago breweries and helped position Milwaukee as the leading beer-producing city in the United States. In 1889, Schandein died, leaving Pabst as president and his widow, Lisette Schandein, as vice-president. In 1890, Pabst changed the "Best" letterhead to "Pabst" and the Pabst Brewing Company officially began.
Sales of Pabst peaked at 18 million barrels in 1977. In 1980 and 1981, the company had four different CEOs, and by 1982 it was fifth in beer sales in the U.S., dropping from third in 1980.
In 1996, Pabst headquarters left Milwaukee (where the company originally established in 1844), and the company ended beer production at its main complex there. By 2001, the brand's sales were below a million barrels. That year, the company got a new CEO, Brian Kovalchuk, formerly the CFO of Benetton, and major changes at the company's marketing department were made.
In 2010, food industry executive C. Dean Metropoulos bought the company for a reported $250 million. In 2011, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission forced two advertising executives to cease efforts to raise $300 million to buy the Pabst Brewing Company. The two had raised over $200 million by crowsourcing, collecting pledges via their website, Facebook, and Twitter. In November 2014, Eugene Kashper, an American beer entrepreneur, and TSG Consumer Partners acquired Pabst Brewing Company. In 2015, Pabst won the "best large brewing company of the year" award at the Great American Beer Festival.
Pabst Blue Ribbon is now available in several international markets, including Australia, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, and China.
On October 8, 2020, the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation announce that Pabst is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to San Antonio, Texas.
In the mid-1940s, the brand was the titular sponsor of the radio comedy show Blue Ribbon Town, starring Groucho Marx. It later was a sponsor of the radio mystery show Night Beat in the early 1950s.
The beer experienced a sales revival in the early 2000s after a two-decade-long slump, largely due to its increasing popularity among urban hipsters. Although the Pabst website features user-submitted photography, much of which features twenty-something Pabst drinkers dressed in alternative fashions, the company has opted not to fully embrace the countercultural label in its marketing, fearing that doing so could jeopardize the very "authenticity" that made the brand popular (as was the case with the poorly received OK Soda). Pabst instead targets its desired market niche through the sponsorship of indie music, local businesses, facial hair clubs (RVA Beard League), post-collegiate sports teams, dive bars and radio programming like National Public Radio's All Things Considered. The company encourages the online submission of fan art, which is subsequently shown on the beer's official Facebook page.