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Restaurant Preps for Buttload of Free Burgers if Brewers Win Friday

A promotion that dates back to the 1950s promises free burgers if the Brewers win 12 games in a row. They have 11 in a row now, and face off against the Dodgers for Game 1 of the NLCS this week.
Photo by Tannen Maury—EPA

Cows in Wisconsin should be trembling. There's a long-standing promise that local Wisconsin restaurant chain George Webb made back in the 1950s and 60s that soon might haunt them—again. It goes something like this: if the Milwaukee Brewers win 12 straight, they give away free burgers, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The vague George Webb promise came first as a prediction, "George Webb Predicts the Brewers Will Win 12 in a Row," and was so popular that it would eventually be printed on the restaurant's napkins. Then, people just started holding the restaurant to a free burger promise. The tradition is so old, that it even predates the Brewers franchise, and originally applied to the Milwaukee Braves before they moved to Atlanta after the 1965 season. The tradition resumed in 1970 when a recent expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, relocated to Milwaukee and called themselves the Brewers.

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Milwaukee has not lost a game since September 22, a run that includes beating the Cubs in a 163rd regular season game, and finishing of a sweep of the Colorado Rockies in the NLDS on Sunday. So, with the Brewers verging on 12 wins, George Webb is using the five-day break before the Brewers next game to prepare for a proverbial onslaught from customers.

And just in case you thought people might forget the promise, just take the year 1987 as an example. When the Brewers accomplished their previous 12-game streak—topping out at 13 wins—48 George Webb locations across the state gave out an estimated 170,000 burgers in one day. Today, there are only 30 restaurants.

"It's sort of a once in a lifetime thing, but I guess it's going to happen twice," said George Webb franchise owner Tom Aldridge, per WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee. George Webb is alerting all of their ingredients distributors now, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

One poor worker who was on hand that day in 1987 remembered things perhaps a little less wistfully. "They brought us five bags of Bermuda onions and for five days I worked third shift, I chopped onions to put in the buckets," said Pam Bloom.

Some fans took their free burgers to the extreme. Per the Sentinel:

Some George Webb customers told Milwaukee reporters in 1987 that they planned to freeze their free burger and keep the edible souvenir as long as they could. Stamm wondered if anyone still has a 31-year-old frozen free burger. He heard of one man who said he bronzed his burger.

Meanwhile, the cows must have their own folklore to tell. "Something happened in a stick game, and it wiped out your great-great-great-grandfather's whole generation." The Dodgers just might be their only saviors now.