CHAPTER ONE

German Beer, American Dreams

LATE SUMMER, 1844. Milwaukee, Wisconsin Territory. Phillip Best elbowed his way along plank walkways jammed with barrels, boxes, pushcarts, and people. He was headed for the canal, or the “Water Power,” as locals called it, a mile-long millrace powered by a tree-trunk-and-gravel dam on the Milwaukee River. Plank docks punctuated its tumbling flow and small manufactories—a few mills, a handful of smithies and wheelwrights, a tannery or two—lined its length. Best was searching for a particular business as he pushed his way past more carts and crates, and dodged horses pulling wagons along the dirt street and laborers shouldering newly hewn planks and bags of freshly milled grain. He had been in the United States only a few weeks, and Milwaukee’s bustle marked a sharp contrast to the drowsy German village where he and his three brothers had worked for their father, Jacob, Sr., a brewer and vintner.

Phillip finally arrived at the shop owned by A. J. Langworthy, metalworker and ironmonger. He presented himself to the proprietor and explained that he needed a boiler—a copper vat—for his family’s new brewing business. Would Langworthy fabricate it for them? The metalworker shook his head no. “I [am] familiar with their construction,” he explained to Best, “ . . . but I [dislike] very much to have the noisy things around, and [I do] not wish to do so.”

Wrong answer. Best possessed what the historian of his brewery later called a “fiery” personality and an irresistible fount of aggressive determination. Best cajoled Langworthy, argued with him, badgered, and perhaps even begged. The metalworker may have been surprised at the passion that poured from the otherwise unassuming man before him, a slender twenty-nine-year-old of medium height, whose prominent ears and blond hair framed deep-set gray eyes and a ruler-straight nose. Overwhelmed and overrun by the man’s persistence, Langworthy finally consented.

That obstacle behind him, Best prodded Langworthy to hurdle the next: lack of materials. Milwaukee, frontier town of seven thousand souls, contained only two sheets of metal. Langworthy needed eight or nine plus a bucket of rivets. Left to his own devices, he might have abandoned the commission; with Phillip Best breathing down his neck, that was impossible. Langworthy headed south, first to Racine, then to Kenosha, and finally on to tiny Chicago. It was an exercise in frustration: He could not find enough material for even one section of the boiler. There was nothing for it but to dispatch an order to Buffalo, New York.

Eventually the goods arrived, and Langworthy and his employees set to work transforming metal sheets and rivets into an oversized pot. They worked on a nearby dock, where what the metalworker called the “music of riveting”—racket is more like it—drew an enormous crowd. “[A]ll came to see it,” said Langworthy, “and I think if the roll had been called at that time that every man, woman, and child except the invalids, would have answered ‘here.’” The finished product was a squat rotund vat, about four feet in diameter and four feet high, big enough to hold three to four hundred gallons of water.

When the boiler was completed, Phillip returned to the ironmonger’s shop, this time lugging a cloth bundle of coins—so many that the two men spent more than an hour tallying the value. The task revealed the truth: Best did not have enough money. He explained that his family had spent nearly all of their funds—two hundred dollars—on a piece of property on Chestnut Street, where they planned to build their brewhouse. Phillip had commissioned the vat in expectation of a forthcoming loan, but the money had failed to materialize. The bundle of coins represented his family’s only remaining cash. Phillip asked Langworthy to keep the boiler until he could scrounge up the balance.

What happened next is a credit to A. J. Langworthy’s generosity and Phillip Best’s integrity. Langworthy was but a few years older than Phillip. Like Phillip, he had left the security of the familiar—in his case, New York—for the adventure and gamble of a new life on the frontier. Perhaps he glanced through the door at the mad rush of people and goods flowing past unabated from daylight to dusk. He was no fool; he understood that business out in the territories would always be more fraught with risk than back in the settled east. But what was life for, if not to embrace some of its uncertainty?

He eyed the man standing before him. He knew about the family’s decision to sell their winery and brewery and venture to the new world. He had come to understand that Best’s “love for dramatic speech and action” stemmed not from swaggering braggadocio, but from the depths of a “born leader.” The debt would never be paid until Best made some money, and the boiler was useless unless filled with steaming malt and hops.

Take the boiler and get busy, he told Phillip, and pay the balance when you can. Langworthy recalled years later that the man “was filled with great joy, and ever after my most ardent friend.” Best promised his creditor not just the family’s first keg of beer, but free brew for the rest of Langworthy’s life. (The promise outlived Best himself. On his deathbed in 1869, Phillip reminded his wife of the pact and charged his sons-in-law with the task of upholding the family’s end. In 1896, Langworthy, well into his eighties, was still drinking free beer.)

It’s not clear how Phillip transported his treasure the half mile or so from Langworthy’s shop to the family’s brewhouse. Perhaps his new friend provided delivery. Perhaps Phillip persuaded an idling wagoner to haul the vat with the promise of free beer. Perhaps one or more of his three brothers accompanied him, and they and their burden staggered through Kilbourntown—the German west side of Milwaukee—and up the Chestnut Street hill. But eventually the vat made its way to the Bests’ property—the location of Best and Company, and the foundation of their American adventure.

 

OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, Phillip Best would lay the groundwork for what stood, fifty years later, as the largest brewery in the world. But in 1844, he was just one anonymous drop in a stream of humanity that poured into the United States in the midnineteenth century. A mere 600,000 immigrants landed during the 1830s, but starting in 1840, that trickle swelled like a creek in early spring: 1.7 million in the 1840s and another 2.6 million the following decade. Seventy-five percent were Irish and German (the rest hailed mostly from England and non-German northern Europe). Many of the Germans were cut from the same mold as the Bests: They arrived in possession of a bit of money and a craft that would earn them more. Most of the Irish, however, were impoverished peasants fleeing the famine that destroyed that sad island’s main source of food and, before it ended, killed a million people. The million or so who survived the trip across the Atlantic (many succumbed to the vomit, feces, and filth of steerage) were mostly peasants, uneducated, unskilled, and carrying nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

The Bests had emigrated from a village called Mettenheim, where a Marley-like chain of war and poverty, taxes and regulations, shackled their ambitions. In the early 1800s, warfare and political turmoil left German-speaking Europeans, whether Prussian, Bavarian, Rhenish, or Austrian, exhausted, disabled, or angry. Explosive population growth and bad harvests added deprivation and poverty to the mix. Tyrannical princes and dukes suppressed political expression and individual ambition. Phillip and his countrymen yearned for a “true” Germany, a people united under one government that granted its citizens basic freedoms. No one believed it would happen anytime soon. The chain’s grip tightened in the 1830s, when the price of coffee and tea plummeted, and customers abandoned beer for the intoxicating novelty of caffeine. Others embraced potato-based schnaps, a throat-burning, alcoholic jolt that was cheaper than beer. Hundreds of brewers emptied their vats, damped their fires, and shut their doors.

So it was that in the early 1840s, Jacob Best, Sr., and his sons decided that it was time to choose: German Europe with tyrants and oppression, or the United States, where angels blessed the ambitious? Sometime between 1840 and 1842, Phillip traveled to New York, intent on developing the contacts needed to export the Bests’ wine to the United States. He failed in that mission and returned home so the family could plot its next move. By early 1843, Jacob, Jr., and Frederick (known around town as Carl) had settled in Milwaukee and opened a small vinegar manufactory, a common side venture of vintners everywhere.

The success of that experiment convinced them that their future lay in America. Carl retraced his steps, helped sell the Bests’ Mettenheim properties, and by mid-1844 was on his way back to Milwaukee with the rest of the family in tow.

They landed in New York and boarded steamboats that chugged up the Hudson River to the Erie Canal. For several days the travelers glided along its waterway, the scenery dominated by tidy farms and grain mills. At Buffalo, they trooped to the harbor, there to board one of the dozens of ferries that plied the Great Lakes between New York and the West—across Lake Erie, up the sliver of water that separated eastern Michigan from the jagged southern tip of Ontario, up Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to journey’s end, Milwaukee.

The nation where the Bests made their new home stretched from the Atlantic seaboard fifteen hundred miles to the Mississippi, from there hundreds more miles to the Rocky Mountains, and on to the border of unclaimed territory that included what are today Washington and Oregon. Within a few years of the Bests’ arrival, Americans would lay claim to that contested terrain and to another vast expanse that included what would become California and Texas.

In Mettenheim, the land’s potential might have remained cocooned in a web of restraints, dominated by lords and princes and worked by peasants burdened by illiteracy, heavy taxes, and impossible rents. Not so in the United States. Compared to people in the rest of the world, white Americans enjoyed extraordinary personal liberty and a short history: At the time Phillip commissioned his vat, the Revolution was still living memory for the oldest Americans. The nation was young in more ways than one: In 1830, to pick one year, about a third of the nation’s twelve million people were under the age of ten, and the median age was seventeen. The federal government did little more than manage the public lands and deliver the mail. Taxes were few, land was abundant and cheap, and the political system was stable. Several million blackskinned humans endured the agony of the “peculiar institution,” but already the paradox of slavery in the midst of such freedom had roused the forces that would eradicate that shame.

Americans even derived inspiration from the obstacles they faced: Overland travel over such enormous distances destroyed farmers’ and merchants’ hopes of profit; and, youthful energy and a parade of immigrants notwithstanding, there weren’t enough people to do the nation’s work. New Yorkers devoted the first half of the 1820s to constructing one grand solution to the transportation problem: the 350-mile Erie Canal, which linked New York City’s harbors, the Hudson River, and the Great Lakes. In one swoop, the canal lopped weeks off the journey from east to west and dollars off the cost. That experiment’s success launched canal mania: Between 1825 and 1840, Americans built three thousand miles of waterways, including one that ran from Chicago to the Illinois River and so connected that city—and thus Milwaukee—to the Mississippi. Canals proved a short-lived wonder, as other investors plowed their money into iron rails and steam locomotives. By 1840, three thousand miles of rails connected city and canal, canal and hinterland, hinterland and harbor. Over the next decade, Americans laid another six thousand miles of rail, and, in 1845, began stringing telegraph wire alongside the tracks.

Immigrants provided much of the labor for laying the rails and digging the canals, disseminating their ambitions and energy deep into the frontier, but Americans also invented their way out of the labor shortage, unencumbered by the guild and apprentice systems that hindered innovation in Europe. Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, to name just one example, allowed one farmer to do the work of many hands. Talented artisans and tinkerers scattered along the eastern seaboard designed machines that replaced skilled craftsmen, such as automated devices that cut gunstocks or ax handles and so reduced the time and money needed to manufacture goods. In 1800, a New England clockmaker built perhaps a half dozen clocks in a year: fifty years later, a single factory turned out 150,000 clocks a year and at a price nearly any family could afford.

A man could make a fortune on Monday and lose it all by Friday. No matter. The era’s byword—progress—rolled off every tongue. There was room for everyone and every idea. True, the pace of industrial change ground slow and uneven: In densely populated and increasingly urban Massachusetts, young women and immigrants operated clattering machinery that wove millions of yards of fabric each year, while in Milwaukee, A. J. Langworthy could not lay hands on enough metal for one brewing vat and Phillip Best employed a horse to grind his malt. But by midcentury, Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world.

Critics complain about its uneven distribution—the wealthy few possessed an oversized chunk of the bounty—but no one could deny that in the United States, even a common laborer ate meat every day and owned a change of clothes, two facts that left his European counterpart gaping in awe. The young men and women who tended machines and shops—unmarried and still unfettered by responsibility—invested their meager wages in fine caps and jaunty jackets, beribboned bonnets and factory-made dresses. Immigrants watched and yearned as Americans in the burgeoning middle class devoted their cash to comfort: Oilcloth floor coverings gave way to rich woolen carpets; iron stoves replaced pots hung over open flame. Families scrabbling for a living on the frontier crowded into country stores to trade corn and homemade whiskey for hair ribbons and top hats, tea sets and button boots. Singer’s sewing machine allowed women to transform machine-made fabrics into dresses and shirts. All of it—the hats and shoes, John Deere’s plows and Samuel Colt’s revolvers, factory-made clocks and soaps, wallpaper and candles—provided pleasure twice: first in the buying and then in the using.

No surprise, émigré letters to family back home praised an otherwise unimaginable paradise. “[O]ne cannot describe how good it is in America,” reported one awestruck transplant. “In America one knows nothing about taxes. Here one does not need to worry about beggars as we do in Germany. Here a man works for himself. Here the one is equal to the other. Here no one takes off his hat to another. We no longer long for Germany.” “Every day,” he added, “we thank the dear God that he has brought us . . . out of slavery into Paradise,” a sweet fate he hoped to share with the millions still suffering, still living back in Germany “as if under lions and dragons, fearing every moment to be devoured by them.” Another new arrival spoke for thousands when he wrote, “We sing: ‘Long live the United States of America.’”

The Bests’ new home provided inspiration aplenty. Milwaukee sat out in the frontier in what was still a territory rather than a state, but in the decade since the town had been founded, the American passion for converting land into profit had transformed a moribund trading post of a few hundred into a lively metropolis, vibrant testimony to the infinite possibility of America in the 1840s.

To the north and west of the family’s Chestnut Street property lay a thick forest that stretched for miles. Concealed beneath the leafy mass, crude wagon tracks led away from the town and into the western hinterland, where dwindling forest eventually gave way to rolling hills and then the vast grassy sweep of the Iowa Territory, acres of soil that could be planted with barley. To the south and east lay the town itself, visible from atop the Chestnut Street ridge as a mosaic of roofs, chimneys, and steeples, their textures and colors interlaced with a mortar of muddy streets that teemed with people, horses, and wagons. “A fellow . . . can hardly get along the sidewalk,” grumbled one visiting farmer. “[E]very kind of Mechanism is a going on in this place from street hawking to Manufacturing steam Engines and every kind of citizens [sic] from the rude Norwegian to the polished Italian.”

Carpenters, metalworkers, and bricklayers hustled from one job to another, busy converting the city’s vacant lots into hotels, houses, law offices, workshops, and taverns. Farmers, shoppers, and newly arrived émigrés thronged the plank walkways that bordered muddy thoroughfares. Lawyers bustled in and out of the courthouse, signing contracts and settling land claims. Carts laden with produce, building supplies, and grain rumbled through the streets. A clatter of languages and dialects filled the air: German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, and Welsh; the New Englander’s flat, clipped twang; the southerner’s softer drawl.

Thanks to its location on the shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee was one of the most accessible of the nation’s far western settlements. In the 1840s, it served as a gateway through which migrants passed on their way to the vast stretch of rich soil in the territories beyond, or to find work in the Wisconsin Territory’s booming mining and timber industries. Every day, steamers spewing gritty clouds of black smoke and cinder chips belched human cargo onto the wharves.

The lake itself could not be seen from the Chestnut ridge, thanks to the sharp ascent of the Milwaukee’s eastern bank. But when Phillip climbed the steep bluff that hugged the lake’s edge, he marveled at the vast sheet of rippling gray silk that stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, jagged tripods of canvas-draped uprights sliced the horizon. Closer at hand, a jumble of masts cluttered the harbor. Bundles of wheat and timber dangled from the slender arms of cranes, then disappeared into waiting hulls. Grunting stevedores trundled carts filled with the multifarious tools needed to convert a wilderness of river and forest into a respectable example of American civilization: plowshares, iron plates, and saddles; boots, stationery, and shawls; casks filled with raisins, nuts, and oils; crates containing bottles of wine from France and porter and stout from England; dictionaries and primers; gloves, yarn, and fabric.

“The public houses and streets are filled with new comers and our old citizens are almost strangers in their own town,” marveled the editor of one of the city’s newspapers. “One hundred persons, chiefly German, landed here yesterday,” another resident wrote to his brother during the summer of 1842. And more were on the way: In the early 1840s, Germans poured into the territory. Some came after reading a pamphlet published in 1841 by a German-speaking visitor who praised the climate, soil, and opportunity. Those first settlers in turn wrote laudatory letters of their own back home, which fueled still more migration to Wisconsin. By the time the Bests arrived, about one-third of the town’s population spoke German.

 

IN SEPTEMBER of 1844, with Langworthy’s copper vat installed, Phillip and the two Jacobs, father and son, began brewing, likely with recipes and yeast carried with them to their new home. They had been winemakers back in Germany, but Americans drank almost no wine and so the United States had no tradition of viniculture. Beer would provide the substance of their American dream.

They followed the practices of most German brewers of that time, relying on strong backs and shoulders to brew by hand rather than machine. At the new brewery, an L-shaped, one-story brick structure that also served as the family’s residence, they trundled wheelbarrows of grain, either purchased in town from a farmer at market or ordered from Buffalo, into the shop and dumped it into a capacious wooden steeping vat to soak for a day or two. Then they spread the sodden grain on the floor and waited for the kernels to sprout. The acrospire, the quarter-inch sprout that emerged from the base of each kernel, contained the enzymes (diastase) that would convert barley’s starch into sugar. Germination typically required two or three days, depending on the humidity and the age and quality of the grain. Phillip kept close watch on the pile, stirring and tossing it regularly to add new oxygen and ensure that all the heads sprouted at more or less the same time. A fruity aroma filled the brewhouse (much like the odor of rotten apples, critics complained) as nature conducted the business of turning barley into malt.

When each kernel had sprouted, the men shoveled the malt onto the drying floor, an elevated platform stationed above a kiln. They fed the firebox a steady diet of wood, watching the flames and testing the heat, aiming for a temperature somewhere between 160 and 170 degrees, hot enough to dry the malt but not burn it. With its moisture evaporated, the malt weighed less for the next go-round of shoveling, this time into a storage bin, where it was left to age a few weeks.

When Jacob, Sr., declared ripe both the grain and the time, he and his sons hauled the malt to the grinder. While the horse dragged a heavy stone over the grain, the brothers filled their precious copper boiler with water, heated it to about 130 degrees, and added the ground malt. As it cooked, they stirred it with long paddles, waiting for the enzymes to transform starch into sugar and the water into syrupy wort. When the sugar had dissolved, the brothers drained the wort, rinsed the vat to remove every bit of the syrup, and began cooking the wort again, this time adding hops, the cone-shaped flower of the Humulus lupulus. Hops added flavor, aroma, and bitterness to the beer and acted as a preservative, too, by inhibiting the growth of bacteria. In 1844, the Bests most likely relied on hops imported (like the metal for the brewing vat) from Buffalo. Much of the beer’s character and taste emerged from this phase of the operation, and the men heated the mix slowly, constantly monitoring it and the fire’s flames.

After several hours, they drained the wort into large flat pans, there to cool to about 45 degrees, no easy feat in an age when “refrigeration” depended on cold weather or blocks of ice. Luckily, Milwaukee in December and January offered plenty of both. Phillip and his brothers transferred the wort to a fermenting tub and added the yeast—“pitched” it, in brewing parlance—then held their breaths and waited. This was make-or-break time. Assuming the yeast had survived the trip from Europe and was alive and healthy, soon white foam would crawl across the wort’s surface. If none appeared, their work was in vain.

To their relief and joy, about ten hours after the first pitch, a thin band of foam appeared. Some ten or twelve hours later, froth covered the entire surface. It dissipated and drifted down to the bottom of the vat, where it continued to work, turning the wort into beer. The brew fermented in its tub for seven to ten days. Then, leaving the yeast behind, the men drained the beer into pitch-lined barrels (the pitch protected the beer from the taint of wood) and transferred the kegs to a cellar beneath the brewery, where the beer aged in cool temperatures.

Now the waiting began—anywhere from two to six months, during which the beer’s flavor mellowed and the yeast precipitated. Jacob and his sons passed the time converting barley, wine, and cider into whiskey and vinegar, tasks that required less labor and time than did brewing. In February 1845, they introduced (or, in the case of the vinegar, reintroduced) Milwaukeeans to the Best family of products in advertisements in the city’s German-language newspaper: “Best & Company, Beer Brewery, Whiskey Distillery & Vinegar Refinery . . . on the summit of the hill above Kilbourntown. Herewith we give notice to our friends that henceforth we will have bottom fermentation beer for sale.” The family promised to provide its “worthy customers” with “prompt and satisfactory service.”

Best and Company was in business.

 

THEY WERE NOT ALONE. Everywhere that Germans went in the 1840s, beer flowed close at hand, and several hundred immigrant brewers opened their doors during the decade. New York and Philadelphia claimed the lion’s share, with forty breweries founded in Philadelphia and several dozen in New York. But beer also foamed freely in other cities where Germans congregated in large numbers: St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Brooklyn, Chicago, and, of course, Milwaukee, where ten brewers set up shop during the decade. (For years, beer historians have credited John Wagner of Philadelphia with introducing lager to the United States, but the title of first lager brewer probably belongs to émigrés Alexander Stausz and John Klein, who founded a tiny outfit in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1838.) Like the Bests, these other pioneering German-American brewers cultivated a local market, selling beer to customers who lived around the corner or a few blocks away.

The Bests were not their city’s first German brewers. That honor belonged to Simon (sometimes called Herman) Reutelshofer. According to one of the laborers who helped build the brewshop, the proprietor tapped his first keg in May 1841. It was nearly his last, presumably because he lacked either the skill or the customers. Within months his business teetered on the brink of collapse. The would-be beer baron went hunting for an infusion of cash, and, to his everlasting regret, found salvation in the person of one John B. Meier (sometimes spelled Meyer), also a German émigré. Reutelshofer wanted a mortgage, but Meier presented him with a contract to buy the property. Reutelshofer, who either ignored the fine print, could not read a document that may have been written in English, or was illiterate, unwittingly signed away his livelihood.

Meier ordered Reutelshofer to vacate the premises. The brewer, still unaware that he no longer owned the shop, resisted. Meier grabbed his dupe and “then and there with divers sticks and clubs and with his fists gave [him] . . . many blows and strokes about his head, face, breast, back, shoulders, arms, [and] legs.” Not content with his handiwork, Meier hurled Reutelshofer to the ground “with great force and violence” and “kicked, struck and . . . choked him.”

Poor Reutelshofer recovered neither pride nor property. He sued his attacker, demanding $2,000 in damages and the return of the brewery. A judge ordered Meier to pay a mere $150 and dispatched a sheriff to seize the building and its contents and return them to their original owner. Nothing doing. Meier had already deeded not only the brewery but everything else he owned to his father-in-law, Franz Neukirch. Reutelshofer’s claims against Meier fell into the category of lost causes. He never collected the monies due him, never regained possession of his brewshop, and dropped out of sight not long after the Best family arrived in Milwaukee.

Had he known, Reutelshofer might have taken comfort in numbers. His failure typified the experience of most brewers who set up shop in the 1840s (except, we hope, in the matter of the trickery and violence that separated him from his brewery). Many failed after a few years, likely due to inexperience or poor management. Others limped along for a decade or two before being bought by new owners who changed the name.

But successful or not, and whether located in New York or the Wisconsin Territory, the first immigrant brewers introduced a new kind of beer to the United States: lager. In the early nineteenth century, the only beer Americans knew was English-style ale, brewed in the states since colonial days but never as popular as either cider or spirits. The differences between British ale and German lager were apparent to both eye and tongue. Ale sat dark, heavy, and “still” in a tankard, brown in color and thick in body. Lager seemed nearly buoyant in contrast, thanks to its lighter body and color, and lower alcohol content. The yeast accounted for part of the difference between the two: Ale’s organisms worked on the wort’s surface; lager yeast foamed and then drifted to the bottom of the vat, there to spin its magic in the dark.

But there was another, greater divide between the two kinds of beer: temperature and fermentation time. Ale fermented at room temperature, it required no aging, and was ready to drink in a matter of days. That also meant that it turned sour and nasty as soon as a man turned his back on it. Wise drinkers edged toward a mug of ale, taking a delicate first sip in order to find out whether the tankard contained sweet beer or sour; a thick, yeasty pleasure or a rank broth with the taste and texture of muddy water. Those who could afford it turned up their noses at local ales in favor of bottles of imported porter or stout from more proficient British brewers.

Lager required more time and care. Brewers stored—or “lagered,” from the German verb lagern, meaning “to rest”—the beer in capacious wooden puncheons that held hundreds of gallons, stacking these in their “caves,” or underground caverns, at near-freezing temperatures for two or three months. As the lager rested, remnants of yeast and other solids drifted to the bottom of the barrel as harmless sediments. The brew mellowed and its flavors ripened. Most important, the combination of rest and cold endowed the beer with greater longevity than ale. Assuming all went well, tapping day produced a malty, amber lager with the heft and sustenance of liquid bread. Then the brewer transferred the beer from the fermenting kegs into smaller barrels, usually sized to hold thirty-one gallons. Because even lager began to decay once it left its cold berth, brewers kept the beer in underground storage until it was sold.

Nowadays, brewers ship their beer long distances on paved highways, but the 1840s were a time of few roads or rails and reliable cold storage was limited to underground caverns. A lager brewer sold nearly all of his beer within a mile or two of his brewhouse, cultivating the goodwill of nearby tavern owners, Germans for the most part who had set up shop in order to supply beer to other immigrants. But both the tavern owners’ and the brewers’ market was driven by their clientele: In the first ten years of German-American brewing, lager was consumed almost exclusively by German-speaking immigrants.

There was a reason that beer and taverns followed on the heels of German immigration. Brewing and beer had been part of Germanic culture for centuries. Ancient northern sagas, among them the Kalevala and the Edda, memorialized fermented beverages as gifts from the gods and as the source of poetry. For centuries, Germanic tribes prized ale as food, and as the centerpiece of the drinking fests that preceded and followed warfare. By the fourteenth century, beer—fermented barley cooked with hops as a preservative—had become central to German culture. To drink with friends was to celebrate life and its bounty. People affirmed wedding vows, settled arguments, and sealed contracts with glasses of beer, which served in those cases as a sacramental offering to the event. As a result, brewing was a craft that was deeply entrenched among the German-speaking peoples of northern Europe. But in the 1840s, it was a rare “American”—an English-speaking native—who embraced the beverage.

 

BY 1847, THE BEST FAMILY was selling thirty barrels of beer a week to saloons in and around Milwaukee. Three horses crowded the small yard on Chestnut Street; two powered the grinding stone and a third pulled the brewery’s delivery wagon. The men hoped to add a fourth animal soon, a necessity now that the family was carrying beer to the outlying villages that dotted the Milwaukee and Menomonee river valleys.

Their success was not hard to understand. Milwaukee behaved like a living creature, a boisterous infant to be precise, whose insatiable appetite fueled seam-ripping growth. The town’s population numbered seven thousand when Phillip arrived in 1844: it topped ten thousand in 1846, and would race past twenty thousand in 1850. The Bests found customers for their lager among the third that was German-speaking. But the Bests’ success rested on more than Phillip’s salesmanship. A young man who tasted the family’s brew in the late 1840s described it as “the most delicious lager,” worth a trek up the hill, and already ranked among Milwaukee’s finest.

In the summer of 1851, Phillip and brother Jacob opened a beerhall in downtown Milwaukee and a second, smaller, tavern above the remodeled brewery. Then, in 1852, the brothers embarked on a new, riskier expansion. Chicago had become one of the great marvels of the nation, growing at a pace that astonished even the most optimistic of boosters: Four thousand residents in 1840 mushroomed to thirty thousand just ten years later. The city’s few brewers could not keep pace, especially as German immigrants arrived to grab their share of the city’s bounty. Phillip and Jacob seized the opportunity and began shipping their lager to Chicago by ferry, an easy day’s trip, two thousand barrels’ worth in 1852 and a thousand more the next year.

Then came the summer of 1854—so agonizingly hot and humid that brewers in both St. Louis and Chicago ran out of lager. “Something must be done,” complained the editor of the Chicago Journal. “Germans disconsolate and haggard wander from hall to hall, and as yet there is no beer.”

The Best brothers, already established in Chicago’s market, capitalized on the moment, expanding production to keep pace with this venture into long-distance shipping. They continued to send beer to Chicago by ferry, and then, after 1855, by the rail line that linked the two cities. Lager bound for St. Louis traveled to Chicago first, and then by canal to the Illinois River, and from there to the city blossoming on the Mississippi River. By the late 1850s, a railroad shortened the journey and reduced its cost.

Nothing says more about Phillip’s ambition and business acumen than this decision to venture into distant markets. Both Chicago and St. Louis contained a solid German presence, which meant that Best beer competed with lagers from other immigrant brewers. But he brewed an exceptional beer, and it was on this that he based his gamble. The maneuver catapulted Best Brewing out of the ordinary and set it on its course toward greatness. “I could never have imagined,” marveled Phillip, “that [the business] could develop as far in ten years as it is now.” But he was quick to credit the real source of his success. “In Germany,” he wrote to his wife’s family, “no one knows how to appreciate the liberty to which every human being is entitled by birth, only here in America can he experience it.” His bustling brewery, Milwaukee’s relentless growth, and the heated competition among the town’s brewers exemplified the nature of the United States, a place where liberty nurtured ambition, and ambition fostered success.

 

TRUE, PARADISE SUFFERED from a few flaws here and there. “[N]obody has any idea of ‘plaisir’,” lamented one discouraged émigré, “but just business, business, business, day out and day in; so that one’s life is not very amusing.” Americans talked of nothing but business and money. They lived to turn every inch of land and every minute of each day to profit. As for leisure, they “played” at quilting bees and barn-raisings—work disguised as pleasure. The nation’s cities sprouted factories and shops, mills and warehouses—but no parks or pleasure gardens. In most towns, cemeteries provided residents with their only green spaces. Land devoted to pleasure? What was the point?

One need only watch the nation at table to discover the people’s priorities: Americans hunched over their plates and gobbled their food. No time to waste on idle chitchat. No time to savor flavors and textures; just gorge and run. Sometimes they did not even bother to sit, choosing instead to stand and feed “like an animal,” as one shocked German traveler put it, racing through meals as if they were endurance tests or some form of gastronomic torture (and, given the quality of most American food—heavily salted meats, undercooked pastries, breads fried in pools of fat—perhaps theirs was a wise strategy).

Americans drank furtively, greedily, and with no thought of pleasure. A typical American tavern, complained another German, contained “neither bench nor chair, just drink your schnaps and then go.” Who wanted to linger? Dingy and devoid of sunlight, floors decorated with spit and cigar butts, the air laced with ribbons of thick smoke and the nose-wrinkling perfume of stale whiskey, the tavern was not a place to relax, and definitely no place to take women and children. Even when Americans sat to drink, they were less interested in enjoying the company or the moment than in testing one another’s generosity and capacity for booze. Germans recoiled from the national practice of “treating” or “buying rounds.” Once a fellow bought you a drink, common courtesy and good sense dictated that you stick around until it was your turn to buy, but you could be topsy by the time your round came—especially if the group was tossing back shots of hard liquor.

German émigrés concluded that they would have to create their own pleasure. The artistically inclined organized orchestras, singing societies, opera clubs, and theater groups. Others introduced the old country tradition of sharpshooting, and Phillip Best supported one group by setting up a shooting gallery out back of the brewery. Club members took turns displaying their marksmanship and sipping Best’s fine lager. Young men organized Turnvereine, clubs aimed at promoting both physical fitness and intellectual well-being, where they practiced the accoutrements of German manhood: gymnastics, shooting, debate, and singing.

The Turners wore their military-inspired uniforms to outings at the city’s new German beerhalls, many of which had been opened and were operated by brewers like the Bests. Jacob and Phillip served cheese and German wine, and of course their lager, which, they informed readers of the town’s several German newspapers, “bubbles as fresh and clear as ever—for our benefit and the good and refreshment of thirsty mankind.” The Bests’ advertising also included a snappy jingle (probably written by Jacob, who was a bit of a wit): “When the glasses loudly ring,/All the waiters quickly spring,/Serving promptly all the guests/With the ‘bestest’ of the Bests.” But theirs was a German-inspired house of amusement, and felt more like the old country than the new one. Light poured through large windows. In the evening, young couples and families congregated for music, dancing, food, and the house lager. Men met there each morning for gatherings devoted to chess or cards, literature and politics.

In warm weather, the city’s Germans migrated to “pleasure gardens.” In the evenings, and on Sunday, the week’s one day of rest, crowds thronged the grassy lawns at Bielfeld’s and Kemper’s; Leudemann Park, perched on the bluff overlooking the lake; and the Ludwigsthal nestled on a small rise just north of Cherry Street. Proprietors wooed customers with flower beds, twinkling lanterns, and gravel paths that wound through leafy arcades. Visitors wandered the manicured grounds or claimed tables and chairs near the music. Waiters trooped through the crowds bearing trays laden with sausage and cheese, ice cream, lemonade, and wine, and, of course, mugs dripping with lager. The young flirted, the old danced, and the pungent aroma of lager nosed its way from table to table. Young and old alike waltzed and polkaed the evening away. Musicians strolled through the crowd, and patrons burst into song or rose to their feet in impromptu dance, their hearts filled with the exquisite pleasure of being a German in free America.

The beer gardens and halls allowed Phillip Best and other German immigrants to infuse their new homeland with old-world pleasure, but in so doing, the brewers and their fellow emigres collided head-on with an incontrovertible fact of life in the United States: A multitude of Americans scorned those who made and drank alcohol, and stood ready to prevent both.

 

THAT HAD NOT ALWAYS been the case. The men and women who first settled the colonies shared the view of Increase Mather, who described alcohol as “a good creature of God” and treated drink as a necessary component of daily life—in moderation and so long as its use did not interfere with God’s other creatures: worship, work, and the pursuit of wealth.

But the colonists who carried beer from England to North America in the early seventeenth century promptly abandoned it, early evidence of the new world’s uncanny ability to inspire new modes of behavior. Settlers devoted every waking minute to the demands of survival: They girdled and burned trees, scratched furrows in the thin, rocky soil, and cultivated meager crops of wheat and corn. Given the amount of labor needed to produce a season’s worth of food, only a fool wasted time fiddling with luxuries like barley or hops. Southern settlers could grow just about anything, but their steamy climate worked a weird magic that turned ale to swill. Far easier, colonists decided, to plant apple and pear trees, which demanded minimal attention and produced plenty of fruit for cider and brandy.

Rum took care of the rest. In the late seventeenth century, West Indian and Caribbean plantation owners flooded the North American colonies with molasses and rum, the waste byproducts of their sugar cane mills. Mainland colonists developed a passion (more like an addiction, critics sniffed) for rum’s intoxicating allure. They drank it straight or mixed it with water, fruit juice, or milk to create slings, sloes, punches, and toddies. They drank it hot; they drank it cold; they drank it morning, noon, and night.

The age of rum ended when the colonies rebelled against England and the price of molasses soared. No matter. Rum represented royalty and repression. In the wake of independence, the citizenry streamed west, up into and beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachians, buying cheap land whose rich soil yielded more grain than a farm family could consume or ship overland to the urban coast. Farmers cobbled together crude stills, converted their grain surpluses into hard liquor, and doused the nation with cheap, potent whiskey.

Like rum, whiskey warmed body and soul; eased digestion of the piles of greasy food that dominated mealtimes; and tempered the frantic pace of life in young America. Every occasion, from breakfast to dinner, birthings to funerals, weddings to barn-raisings, unfolded to the accompaniment of copious amounts of whiskey. Americans’ appetite for spirits stupefied and astounded foreigners. “I am sure,” wrote an English visitor, “the American can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet you drink; if you part you drink; if you make an acquaintance you drink. They quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink.” And woe be to those who resisted. A Methodist minister riding the Ohio River valley circuit found that it was he who had to pay the price of conversion. One of his would-be followers stated the terms of the bargain with the powerful simplicity of a biblical verse: “[I]f I did not drink with him,” the cleric reported, “I was no friend of his, or his family, and he would never hear me preach again.”

By the early nineteenth century, fourteen thousand distillers were producing some twenty-five million gallons of whiskey each year, or, in more digestible terms, some seven or eight gallons per adult per capita. Compared to the seduction of a tot of whiskey, beer had all the allure of an aging maiden aunt. A mere two hundred or so breweries produced English-style ale.

But starting in the 1820s, the passion for drink collided with a moment of national doubt and self-reflection. The rambunctious half century that followed the Revolution had produced independence—meaning a free market and plenty of it; self-governance, and damned little of that—that proved as intoxicating as cheap whiskey. But the burgeoning economy also prompted an orgy of speculation and consumption. Bidding wars for western land created fortunes overnight. A new breed of chap, the “confidence man”—con man for short—spun outrageous schemes from thin air, each one designed to part fools and their money. A host of “capitalists,” as men with money termed themselves, harvested a cornucopia of objects and ideas, each one a seed sown in hopes of reaping a crop of cash. Those who weren’t selling were buying. Americans reveled in things, glorious things, the less useful the better.

Eventually, the niggling ghosts of the Puritan forefathers interrupted the lunatic frenzy of free-market self-indulgence. In the 1820s, as if awakening from a bad hangover, millions of Americans turned their gaze on themselves and each other, and cringed at the sight. Was getting rich truly the mission for which the founding fathers had sacrificed? Was money the be-all and end-all of this great experiment in human liberty? Had Mammon become the god to which Americans prayed?

Self-doubt and self-examination inspired action. In the 1820s and 1830s, hordes of well-meaning crusaders launched a multiarmed effort to reform and perfect the American character, to woo it away from self-indulgence and toward rectitude, and thereby ensure the nation’s future. Campaigners railed against every conceivable national ill, from dueling and spitting to bad architecture and masturbation. Others campaigned for exercise and well-chewed food, cold baths and better ventilation. While the crackpots and fanatics jostled for attention, the high-minded crusaded for abolition, female suffrage, and free education.

But the jewel in reform’s thorny crown was temperance. Nothing before or since has matched the passion with which ordinary folk waged war on wicked whiskey, which they regarded as the devil’s spawn and the root of the nation’s ills. The temperance crusade began in earnest in the 1820s as an army of antiliquor zealots preached, prayed, and sang the evils of whiskey and rum, all in the name of converting their countrymen away from excess and toward moderation, sobriety, and good citizenship.

“Intemperance,” thundered Lyman Beecher, the Billy Graham of his day, “is a national sin carrying destruction from the centre [sic] to every extremity of the empire . . . ” An enormous crosssection of Americans agreed, and campaigned against drinking and drunkenness, which they regarded as a “gangerous [sic] excrescence, poisoning and eating away the life of the community.” Their logic was simple: Alcohol and its partner intoxication hindered the progress of “Capital,—Enterprise,—Industry,—Morals,—and Religion.” Alcohol wasted mind and body, destroyed ambition, and laid asunder marriages and families. It spawned murder, prostitution, and gambling; deprived the poor man’s family of food; and led young men into degeneracy. Allowed to flow unchecked, the liquid terrors threatened the future of the republic itself. Eliminate drink and most of the nation’s ills would vanish as well.

The crusade against alcohol has erupted with predictable regularity since that time, although each subsequent generation has stamped the effort with its own rationale. The early-nineteenth-century campaigners took seriously then, as we perhaps do not now, the mission to make tangible the founding fathers’ dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They took as a personal charge the need to prove to skeptics that ordinary people possessed the wisdom necessary to make democracy live. The momentary pleasures of intoxication interfered with the demands of this great moment in human history. Between 1820 and 1850, millions of Americans pledged to abstain from drink, and among people age fifteen or older, alcohol consumption fell from seven gallons per capita in 1830 to three gallons in 1840. By the time Phillip Best arrived in the United States, Americans downed less than two gallons per year.

More important, that first generation of anti-drink crusaders infused the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol with a stain of disrepute that has never gone away. God’s good creature had become the devil’s handmaid, and respectable folk were, by definition, ones who abstained. The flip side of that equation was obvious: Those who trafficked in alcohol, whether by making, selling, or drinking it, were people of dubious repute. In the 1840s, taverns were dark and dreary because most Americans regarded them as houses of shame.

No surprise, the casual embrace of alcohol by German and Irish immigrants clashed with the American disdain for drink and drink-makers. A temperance leader in Cincinnati denounced the Irish and German “liquor power” as “unquestionably the mightiest power in the Republic,” one that must be destroyed. Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, Maine, argued that the only people who drank to the point of danger were “working people” like the Irish. Remove alcohol, he argued, and the poor would have more money to spend on their basic needs; “they [would] earn more, enjoy more, and save more than they ever did before” and so become good citizens.

Dow’s words inspired his state’s legislators to pass the nation’s first prohibition act. The Maine law, as it was called, banned the sale, manufacture, and consumption of alcohol. Maine’s legislation electrified the temperance movement and a prohibition crusade fifty years before the better-known eruption. Between 1850 and 1855, legislators in two territories and eleven of the thirty-one states followed Maine’s lead.

But where prohibition prevailed, violence erupted as mobs challenged the alcohol bans, or exacted revenge on the “pestilent . . . foreign swarms” whom they blamed for inspiring the laws. Such was the case in Chicago after voters filled city hall with pro-temperance, anti-immigrant officials and the new mayor ordered a ban on Sunday drinking. The mostly native-born police force closed the city’s foreign-owned beer gardens, beerhalls, and taverns but turned a blind eye to “American” taverns that stayed open in violation of the law. As the accused, most of them German, went on trial, six hundred men and boys, also mostly German, stormed the courthouse and battled police in the streets. The Lager Beer Riot ended when both sides fired shots; one man died, many were injured, and scores were arrested.

A few weeks later, it was Cincinnati’s turn. Violence erupted on an election day in April, as a mob attacked German voting stations and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Germans barricaded the bridge leading to the city’s “Over the Rhine” Germantown, but their opponents, armed with a cannon and muskets, stormed the defenses. The conflict dragged on for three days, leaving many dead and wounded on both sides.

During the “Bloody Monday” riots in Louisville in August 1855, Germans, Irish, and nativists armed with muskets, bayonets, and cannons roamed the streets firing on each other and passers-by. Nineteen men died in that rampage. Violence erupted even in Portland, Maine, where Neal Dow bragged that prohibition had eradicated crime: Rumors spread that Dow had purchased liquor and sold it to the state for medicinal purposes. A mob gathered outside the Portland liquor agency and Dow ordered a local militia group to the scene. When rioters broke into the building, Dow commanded the troops to fire. Their bullets killed one person and injured seven others.

The temperance campaign rent the fabric of Milwaukee. When the state legislature passed a bill that imposed new restrictions on alcohol sales, an angry crowd filled the streets in the town’s business district. Crowds of men and boys lit bonfires and fired rifles, blew horns and pounded on pans. Eventually a mob of about three hundred surrounded the house of John Smith, Milwaukee’s state representative and president of a local temperance society, and pelted it with rocks and bricks, smashing windows and terrifying the four children and two servants inside.

From Phillip Best’s perspective, this was bad news indeed. He had built both a thriving business and a reputation as a man of honor and an honest entrepreneur trusted by Germans and Americans alike. A mob scene like the one at Smith’s house damaged the reputation of all Germans, but it hurt the brewers most of all. The city’s moralists would be quick to charge the crowd with drunkenness, and if the crowd was mostly German, they would have been drunk on only one thing.

So it went around the country, as prohibition laws inadvertently and unexpectedly sparked the crime and chaos they had been designed to eliminate. This turn of events troubled many Americans, and by the mid-1850s, some who had once supported prohibition began to reject this extreme solution to the nation’s drinking problem. But even as the riots raged, the temperance crusaders found themselves under attack from another quarter.

In the 1850s, the most contentious issues facing the nation involved not drink but land and slavery. Politicians longed to open the nation’s vast western territories—nearly everything west of the Missouri River—to settlement and statehood. Every American thrilled to the prospect of all that land waiting to be plowed, planted, and built, but no hearts beat faster than those of southern slave owners. To the west, they realized, lay a magnificent opportunity to expand slavery beyond the Deep South. That same prospect terrified white northerners. Once slavery ensnared the West, would it conquer the North, too? Would slaves invade northern factories and farms, their free labor eliminating the need to pay a white man’s wages?

Those questions trumped the debate over drink. No one could see that more clearly than the leaders of the nation’s two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whigs hated slavery and immigrants but loved prohibition, a combination that repelled German and Irish voters. The Democrats welcomed immigrants and lager lovers alike. Unfortunately the party also supported slavery, and men like Phillip Best had not fled Europe’s oppression in order to join hands with politicians who ignored the distinction between free labor and slavery. Laborers and fields hands shied away, too, fearful that Democratic victories would deposit slavery on factory floors and northern farms.

In March 1854, a group of Wisconsin men frustrated with the Whigs’ anti-immigrant message and the Democrats’ pro-slavery stance organized a new political party devoted first and foremost to the end of slavery. Prohibitionists tried to clamber aboard the new bandwagon. Nothing doing. The Republicans, as the new party’s leaders called themselves, shoved them right back off: They planned to win elections, and to do so, they had to woo voters. They understood that prohibition, which alienated immigrants and urbanites, had become a political liability. There was no place in the new party’s agenda for a divisive crusade against drink.

And if the lesson was lost on some, a Milwaukee man hastened to set the record straight. “[N]early all the Germans of this city,” he announced in a letter published in a local newspaper, were prepared to cast their lot against slavery and with the new party, but they refused to bow to the dictates of “fanatic and zealous temperance men.” They would even support a “teetotaller” candidate, as long as he promised to stand against slavery. But Germans would not vote for prohibition or a prohibition man. “Can you expect of a brewer that he will tear down, with his own hands, his brewery?” he demanded. Or ask a laborer, after a “hard day’s work . . . paving your streets,” to “throw away” his “wholesome and nourishing Lagerbeer,” to “sacrifice his comfort for the sake of restricting slavery”? Go ahead, he added, punish the drunk. Close the beerhalls on election day. But if the Republicans wanted German support, they had to steer clear of the “fanaticism” of prohibition.

Lawmakers in Madison got the message. In early 1855, Wisconsin’s governor vetoed a flimsy prohibition law. Jacob Best, Jr., hung a “veto pen” in pride of place at the brothers’ beerhall, and Milwaukee’s young men celebrated the freedom to drink lager by marching from beerhall to beerhall, lighting bonfires and shooting fireworks.

 

CAUGHT BETWEEN the rock of slavery and the hard place of immigration, the temperance crusade collapsed. But this short-lived battle over drink produced an unintended, profound consequence that shaped brewing’s next fifty years. On one hand, even the zealots were forced to acknowledge that prohibition created more problems than it solved. On the other hand, most Americans sincerely believed that drink posed a genuine threat to the nation’s future. Where, many wondered, was the middle ground between the two?

The answer lay close at hand, and among the very people and beverage formerly accused of degrading American morals: Germans and their lager. Weary of the temperance movement and the conflict that it sparked, native-born Americans latched onto lager and the German model of sociable drinking as a compromise that allowed them to avoid the two extremes of prohibition and drunkenness.

The violence that accompanied the short-lived prohibition effort had drawn attention to the German lifestyle, to the beer gardens that welcomed families, and, of course, to lager itself. But the spotlight revealed what many Americans had been loath to admit: German-Americans lived respectably and moderately. They had prospered and assimilated into the American mainstream. They had built churches, and many owned their own businesses. Their homes were well kept and orderly. And they had accomplished this in spite of their lager.

The staff at the St. Louis Republican quantified the point. Between March and mid-September of 1854, they calculated, St. Louisians had consumed some eighteen million glasses of lager. “And yet,” they mused, Germans “contributed the smallest ratio to the sick list [and] the smallest number of convicts or criminals.” More to the point, the Germans “prosper[ed] in health, worldly goods and happiness.” The point was clear: Temperance crusaders insisted that alcohol led to degradation and crime, vice and decay, but Germans stood as living proof that it was possible to combine alcohol and respectability, pleasure and decency. A Buffalo newspaper editor chimed in with a possible explanation for the conundrum: American drinkers drank to get drunk and swilled “liver-eating gin, and stomach-destroying rum.” But Germans sipped lager as an accompaniment to other pleasures, such as singing and dancing and card-playing, and enjoyed lager’s yeasty heft as more of “a kindly sedative than a stimulus.”

Juries in several cities confirmed the growing belief that lager beer posed no threat to the nation’s future. In February 1858, one George Staats, a Brooklyn brewer and proprietor of a lager garden, went on trial on charges of violating the city’s Sunday drink law. Staats’s lawyer offered an ingenious defense: His client was innocent because lager beer was not intoxicating.

Men of science took the stand to explain that, at 3 percent alcohol content, lager could intoxicate only if consumed in extraordinary quantities. Or, as a reporter for the New York Times explained, “if it takes a pail-full of bier to make a person drunk, and the same person could get drunk on an eighth the quantity of rum, then lager is not an intoxicating drink, but may be a wholesome beverage.” Men of more practical experience agreed. Witness after witness testified to drinking excruciating quantities of lager—twenty to ninety pints a day—with no ill effects. The jury retired, debated the case for three hours (presumably without the benefit of lager to clear their minds), and returned to declare both Staats and lager not guilty.

Three months later, an identical case unfolded before a judge in Manhattan. Physicians took the stand to defend George Maurer against a charge of selling intoxicants on Sunday. One analyzed lager at three different New York breweries and concluded that, when consumed in moderate quantities, lager could not and did not intoxicate. Another reported that he had watched men imbibe as many as sixty glasses of lager without any evidence of intoxication. A third informed the jury that “he was in the habit of ordering [lager] for females after their confinements, and with good results.”

Professionals of another kind followed them to the stand, among them a portly German who volunteered the information that he regularly drank more than one hundred glasses of lager a day and never got drunk. In fact, he added, in case the jurors doubted his word, he had consumed twenty-two glasses that very morning before reporting to the courtroom. And so it went during four days of testimony. The jury retired, contemplated the facts for over seven hours, and reported they could not agree on a verdict. The judge, perhaps longing for a glass of lager, sent them and Mr. Maurer home.

The editors of Harper’s Weekly provided further evidence for lager’s benefits: “Good lager beer is pronounced by the [scientific] faculty to be a mild tonic, calculated, on the average, to be rather beneficial than injurious to the system.” The editor of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Union concurred: “There is no denying the fact,” he wrote, that under the regime of “total abstinence American women are sadly degenerating,” adding that one “good, rollicking fast-liver could clean out a regiment” of temperance types “in ten minutes.” Queen Victoria drank beer on a regular basis, he pointed out, as did German women, and they were “as robust as any women in the world.”

Even the editors of the New York Times, who groused that lager had become “a good deal too fashionable for . . . the morals of young citizens,” conceded that it was better than the alternative. When that state’s legislature passed a bill banning the sale of wine and spirits, Americans flocked to lager beer gardens. A reporter’s investigation revealed the truth: Many New Yorkers formerly “in the habit of drinking one or more glasses of rum, gin or brandy, every day” now consumed lager instead, evidence, he claimed, of people’s willingness to forgo “the stronger [alcoholic] beverages” in favor of the “very weakest.”

So it went around the country, as non-German Americans rendered their own verdict: Lager was both good and safe. By the late 1850s, “lager bier” saloons lined the streets of cities large and small, and a profusion of new summer gardens dotted leafy suburbs. There men and women danced to German bands, thrilled to the exquisite voices of German choral groups, enjoyed opera and dancers and comics, and relaxed over glasses of fresh lager. In Buffalo, families that once picnicked at Forest Lawn cemetery—the only green space in town—now thronged Westphal’s Garden to enjoy lager and music. Respectable businessmen and artisans learned that they need not endure the humiliation of slipping furtively into a grimy tavern for beer; they could stroll Westphal’s greenery with wife on arm and children straggling behind. Everyone—German, Irish, American—looked forward to that city’s St. John’s Day Festival. “A German festival is always full of life, spirit and fun,” commented one local newspaper editor.

So, too, in Cincinnati, where one man marveled at the change: Lager beer, he informed readers of his guide to that city, “forms refreshment to one-half of our native population . . . [and] is driving out the consumption of whiskey . . . ” A Richmond, Virginia, man agreed. “Lager has gone ahead of all other beverages,” he claimed, and Germans were that city’s “gayest citizens,” ones who knew how to “enjoy their hours of relaxation.” Thanks to the émigrés, American life had entered a “new and pleasant phase.”

An Englishman who spent the 1850s in the United States also testified to the change in tastes. “A dozen years ago,” he wrote in 1862, at the conclusion of his stay, “brandy and whiskey were the popular drinks; now they have, in a great measure, given place to this lager-bier, with its three per cent. of alcohol . . . [N]obody liked it at first,” but now “everybody . . . everywhere” drank it in “immense quantities.” Americans had embraced the pleasures of café life, and he advised the temperance crowd to come up with other “wholesome, palatable, and invigorating drinks, which people could drink and talk over . . . The use of lager-bier proves the practicability of this course.”

 

LAGER’S NEW POPULARITY among Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities spurred the growth of breweries nationwide, nearly all of them owned by Germans who hoped that lager mania would pave their way to wealth. Ten new breweries opened in Milwaukee alone during the 1850s.

Among the newcomers was Valentin Blatz. He had trained as a brewer in his native Bavaria before emigrating to Milwaukee in the 1840s, where he began his American life working for another beermaker, John (or Johann) Braun. But Blatz wanted more, and in 1851 he pitched the first yeast in his own brewing vat. He revealed the expanse of his ambition a few months later when Braun died in an accident: Blatz married the man’s widow and took control of his brewery. Like the Bests, he had devoted the 1850s to expansion, building a larger brewhouse and more extensive malthouse. Unlike the Bests, Blatz paid for the projects by pilfering the estates of the children of his now-deceased former employer. Blatz arranged for a lawyer friend to be appointed as legal guardian to the children and their inheritance; the friend opened the door to the money and Blatz helped himself.

August Krug, too, longed for a larger operation. In 1849 he had added a brewery to the restaurant and saloon he owned on Chestnut Street, and an opportunity for growth presented itself a year later, when his father arrived from Germany bearing eight hundred dollars in gold coin and Krug’s eight-year-old nephew, August Uihlein (pronounced E-line). Krug placed the boy in school and invested the coin in the brewery. He purchased more land and excavated a 150-barrel lagering vault, a clear signal that he planned to run on the same turf as Phillip Best. Krug could manage the brewery and restaurant, but he needed help keeping an eye on the numbers. In 1855, he hired a bookkeeper named Joseph Schlitz.

But in December of that year, Krug tumbled down a hatchway and landed hard on the floor below; a few days later he died, leaving his estate to his wife. Schlitz wasted no time in offering the widow his life savings in exchange for a partnership. In 1858 he sealed the deal by marrying her, hiring August Uihlein as the new bookkeeper, and changing the company name to Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.

Phillip Best’s brother Carl suffered a different kind of loss. He had not joined the family brewery, preferring to stick with the vinegar factory he had founded. But in 1849 he sold that, and he and a business partner purchased land for a new brewery three miles west of Milwaukee in the relatively unpopulated Menomonee Valley. They christened their venture the Plank Road Brewery, named for the wooden roadway that ran past their door (today’s State Street). The partners hoped to sell part of their output to the farmers who hauled grain into town one way on Plank Road and supplies back the other. When the partner ran the brewery into debt and then absconded, Carl and younger brother Lorenz carried on until young Lorenz died; Carl, either bereft or inept, let the brewery slide into bankruptcy.

Thirty-year-old Frederick Miller, who had emigrated to the United States a few months earlier, leased the property in 1855, then purchased it outright a year later and set about to make his family’s American fortune. He had begun training as a brewer fifteen years earlier, and by the time he arrived in the United States had achieved the status of brewmaster and managed his own brewhouse. Another century would pass before the small outfit he helmed joined the ranks of the world’s great breweries, but in the late 1850s, his talents earned a good living for his family. He lured Milwaukeeans to his relatively distant location with a garden filled with tables, shade trees, and a multicolored, aromatic array of formal flower beds that cascaded down the sides of the bluff behind the brewery. Customers enjoyed homemade breads and cakes and specially prepared hams. Women sipped a house specialty, mocha coffee, while men clutching beer steins thronged the bowling alley. Children romped to the strains of orchestras and choruses that performed under the roof of the open-air pavilion. Miller would succeed where Carl Best failed, and today all that remains to memorialize Carl’s efforts is a section of his lager cave, now the last stop on the visitors’ tour at Miller Brewing Company.

 

PHILLIP AND JACOB JUNIOR enjoyed the competition, which only spurred their own ambitions. By the late 1850s, the modest brewhouse on the hill, symbol of their émigré hopes and the limits of their original capital, had outlived its usefulness. In 1857, the pair plowed their profits—some $20,000 a year (over $400,000 in today’s dollars)—into a new plant: an imposing two-story brick complex adorned with turrets and Gothic windows, with a life-sized statue of lager-swilling Gambrinus, the mythical inventor of lager, perched on top. The new brewery could be seen from almost everywhere in the city, testimony to Phillip and Jacob’s ambitions and to the importance of lager to Milwaukee’s economy. But its crowning glory lay hidden from sight: The “vaults,” or lager cellars, consisted of several blocks of flagstone corridors surmounted by arched brick ceilings and lined with hundreds of rows of puncheons sized to hold thirty barrels, or about one thousand gallons, of lager.

The decision to expand forced them to live with stomach-wrenching risk. In order to earn a return on their investment, they had to operate at full capacity. Milwaukee’s growth continued apace, but the contest for customers grew more heated each year. Chicago’s growth was, if anything, even more astonishing, and the brothers could count on selling several thousand barrels there each year to taverns around that bustling city. But even that outlet bristled with uncertainty: They had to buy or rent real estate in Chicago, both for their office and for warehousing the beer. And they had to hire a reliable agent to manage their Chicago affairs—lining up customers, ordering ice, and hiring teams and drivers to deliver the beer. All of it—the new plant, the larger vats, the Chicago branch, the soaring payroll—forced the men to the edge of their means.

What is most remarkable about this moment in the history of what would become the world’s largest brewery is that Phillip and Jacob played their hand just as the nation’s economy skittered into a two-year recession. The so-called Panic of 1857 spawned a string of bankruptcies and foreclosures that reached from the urban coast to the rural frontier. The impact crashed across the Midwest, where investors in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa had dumped millions into railroad projects, using loans from chronically wobbly banks that crumpled under the impact of first recession, then depression. In Milwaukee, beer sales plunged: The 100,000 barrels produced by the city’s brewers in 1857 fell to 42,000 in 1859.

That may explain why, just a year after building the new brewhouse, the brothers parted ways, Phillip claiming the brewery and Jacob the real estate—a couple of lots and a large brick building—that they owned in downtown Milwaukee. Years later, an aging Milwaukee saloonkeeper claimed that the brothers rolled dice to determine the division of property. According to this account, Phillip won the toss and opted to keep the brewery, betting, apparently, that good times would return and so would the demand for his beer.

It’s hard to imagine so shrewd a businessman as Phillip Best risking so much on chance. On the other hand, he never lost touch with the hard-driving roustabout within. On more than one occasion, he galloped his horse down East Water Street and charged through the doorway of the Menomonee Saloon, one of the city’s most popular watering holes. As the men draped across the bar or slouched in chairs watched, whooped, and hollered, the equally amused barkeeper shooed Best out the door. Phillip tied his horse at the rail outside and then strolled back inside, shouting an order to “‘set ’em up’ for the house.”

As with the dice-rolling partnership split, there’s no way to know if the horse tale is apocryphal. But both have a ring of truth: If we know anything about Phillip Best and the handful of brewers who laid the foundations of fortunes in those early days of the brewing industry, it is that they embraced risk. After all, Phillip had turned thirty the year he left Europe for the United States. By the late 1850s, he’d long since passed the first flower of youth and understood that this gamble might not pay off, especially given the number of players who crowded the table. Like him, ambitious brewers in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities were busy adding steam engines and larger vats to their brewhouses. Also like him, they relished the competition from the hundreds of new breweries that had opened to accommodate Americans’ new passion for lager.

Phillip’s choice, like his earlier decision to risk his adulthood on America, paid off. By the time he gained sole ownership of the brewery, he could measure his American success by more than his company’s profits. A Democratic governor honored his contributions to Wisconsin politics by granting him a commission in the Milwaukee Dragoons militia company, and a grateful Republican governor elevated him to the rank of brigadier general in a division of the state militia.

In 1857, Phillip reigned as Prince during Milwaukee’s first Lenten-season Carnival. He presided over a lavish reception on opening night and sat enthroned on the lead wagon of a parade that sashayed through the city’s streets the next day. Behind him marched horn-tooting musicians and beribboned stallions carrying local dignitaries. A river of wagons flowed behind, loaded with men and women attired in ornate costume and mask: A majestic King Gambrinus waved to the delighted onlookers; Bacchus greeted his subjects; two “apostles of Temperance” perched on another wagon, and the crowd roared when one fell off and into the muddy street.

By any measure, German or American, Phillip had succeeded. Among the city’s two dozen or so brewers, only Val Blatz produced more lager, and Best Brewing lagged by fewer than two hundred barrels. As the decade turned, the landscape that Phillip surveyed from his hilltop empire contrasted dramatically with the one he had first seen back in 1844. Then, he looked down on a sea of leafy green on one side and a small town on the other. Now Milwaukee, population forty-five thousand, sprawled in all directions. Rippling layers of forest had given way to houses and roads. Phillip owned not just two small lots, but several city blocks. And beneath his feet lay thousands of barrels of German lager, the stuff of his American dreams.