FOR A FAITHFUL BEER PILGRIM, THE MIDWEST HAS NO shortage of brewing meccas. There’s St. Louis, with its massive Anheuser-Busch facility, one of the biggest in the world. Milwaukee boasts the historical architecture of Miller and Pabst, not to mention some darn good bratwurst. Chicago, too, is right there at the head of the pack when it comes to craft brewing in America’s heartland, with local labels like the Goose Island Beer Company adding a host of unique brews to the regional repertoire. Cleveland may not be quite as renowned for its brewing history, but it does have one thing these illustrious beer capitals do not: Fred Ziwich & His International Sound Machine. The “Sound Machine,” as far as I can tell, is simply a preprogrammed beat box, but it complements one of the meanest accordions and sharpest pairs of lederhosen this side of Lake Erie. Fred is absolutely tearing it up this afternoon at the new Hofbräuhaus beer hall, getting the entire crowd up on its feet and swinging steins, to polkas and beer chants straight out of the Old Country. A nice Sunday alternative to watching the Browns get creamed yet again while chugging back cans of the standard macrobrew, and a pretty good reason to visit my own hometown.
There is, however, something deliciously atavistic about the whole phenomenon. Because while the Cleveland Hofbräuhaus does indeed feel “new” to the scene (there was an older, unlicensed Hofbräuhaus I remember from my teenage years that had no qualms serving underage imbibers, although it closed years ago), one can’t help but feel a twinge of déjà vu. For Cleveland, like many midwestern cities, has had Germans, German beer, and German beer halls from nearly the get-go. Most of what we have traditionally considered “American” beer—Budweiser, Busch, Pabst, Miller—began in these cities a century and a half ago, in beer halls and breweries not so very different from the one I find myself in today. Over the years, the accordian ditties may have morphed into Bob Seger tracks, and the wide variety of German brew recipes may have evolved into the standard pale lagers that citizens now consume by the metric ton, but there’s no denying the European origins. Our favorite macrobrews might feel as American as apple pie in this day and age, but the fact of the matter is, they have an exceedingly Teutonic pedigree. At some point in the nineteenth century, what was generally considered to constitute American beer switched from the darker and more fragrant British-style brews produced in New York and Philadelphia to a milder and more refreshing German-style lager brewed largely in the industrial cities of the Middle West.
When Germans began immigrating in large numbers in the mid-1800s, they didn’t just bring a new style of beer; they brought a new drinking attitude as well. “It’s a social lubricant that’s always going to be there,” Josh Jones, the brewmaster at the Cleveland Hofbräuhaus, told me. “At a place like this, you’ll sit next to complete strangers, and by the end, you’ll be friends.” Gemütlichkeit, as it’s known in the Old Country, is the idea that the consumption of beer is a happy, wholesome, family activity that brings people and communities together—not something furtive and mildly illicit for men to do alone in a bar. This new approach to drinking arrived at the exact time when New World beer was seriously waning, and Americans across the social spectrum were binging on the cheap whiskey that poured in from the trans-Appalachian frontier.
But there was certainly more to it than just a happy-go-lucky attitude surrounding the consumption of beer. Indeed, that fun-in-the-sun beer-garden approach belies just how seriously Germans took their beer, and still do today. When Josh moved to the Cleveland Hofbräuhaus from his earlier position at the Great Lakes Brewery, he not only had to be approved by the local franchise owners, but also vetted following a lengthy background check by the regional Bavarian government. Inspectors still come from Germany every few months to check on the brewery, and they take samples back with them to test in their lab. “Fifty percent of brewing is cleaning,” Josh informed me, and to that end, his overseers in the old country insist that everything be spotless, and the ingredients pure as can be. This isn’t a modern phenomenon; the standards they use go back to the Rheinheitsgebot, better known as the German Purity Laws, which haven’t changed much in five hundred years. At the Cleveland Hofbräuhaus, Josh Jones follows the same rules German brewers did half a millennium ago. The results, as I and the many others swinging steins to Fred Ziwich & His International Sound Machine can attest, are just as delicious. Good beer translates into good times, and nobody knows this better than the Germans. “The moment when you look out and see everyone enjoying your beer,” Josh told me while discussing the rigorous standards and meticulous nature of German brewing, “that’s what makes it all worthwhile.”
So that’s the short version. Now that Fred’s taking a break between sets and a fresh mug of Bavarian-style lager is on its way, there’s just enough time for the long one.
The love affair between Germans and their beer is an ancient one indeed—a relationship that transcends recorded history. The word ale is thought by some scholars to come from the Proto-Germanic word aluth, itself derived from an even earlier and murkier Proto-Indo-European word alu, which has connotations of sorcery and intoxication; essentially, of being sacred. A tribe called the Alemanii were recorded as making an annual brew contribution to their temple, indicating a religious connotation to beer that was probably shared across the Germanic world. Julius Caesar himself took note of beer’s unique status among the Germans during a foray into northern territory in 57 B.C., writing that “they do not allow wine to be imported among them, since they believe that by it men are made soft and effeminate for the endurance of hardship.” No, it was beer that the pagan Germans cherished, and unlike the Gauls, who became became expert winemakers, not even interactions with the “civilized” Romans to the south could convince them otherwise. The Germans remained steadfastly “barbarian” and stuck to their beer and rambunctious ways. In the first century A.D., the Roman scholar Tacitus would write of them: “No other people indulges more extravagantly in feasting and hospitality,” with beer enabling the festivities. When the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, a stampede of Germanic invaders into the old Roman lands begat a flood of German beer there as well. The early Frankish kings who came to rule parts of Germany and northern Gaul brought their love of brewing right along with them. A physician to King Theodoric would write in the sixth century:
It is on the whole extremely suitable for all to drink beer . . . since beer which has been well made is excellent in terms of benefits and is reasonable, just like the barley soup which we make in another way. However, it is usually cold.
An early take on Gemütlichkeit, perhaps, and also proof that the Germans were enjoying a cold, refreshing beer long before Oktoberfests and decorative steins came into the picture. Although the gradual conversion to Christianity that spread throughout Germanic Europe hindered some of the old pagan practices, beer drinking continued unabated.
In early Frankish monasteries, where grain taxes placed on the peasantry allowed for brewing on a larger scale, beer continued to be consumed in substantial quantities. At the Council of Frankfurt in A.D. 794, Charlemagne sought to consolidate the monasteries and convents he controlled under the single order of Benedict, and he included among his many regulations a rule stating that nuns must drink beer on a regular basis, though wine only on special occasions. A ninth-century plan for the St. Gall monastery, likely drafted by the Bishop of Reichenau, included three separate breweries: one that produced beer for monks, another for distinguished guests, and a third for pilgrims and paupers. It may come as no surprise that the monks’ brewery was by far the nicest. At similar Carolingian-era monasteries, both in northern France and Germany proper, monks first began tinkering with hops. In the abbey of Freisingen, Germany, hop gardens were being cultivated for brewing as early as A.D. 860, and archaeological evidence indicates that hops were being used in Haithabu, northern Germany, in the ninth century as well.* With the discovery of the plant’s preservative properties, using hops as an additive would become the norm, eventually winning out over the older gruit spices previously used to flavor German beer. As detailed previously, with the use of hops, beer became more consistent and more durable; mass production wasn’t far behind.
The spread of hops throughout Germany during the medieval period made brewing a more profitable enterprise and encouraged the rise of commercial breweries and taverns.
An early example of the transition from sacred to secular beer making can be found in Bavaria, although it likely predates hopping in the region. As early as 1143, monastic brewers in southern Germany were producing more beer than the monks could consume, and, as a result, they began selling it to their neighbors. Monasteries selling beer became relatively common in Germany, in the north and south, as hopping spread and output grew. With all that potential, some men not of the cloth began to take note, and soon, monasteries had competition from purely commercial interests. By the 1200s, many monastic breweries were being surpassed by professional town-based brewers, with the growing urban classes relying on the local brewery down the street for their daily tankards, as opposed to the more remote monasteries in the surrounding countryside.
Access to shipping routes in the north of Germany meant that beer needn’t stay local. In coastal towns like Bremen, Wismar, and Hamburg, breweries were producing hopped beer that was plentiful and durable enough to be shipped to more distant markets across northern Europe. Soon these port towns, all members of the Hanseatic League, became the leading export centers for European beer. To keep their edge over competitors, as well as maintain quality control, strict brewing regulations were already in place throughout the port cities of the Hanseatic League by the 1300s. “Hamburg” beer, as northern German beer was generically known, benefited from easy access to the grain belt of the Elbe Valley and the hop fields of the Baltic and became famous across the region, from the Low Countries to England and Scandinavia. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Hamburg alone was producing as many as 25,000,000 liters per year. Dutch beer would eventually catch up and come to rival the Hanseatic brews, as would the beers of Bavaria to the south. But for more than a century, Hamburg beer was the beer of northern Europe, and it was taxed and regulated accordingly.
The mass production of hopped beer began in northern Germany, but it didn’t stay there. It would travel westward to Holland, northward to England, and eventually to Bavaria to the south. The techniques were brought to the region along the trading routes of the Rhine; by the mid-fifteenth century, hopped beer was already common in southern Germany, with locally made wines and unhopped brews becoming increasingly less so. By the late fifteenth century, Bavaria was beginning to rival even the north in both quality and amounts of beer being produced, with licensed merchants and courtrun breweries quickly picking up on and copying the effective techniques of their neighbors to the north. “Bock” beer, a long-standing Bavarian institution, was one such imitation, originally designed to duplicate the smooth, drinkable beers of the Hanseatic town of Einbeck.* Among their bag of tricks, northern brewers had an ingenious recipe for exceptionally smooth beer: they used wheat in perfect proportion to barley, to produce a softer, more drinkable beverage. Bavarians attempted to duplicate that smoothness, but they had a hard time getting it just right.
That is, until the sixteenth century. In the middle decades of the 1500s, Bavaria developed an ingenious technique of its own. This was not related to hops, but rather to yeast—an entirely new kind of brewing yeast, the origins of which were to be found in a most unexpected place, thousands of miles away from any Bavarian brewery. To protect this new development, a series of rules and regulations would be introduced alongside it, laws that would eventually give Bavarian brewers a tremendous advantage over the competition. So hold on to your Tyrolean hats: lager beer, today the most popular form of beer in the world, is about to be born.
Humans have been brewing beer for thousands of years—exactly how many is difficult to say, but it’s safe to presume beer is at least as old as agriculture, and possibly even older. For the vast majority of brewing history, the technique remained surprisingly constant. First, the grain was dampened with water to begin the process of germination, which released enzymes capable of converting starches into sugar. This incipient sprouting was abruptly stopped, though, by some form of heat; in the ancient world, by baking the damp grain into bread, and in more modern times, by use of a kiln. The resulting baked grain, now “malted,” was added to water to steep in a primitive mash tun, and then boiled in some form of brew kettle. This sugar-rich wort, if left to cool and ferment, would in some cases turn into a beverage that produced a tickle of alcohol on the palate and left the drinker feeling relaxed, uninhibited, and ready at last for that second order of buffalo wings.
That almost magical process of transformation, from a thick barley soup into honest-to-goodness beer, was something that early brewers mastered, but never completely understood. Without microscopes or cellular biology, how could they? They attributed it to all sorts of things, from divine intervention, to a process of instantaneous fermentation akin to spontaneous generation. But in fact, everything they loved about beer owed its existence to a diminutive wild organism called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, better known as “brewer’s yeast” or “ale yeast.” It is a common creature that can be found floating through the air in most corners of the globe. When presented with natural sugars upon which to feed, it does so dutifully and relentlessly, producing a number of waste products, alcohol and carbon dioxide chief among them. This feisty little yeast prefers warmer temperatures and will float atop almost any sweet liquid, feeding in a great foamy mass until it’s had its fill. Brewers eventually learned to reuse leftover yeast sediments they favored, resulting in specific strains that produced different characteristics. They were all technically “ales,” though, in that they were dependent on various mutated forms of basic ale yeast. Hops or no hops, they still relied on the same microorganism.
In the early sixteenth century, however—and possibly even earlier—Bavarian brewers began to notice something funny was going on with their beer. Many breweries had long been in the habit of “lagering” beer, that is, storing it in cool caves covered in blocks of ice from nearby rivers and lakes. Before refrigeration, lagering helped beer condition and keep longer. Beginning in the early decades of the 1500s, Bavarian brewers started pulling out a very different sort of product from their lagering caves. The traditional beers they were accustomed to were rich, cloudy, almost fruity things, full of complex flavors we now call esters. They were also hard to predict—souring was commonplace, due to unwelcome bacteria and wild yeast strains,* and uneven batch consistency was a brewing fact of life. Hops did some to fix the problem, as did making stronger beers with higher alcohol contents, although not nearly enough. But these new “lager” beers that began turning up in their storage caves had a different character altogether. They were lighter, crisper, more carbonated, and more refreshing. And they were far more consistent in their quality—infectious bacteria and wild yeasts didn’t like cold weather, but whatever was helping to make this beer apparently did. Essentially, Bavarians had discovered an entirely new kind of beer that was easier to drink and easier to market. Something less like a murky, yeasty Trappist ale, and more akin to a frothy golden pilsner (although to be fair, true pilsner malts were still a few centuries away).
As to when this new cold-fermenting type of beer was discovered, well, it gets a bit tricky. The first mention of a cold-fermenting yeast that stayed on the bottom of the beer rather than floating on the top—the fundamental characteristics of a lager—can be dated to Bavaria in 1420. It’s possible this was the first reference to the new yeast, although later mentions of cold-fermenting beer from the early and middle parts of the sixteenth century may be more likely candidates, and for a very compelling reason: this new “lager” yeast that fermented at cold temperatures owed its origins to a very unlikely place. Not to monastery on a Bavarian hillside, not some feudal castle on the edge of Munich, but rather to the chilly pine forests of Patagonia. Yes, Patagonia. As in southern Argentina. It turns out, there’s a convenient explanation for how this new lager yeast, known to modern scientists as Saccharomyces pastorianus, began to appear in the 1500s, right in the foamy wake of Christopher Columbus. Genetic evidence seems to indicate that its ancestor hitched a ride to Europe from the New World. As to whether it was aboard a ship, on a piece of wood, or in the belly of an insect, it’s impossible to say. Amerigo Vespucci claimed to have reached Patagonia in 1502; the captain João de Lisboa may have explored its coastline as well in 1512, and Ferdinand Magellan definitely did so in 1520. All are intriguing candidates for stowaway yeast strains, although we will likely never know for sure. What is certain is that at some point in the first half of the sixteenth century, perhaps even a little before then, a wild South American yeast, able to thrive in the cold, dark woods of Patagonia, ended up crossing the Atlantic to Europe, found its way to Bavaria, created a hybrid strain with the local ale yeast, and began producing an entirely new kind of beer. Quite a voyage for a single-celled organism, to say the least.* And a fine contribution from the Americas to beer history.
Naturally, Bavarian brewers at the time knew none of this. Nor did they need to. All they understood was that when they made beer in colder weather, and left it to condition for a few months in a chilly cave, the product had cleaner flavors and was far more stable than the beer they had been accustomed to drinking. These new beers were no longer conventional ales, which had relied on warm-weather-loving ale yeast, but lagers, an entirely novel form of beer that depended on a new hybrid strain of bottom-fermenting, cold-weather yeast. It didn’t take Bavarians long to realize they much preferred the latter—and that they could at last give the beer makers of the Hanseatic League to the north a run for their money.
It was not just taste, though. There were enticing economic reasons for leaning toward lager. In much the same way hops had revolutionized the northern German, Dutch, and English beer industries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, lagers would change the way beer was produced and marketed in southern Germany in the sixteenth. Because fermentation occurred at a colder temperature, it was a far slower and less volatile process. With less chance of bacterial infection, batch consistency and longevity improved immensely. This in turn meant beer could be brewed using less grain and fewer hops—the high alcohol and hop content needed to brew a consistent, durable ale were no longer necessary. A new dichotomy in German brewing emerged. It was no longer between unhopped ales versus hopped beer, as had been the case in fifteenth-century England, but rather a preference between brews made from traditional ale yeast, be they hopped or unhopped, and those made with the new strains of lager yeast. The age of ales versus lagers had officially begun, and the argument continues to rage to this very day.
For the feudal lords and minor nobility who held sway in southern Germany at that time, though, there was little room for debate. Thanks to their court-owned Hofbräuhauses, not to mention the franchise rights and licenses they granted to privately owned breweries and taverns, they had quite a bit riding on the success of the beer industry. They would do anything they could to make it more consistently profitable, including passing all manner of strict regulations and unbending mandates. And lager beer, with its lower costs and higher consistency, was most profitable of all.
Now, the German love of efficiency and quality was applied to brewing long before lager yeast came onto the scene. Charlemagne was enforcing beer quality tests and mandating that brewers keep a clean shop as early as the eighth century in German lands. In the age before hops, the Carolingian kings kept careful tabs on the industry by granting gruitrecht, or the right to make beer with gruit spices, only to monasteries and towns whose methods and funds they trusted. In Augsburg, Emperor Frederick I was incorporating punishments for unskilled brewers into the city’s municipal code as early as 1156, and in Munich, the Duke of Bavaria was only giving brewing licenses to skilled, experienced brewers who produced a consistent product way back in 1286. There are lofty explanations for this early commitment to brewing excellence, but the more practical truth is that brewing was big business and quality mattered. A bad batch of beer was not only detrimental to a local brewery’s reputation: it cut directly into the pockets of the nobility, who garnered tremendous amounts of wealth from breweries through taxes and licensing.
The widespread use of hops, which occured in Bavaria roughly a century before lager yeast came into the picture, was most likely the impetus behind the most famous piece of German brewing legislature, the Rheinheitsgebot, the aforementioned “German Purity Law.” An early version was passed by the Munich city council in 1447 and reissued again in 1487 by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria. It stipulated that only three ingredients—water, malted barley, and hops—could be used in the production of beer. In an age when many local German brewers were still using all manner of grains and wild (and largely ineffectual) preservative agents to make their beer, it was a way of ensuring that best practices were adhered to, and, incidentally, of ensuring other grains like wheat would always be available to make bread. After all, no one wanted a peasant revolt. A more official, wider-reaching version was signed into effect on April 23, 1516, drafted by the coruling Bavarian dukes Wilhem IV and Ludwig X. Some of it regarded price controls, but it once again mandated that only water, barley, and hops could be used.
This established once and for all the ingredient portion of the law, but it didn’t end there. In the decades to come, additional amendments would appear in local brewing codes, albeit with a decidedly different slant. For while the original Rheinheitsgebot did serve to regulate what went into beer, in the middle of the sixteenth century, rules were put into play dictating how and when beer was made. In 1551, ordinances were passed in Munich that clearly identified a distinct cold-fermenting style of beer, indicating at last the officially acknowledged arrival of lager yeast on the scene. This was followed up by a 1553 law banning brewing altogether during the warmer months of the year. Why such drastic measures? To ensure that only the longer-lasting, crisper-tasting, and more cost-efficient lager style of beer would be made. The Bavarian brewing season became officially restricted to the time between St. Michael’s Day (September 29) and St. George’s Day (April 23). With the enforcement of that official calendar, Bavaria’s adoption of lager beer became official as well. Thanks to a windblown yeast strain from the forests of Argentina, a schism had formed in Germany—not between the Catholic Church and the northern Reformation, although Martin Luther himself would state that he preferred to “drink a tankard of beer against the devil.” But rather, between the ale-sipping north and the lager-chugging south. Bavaria had at last found its own way to compete with the large, commercial breweries of the Hanseatic League. It would brew only lager, a beer whose quality and drinkability surpassed the brews from the north, and whose costs they could far more easily manage.
For the most part, it worked. The Hanseatic League dissolved by the year 1669, and although beer would continue to be made there, its brewing industry was in a state of serious stagnation. Bavarian brewing, meanwhile, was thriving and had no qualms filling the beer vacuum with its own regional lagers. Long gone were the days when the best beer had to be imported from the north—some of the finest beer in Europe was being brewed by the many commercial breweries licensed by the southern nobility. By 1750, Bavaria had some four thousand breweries turning out lager—more than we have in all of America today, despite their having only a small fraction of our current population. The large number of breweries was due in part to local antimonopoly laws that protected the small, private brewhouses in each hamlet or village from “foreign” competition. Essentially, it was in many cases against the law to consume beer from another town, even if it was available and preferred. These protectionist policies came to a screeching halt in the early 1800s, though, thanks to a belligerent Corsican named Napoleon. When France briefly took control of what had been the Holy Roman Empire comprising much of the German heartland, one of his first orders was to ban local groups that might challenge his authority, including brewers’ guilds and trade organizations—a move that would effectively kill most protectionist beer legislation across German lands. Napoleon would eventually catch that ferry to Elba and have his Waterloo, but a select and powerful few had made a killing in the new economy, and the freemarket approach to German beer was there to stay. Successful breweries either absorbed their competition, or drove them out of business—an age of brewery consolidation had begun. In the Bavarian capital of Munich in 1790, there were sixty breweries in the city proper. By 1819, that number had fallen to thirty-five, and by 1865, it stood at less than fifteen.
There was of course a negative side to Bavarian hegemony and the gradual consolidation of breweries. For several centuries—beginning with the collapse of the northern Hanseatic brewing powers in the 1600s—the southern German duchy could quite accurately have been called a beery bully. Bavarian breweries and the nobles who profited from them used all their influence to spread their Rheinheitsgebot to neighboring German states and effectively steal their milk money, or beer money as it were (in fact, the universal adoption of the purity laws would even go on to become a Bavarian precondition for German unification in 1871). Again, there probably was an element to quality control, but there also was a far larger impetus to simply knock the competition right out of existence and keep the local Bavarian industry strong. Gradually, over the course of centuries, beloved regional German ales succumbed to the pressure and went the way of the dodo. Even wheat beer was banned for some time, as it wasn’t brewed using only malted barley. Fortunately for those of us who love a good Hefeweizen on a hot summer day, the nobility eventually deemed wheat beer too profitable to go extinct, and it was allowed as something of an exception. In addition to Hefeweizen, a few other regional German ales would survive the Rheinheitsgebot by the skin of their teeth and persist into the present day—styles you can still find on the import shelves, with names like gose, kölsch, altbier, and Berlinerwiesse. But generally speaking, the vast majority of German ales slowly slipped into the pages of history when they failed to comply with the strict rules set forth by the Bavarian nobility and their powerful breweries. In their place, though, new forms of lager beer evolved to fill in the gaps. Bock, doppelbock, Märzen, and eventually pilsner—the precursor of American pale lager—were born during the heyday of the Bavarian brewing era, each using various malts and techniques to achieve a distinctive character and flavor.
There was another obvious benefit to the eventual predominance of the Rheinheitsgebot and subsequent brewery consolidation as well: the larger German breweries that persisted into the nineteenth century did well because they consistently made very good lager beer. A few key technological innovations helped. Thanks to the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century, science had disproven the theory of spontaneous generation and begun to understand the reproductive process of yeasts. The first usable thermometers arrived in the eighteenth century, meaning the heating of liquids was no longer a haphazard process of guessing. And thanks to a French chemist named Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a scientific explanation for the process of fermentation was at last available by 1789. For years, brewers had regarded their craft with awe and wonder; they mastered it, but they did not understand it. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, science was truly beginning to furnish them with the answers to those ancient mysteries. By the mid-1800s, massive, ultracompetitive lager breweries had become entrenched in Germany, where quality control was carefully monitored by highly trained experts, and scientific innovations were readily adopted for the good of the beer.
The concept of Gemütlichkeit goes back a long way in German culture. Here, three students practice their most sentimental Teutonic tunes over steins of local lager.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
All the above paved the way quite nicely for a move to America. The winds had brought lager yeast from the New World aboard European sailing ships in the mid-sixteenth century and transformed German brewing forever. Three hundred years later, a fresh tide of German immigrant brewers took that same yeast back across the sea to America. So, get out that accordion and strike up the oompah band—Herren Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz are all on their way.
As early as 1710, a group of “Poor Palatines” from the southwest of Germany arrived in the Hudson Valley, fleeing the ravages of Franco-Germanic warfare back home. Their establishment in New York encouraged further bursts of immigration from the Palatine region of Germany over the next century, for a mixture of religious and economic reasons. Some stayed in New York, others ventured to New Jersey, and eventually, a considerable number found their way to Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, they would create one of the first “Germantowns” in America, while in the untamed interior of Penn’s Woods, they would either meld with the whiskey-drinking Scots-Irish settlers,* or keep to themselves in rural, oftentimes religiously inclined enclaves, becoming some form of Pennsylvania Dutch. Many of these early German immigrants did drink beer, but not enough to greatly affect the entrenched brewing traditions of early America. Most of the first-wave Palatines lacked the resources and expertise to establish commercial breweries of their own and readily adapted to the culture of English-style ales and porters.
Founded in 1829, Yuengling isn’t just the oldest existing beer brand in America. It also happens to be the rare example of a German American label that can trace its origins to the first wave of Palatine immigrants, before the second wave of German immigrants arrived in 1848.
There were some exceptions, though, one of which still exists today. Yuengling beer, the long-treasured drink of eastern Pennsylvanians, was started by an ambitious German from the outskirts of Stuttgart named David Gottlob Jüngling. As the son of a relatively successful brewer back in Germany, he came to America better equipped than most of his fellow immigrants to get a brewery off the ground. Following a quickly anglicized name change and some fund-raising, he established the Eagle Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1829, which almost certainly began by producing ale. The name of the brewery would change when his son came on board, and it eventually made the switch to brewing German-style lager. But its place in the region was there to stay, buoyed along by the beer-thirsty laborers who liked to finish their shift back then, as they still do today, with a nice, cold Yuengling.
For the most part, though, the beer early Germans consumed in America was not lager, the preferred drink from back home. Making it properly required an elusive yeast strain, expansive lagering caves, and a steady supply of ice—none of which was readily available to the humble German farmers and small-time brewers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor was there sufficient demand. Most Germans probably weren’t thrilled with the beer options set before them, but what other choice did they have? America at that time was dominated by ale breweries. The diary entry of an immigrant and brewer named George Herancourt from 1830 gives some idea of how many Germans reacted upon arriving in their new country:
In an inn we had 2 or 3 bottles of porter, in America there is not too much good stuff to drink . . . Ale and porter are the best kind of the five sorts they have here . . . I was told that there were 20 breweries in Philadelphia, I went to all of them and could not find work anywhere. Here, you don’t have to be a trained brewer; the main thing is, can you work.
From George’s account, the situation is clear: comparatively mediocre ales and porters dominated the scene, and brewing them was not necessarily considered skilled labor, the way it had been back in Germany. In the Old Country, George would have been part of a highly trained workforce, beholden to a strict set of state-enforced brewing regulations, and able to turn out a wide variety of delicious, expertly crafted lager beers. In Philadelphia, which along with New York was one of the great brew capitals of America at that time, he found his options were limited to a few heavy, murky, often-soured ales, and that his training as a brewer counted for very little. Not exactly Gemütlichkeit, to say the least.
Perhaps the most important beer innovation Germans brought to America was the lagering cellar. This one was dug in Jefferson County, Missouri, in 1859. The beer that cellars like these produced would change the American brewing industry forever.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
But it wasn’t all gloom and doom for George and his ilk. Just ten years later, a Philadelphia brewer named John Wagner, who likely brought over a bottom-fermenting yeast strain from Bavaria, began experimenting with lager beers in the cellar under his house. Five years after that, the brewers Charles C. Wolf and Charles Engel created some of the city’s first true lagering cellars, allowing a community of homesick immigrants to finally savor beer the way they remembered it in the gasthauses and biergartens back home. And just across the Alleghenies, in the relatively unsettled region that would come to be known as the Midwest, there were no limits or boundaries to what an ambitious German brewer might accomplish. Tellingly, George Herancourt eventually gave up on finding a job in Philadelphia and started a new brewery of his own in Cincinnati, Ohio. Fortuitously for him, by the late 1840s the floodgates on German immigration were just beginning to open, sending Teutons by the thousands pouring into America’s new heartland, to establish farms, found cities, and most important for our purposes, build breweries, ushering in a whole new age of American beer. Whiskey and ale were on the wane; German-style lagers were about to blow them both right out of the water.
To understand why so many Germans suddenly decided to leave behind their homeland for America after 1848, it’s crucial to recognize a surprising fact: at this time, they weren’t really Germans. While large European nation-states like France, Spain, and England had long since emerged from the feudal chaos of the Middle Ages, the lands comprising modern Germany were still up to their dirndls in it. There was no single consolidated country, but rather a loose confederation of squabbling, autocratic princedoms and duchies that hadn’t changed much since the early days of the Holy Roman Empire. And the growing urban middle class—bourgeois merchants, independent tradesmen, freethinking intellectuals—found notions of Divine Right antiquated, if not flat-out repugnant. Essentially, the social reality of the German states was outgrowing its political structure. Charlemagne was long gone, but the modern, progressive-minded burghers found themselves obliged to bend a knee to their clueless kings. They were still stuck with tithes and tributes, in an age when democracy and national identity were becoming all the rage.
These “Forty-Eighters,” as they would come to be known, believed in liberal ideals and a common German identity. They wanted a democratic, secular state that incorporated their local affiliation, be it Prussian, Bavarian, Westphalian, or Hessian. The U.S. senator Carl Schurz, who was right in the thick of things back in Germany in the 1840s, would recall: “We young people [believed] that the disintegrated Fatherland must be molded into a united empire with free political institutions. The fermenting, restless spirit permeating the minds of the educated classes, and finding expression in the literature of the day, aroused in us boys the warmest enthusiasm.” Individual rights, democratically elected leaders, universal education—such things may not sound terribly revolutionary in hindsight, but at the time, these ideas were nothing short of a powder keg.
And in February of 1848, that powder keg finally exploded. Spurred on by the general unrest that gripped much of Europe at that time, particularly across the border in France, the disgruntled men and women of the confederated German states began to revolt, rising up against the nobles and monarchs in a show of defiance. Protests were organized, marches ensued, and in some cases, even a few weapons were brandished. The liberal nationalists were making a stand, demanding the creation of a modern German republic.
The monarchs did listen—at least, at first. In March of 1848, they conceded to the creation of an elected parliament in Frankfurt. But whatever celebrations the liberal nationalists felt upon that allowance proved to be short-lived. The Frankfurt Assembly, created from a hodgepodge of competing regional and class-based interests, failed to reach consensus as a governing body. When the ruling monarchs of the German states came around to the fact that the assembly could hardly agree on its own name, let alone unite to meaningfully challenge their authority, they gave one another a round of high fives, dissolved the assembly with the help of some aristocratic friends, and effectively crushed the revolution. Some of its participants were in danger of prosecution for treason, others faced retaliatory discrimination, and all were highly disillusioned with the state of things in old Europe. Suddenly, America began to sound like a very tempting alternative. By 1848, German-born Americans already numbered about half a million, scattered mostly across New York, Pennsylvania, and some of the younger states in the country’s interior. Those German Americans seemed to be doing just fine. All across what would eventually come to comprise a German nation, emigrants began packing their bags by the thousands.
Just how many would come to America? Between 1840 and 1860, over 1,350,000 citizens of German states would arrive in the United States. And because so many of these immigrants were political refugees as opposed to economic ones, they landed on these shores far better equipped than many of their European brethren. They generally had liquid assets and marketable skills from the start. Unlike many other immigrant groups, the Forty-Eighters were already largely middle class upon their arrival, and they fared well in America as a result.
Not that it was all beer and skittles. While some did find comfortable homes in eastern cities—by 1855, only Vienna and Berlin had larger German-speaking populations than New York City—many more encountered the same limited opportunities our old friend Charles Herancourt did upon arriving in Philadelphia back in 1830. Just like him, they kept going west, to a part of the nation’s interior that would come to be known as the German Triangle, with Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis as its vertices. The “Teutonic tide,” one historian dubbed it. In 1833, the German population of St. Louis stood at sixteen families. By 1857, one-quarter of the city’s 161,000 residents was Deutsch in both language and habits. An editorial published in a St. Louis newspaper that same year described the cultural deluge:
A sudden and almost unexpected wave of emigration swept over us, and we found the town inundated with breweries, beer houses, sausage shops, Apollo gardens, Sunday concerts, Swiss cheese and Holland herrings. We found it almost necessary to learn the German language before we could ride in an omnibus, or buy a pair of breeches, and absolutely necessary to drink a beer at a Sunday concert.
This account, which seems to capture quite nicely the mix of wonder and dismay that Anglo-Americans felt upon encountering this sudden burst of foreign immigration, also hints at the social changes the immigrants initiated. First, the Germans drank and entertained on Sundays—a practice the more puritanical, Sabbath-observing Americans had long refrained from. They liked to do so in beer gardens, a Bavarian tradition that had become popular during the prosperity of the early nineteenth century, based on the notion that it was far more pleasant to drink outdoors under linden trees than indoors in a stuffy saloon. Rather than glasses, they much preferred “steins”—the salt-glazed stoneware kept the beer cool, and the flip-top lid kept the bugs and branches out.* Food was also changing, with frankfurters, Hamburg steaks, and pretzels making their first appearances on street corners, German snacks that Americans today take for granted. And most important, there was the beer itself . . . the breweries, the beer gardens, the brew-soaked Gemütlichkeit. A mere decade after the great exodus of 1848, the city of St. Louis could boast close to forty breweries, most of which were German American, churning out more than sixty thousand barrels of lager a year. Germans were transforming the culture of the Midwest, and German beer was playing an inordinately large part.
After having to make do with tepid, murky ales that were unreliable and often sour, Americans across the board welcomed crisp, refreshing lager beer with open arms—although some other aspects of German culture took a little getting used to.
Following the failed revolutions of 1848, and the subsequent tide of German refugees, a new sight began to appear in many midwestern cities: the beer garden—a far cry from the smoky, all-male taverns and saloons that Anglo-Americans were accustomed to.
This is not to say that beer did not exist in the Midwest before the arrival of Germans. It most certainly did. According to some accounts, the Iroquois were brewing a mildly alcohol beverage from the sweet sap of sugar maples long before Mrs. Butterworth came to town. So sacred was the sugar maple, the Iroquois had their own form of thanksgiving ceremony dedicated to it, and they venerated the trees with ceremonial fires and offerings of incense and tobacco.
The motley collection of French fur trappers and traders who settled the region also brewed. It’s easy to forget the Gallic love of beer, given their reputation for viniculture, but it was precious to the French centuries before the arrival of Roman vineyards. Beer never faded in popularity in the monasteries of the north, where Frankish monks would go on to refine the use of hops and facilitate its spread through Germany and the rest of Europe. It was only logical, then, that when French missionaries traveled into the colder, damper parts of the northern Mississippi, they resorted to what they knew how to make best in such places: beer. As one early visitor to French Illinois noted, “Wheat and Indian Corn grow very well . . . their beer is very good.” In Kaskaskia, Jesuits had established a frontier mission by the 1760s that consisted of “two hundred and forty arpents of cultivated land, a very good stock of cattle, and a brewery.” A brewer named François Colman was turning out cold ones for fur trappers and river men in the Missouri settlement of Ste. Genevieve as early as 1779, and Jacques Delassus de St. Vrain was advertising that he had “erected a manufactory and taken into partnership an experienced European brewer” in St. Louis by 1810. His brewery would later change owners, but its genesis was entirely French.
Among them of course were the more traditional Anglo-American and Palatine brewers who came from the East with their ales and porters as well. A Davis Embree was already brewing both in Cincinnati as early as 1810, and even shipping some of his excess downriver to New Orleans. By 1832, a Cleveland newspaper was advertising both ale and table beer, with the local beer trade soon to be dominated by a brewer in the Flats part of town named John M. Hughes, whose “Hughes Ale” would become a local favorite. Detroit followed suit in 1836, when “a single brewery upon the River road” owned by Emerson, Davis & Moore began selling suds, and Chicago beer took off that same year, when the city’s first mayor, William B. Ogden, took over the city’s primary brewery and turned it into what would become one of the largest in “the West.”
With the surge of German immigration in the 1840s and 1850s, all this would change. In fact, the very social and cultural dynamics of an entire region were changing. In 1830, just 5 percent of the population of Cincinnati was German; by 1850, that number had climbed to 27 percent, and a neighborhood called “Over the Rhine” became the city’s German cultural center. In Milwaukee, perhaps the most “German” American city of them all, as many as 1,200 immigrants were arriving weekly in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and by 1859, they made up one-third of the city’s population. With these hopeful immigrants came a host of musical, political, architectural, and culinary traditions, but perhaps most important of all, they brought a distinctive appreciation for lager beer. To them, beer was not a casual by-product of grain farming. It was not a convenient table beverage or a caloric supplement. To the Germans who poured into the nation’s middle, beer was nothing short of a sacrament and an art form. They brought from the towns of Bavaria and the villages of the Rhineland the same appreciation for beer that had guided their forefathers. They wasted no time in replacing the haphazard ale-based brewing culture they found in the Midwest with the more meticulous and artisanal lager traditions they had cultivated back home.
Now, it would be a self-serving exaggeration to say it was beer that brought the Germans to the Midwest—an availability of farmland, a lack of professional competition, and a similarity of landscape and climate all factored into the decision many immigrants made to not stop on the coast, but rather keep plowing west. It would not be hyperbole, though, to state that for a people whose social and cultural life revolved around beer, ease of brewing was certainly a consideration. First, there was the access to grain—the region was well on its way to becoming the buckle in the American grain belt, and in addition to the corn and wheat that fared so well, barley and hops would also thrive, particularly in the cooler north. And thanks to the southward-flowing Mississippi, getting access to grains, especially in a relatively downriver town like St. Louis, was becoming easier by the year. Second, there was the availability of ice. In the days before refrigeration, tremendous quantities of ice were required to keep lager beer cool while it conditioned and prior to serving. Fortunately for brewers, the Great Lakes and their various tributaries were flush with ice, thanks to the region’s severe winters and relatively mild springs.
Last, there was the simple question of space. Founding a lager brewery required a lagering cellar or cave of some kind, where barrels of beer could be stored underground for weeks on end. Put quite simply, people back east were running out of room. Cramped quarters and commercial lager brewing simply did not mix, and problems inevitably ensued—sometimes, with comical results, as in the experience of some very surprised Pennsylvania oil prospectors from 1881:
At a depth of a few hundred feet unexpectedly found what was supposed to be oil; the bailer was run several times and brought up a liquid resembling oil in color, but which was discovered to be beer; it was soon ascertained that the well had been located directly over the storage vault of Grossman’s brewery, and that the drill had penetrated the vault filled with beer; the vault had been dug out of the solid rock and extended back into the hill for over 100 feet, the brewery being on the opposite side of French Creek, at the foot of South Park street.
This passage not only illustrates how much darker German American lager was in the nineteenth century—dark enough to be confused with oil—but also how cramped eastern brewing quarters had become. Lagering demanded subterranean real estate that was hard to come by in urban centers—a problem that the relatively undeveloped towns of the Midwest solved quite nicely. Unlike in the East, where the urban landscape was already cluttered by two centuries of settlement, midwestern states like Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin were still something of an open frontier in the mid-1800s. It was not hard to get the land necessary to build a brewery and dig a lagering cellar, and more than a few of the German newcomers did. By the end of the nineteenth century, the brewing complex of Adolphus Busch would take up a full seventy acres of St. Louis riverfront—a feat that would have been tough to duplicate in downtown New York or Philadelphia.
This isn’t to say these goliath breweries sprang up overnight. The first German American breweries in midwestern cities were comparatively modest affairs. The brewery of Jacob Best, which would grow into the behemoth Pabst Brewing Company, began in Milwaukee in 1844 as a humble one-story structure on Chestnut Street, squirting out a meager three hundred barrels a year. In 1855, long before “Miller Time” was a national call to action, the Milwaukee brewer Friedrich Müller was also only able to supply roughly three hundred barrels from his simple clapboard brewery along the Plank Road. Keep in mind, this was a man who came to America from a prosperous brewing business in Germany with $10,000 in his pocket—not exactly a “poor immigrant” by any stretch. Even the brewery of the Bavarian newcomer August Krug, which would one day become the gargantuan Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, was only able to lager some four hundred barrels of beer its first year, following its founding in 1849. Corporate giants, these early brewing companies were most certainly not.
German immigrants brought more than simple lager—they brought a host of distinctive lager styles, including dark, rich bock beer. A lighter, more refreshing pilsner style would win out in the end, however, and ultimately go on to define American beer for most of the twentieth century.
But ambitious, yes, they were. Call it the American dream. Ever industrious and expanding, the first cohort of lager brewers grew their facilities and their output as quickly as their means allowed. Friedrich Müller didn’t just change his name to Fred Miller upon settling in America—he updated his entire production apparatus, creating an extensive network of lagering cellars, dug by hand and lined with bricks and limestone, which could condition up to fifteen thousand barrels of beer. And by the 1850s, August Krug had finally teamed up with his own ingenious bookkeeper Joseph Schlitz to form the Krug-Schlitz brewery; the original brewhouse was now an entire brewing compound, complete with a central three-and-a-half-story brick headquarters with double chimneys and parapeted end-walls. German American brewers were on the upswing. As more immigrants and settlers came to the region, their consumer base only grew.
But not all their customers were German. The Irish Potato Famine (the potato itself being a transplant from the Americas) sent a million desperate refuges from the shores of Erin between 1842 and 1852, and a sizable number ended up in American cities. Just like the Germans, many stayed on the coast, but the midwestern capitals received a steady stream of Irish immigrants as well, roughly concurrent with the peak years of the German migrations. Also like the Germans, the Irish were a people with a long-standing tradition of beer. Unlike the Germans, though, the conditions of their arrival did not easily dispose them to brewing. Whereas the former had arrived largely as middle-class political refugees with fungible assets and marketable skills, the Irish were predominantly agricultural laborers from the Gaeltachts of the west, running for their lives from the dark specter of starvation. Generally speaking, they came to America with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and in some cases, not even that—a far cry from the ten grand Frederick Miller brought with him on the boat. All of which made it exceedingly difficult to assemble the necessary investments to found a commercial brewery. That didn’t mean that a glass of cold beer was unwelcome, and Irish immigrants were among the first non-Germans in America to readily adapt to lager beer. When Irish immigrants did gain the capital necessary to establish their own taverns and restaurants, they often had locally produced German American lager on tap.
By the 1860s, America had developed a taste for lager, bolstered not only by the German American breweries of the Midwest, but by the rising German populations of East Coast cities as well. The Bowery in New York was famous for its beer gardens, some accommodating “from four hundred to twelve hundred guests.” German social and athletic clubs called Turnverein sprang up not only in cities like Milwaukee and Cincinnati, but in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston as well. As lager breweries began appearing wherever German Americans found a foothold, the older English-style ale breweries fell by the wayside. And just as lager beer had gradually eliminated most of its older ale competition back in Germany, so did it whittle away at its rivals in America as well, for very similar reasons: it was more consistent and stable, it was cheaper to make, and it was generally considered to be crisper and more refreshing. German efficiency and precision had brought a level of quality to American brewing that had been virtually nonexistent before. Tapping a keg of beer was no longer a gamble; you knew you were getting something good. Sour, funky ales and dark, smoky porters were quickly becoming a thing of the past, as Americans came around to the fact that it was indeed “Miller Time” after all.
Between 1840 and 1860, per capita consumption of beer tripled, a feat made possible by an influx of German immigrants and the establishment of their lager breweries. As early as 1856, the New York Times, uneasy at the sudden onslaught of immigrant-owned lager breweries, was already warning the nation that lager beer was “getting a good deal too fashionable,” with contemporary brewing numbers supporting that claim: In 1850, there had been just 431 breweries in the country, brewing roughly 750,000 barrels of beer. Just a decade later, 1,269 American breweries were producing an annual output of well over a million barrels. Ale and porter were still being made, but the majority of those million-plus barrels would have contained crisp and frothy lager made by upstart German American breweries, which were certainly growing, although not yet huge. By 1866, Milwaukee beer makers were selling over 68,000 barrels of lager, compared to a relatively insignificant output of 3,600 barrels of ale—a sign of the times, and of the inevitable demise of the American ale brewery.
Lager beer did still have one rather imposing rival, and that was whiskey—the fruits of Scots-Irish pioneering and all those amber waves of grain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America was essentially a whiskey-drinking nation after all, with the hard stuff being far easier to store and transport in what was still a widely dispersed and predominantly rural country. But German lager would get a most unexpected boost beginning on April 12, 1861, when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, touching off the American Civil War.
The western expansion that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century proved a boon to the many immigrants and disenfranchised easterners who pointed their wagons toward the setting sun. For many other segments of the American populace, however, this “Manifest Destiny” was nothing short of a disaster. Many Native American societies were either displaced from their traditional lands or destroyed entirely through warfare and disease. Hispanic and Creole settlers from what had been Mexico and French Louisiana often lost whatever position and property their own colonial efforts had won them to the fresh wave of incoming Anglos. For the African American slaves who toiled on southern plantations, western expansion, coupled with the invention of the cotton gin, meant that an institution that had been phased out in the rest of the country was to become not only firmly entrenched, but the rallying cause of southern politicians. With the economies and traditions of southern states so thoroughly tied to the plantation economy, encouraging slavery in the new western territories was necessary to ensure an equal balance of pro-slavery states. As long as slave states were added in equal measure to the free, the cruelest of American institutions could not be voted out of existence.
Even during the Civil War—a conflict in which German Americans from the Midwest played a significant role—both sides could agree on a nice, cold beer.
The American Civil War was born of this tragedy, dividing families, splitting allegiances, and cleaving a nation. While many recent immigrants were understandably ambivalent about going to war for a nation they hardly knew, German Americans generally supported the Union and rallied to preserve it. There are obvious geographic reasons for this—there were not nearly as many Germans in the South—but cultural and historical explanations as well. The Forty-Eighters had been ousted from Europe based on their own political desire to create a solid union from a mass of querulous German states, and they were generally progressive and liberal leaning in their ideology. As such, they became a tremendous asset to the federal war effort. German language newspapers, like the Milwaukee Atlas, supported abolitionist causes and demanded to know why “a lighter colored people had the right to rob darker colored people of their human rights.” German American activists lobbied for universal rights and suffrage, declaring as one Carl Schurz did during a speech to Boston Republicans in 1859, that the United States was “the great colony of free humanity, which has not old England alone, but the world, for its mother country.” When it came to practicing what they preached, German Americans by and large did what they could to help abolish slavery and win the war. They put their own sons on the front lines, and they added much-needed funds to government coffers. And although it was certainly unintentional, German lager would benefit from the war as well.
Close to a quarter of all northern troops—half a million men—came from immigrant backgrounds, and of these, more than two hundred thousand were born in Germany. Many midwestern regiments consisted entirely of German Americans, such as the Ninth Ohio, Ninth Wisconsin, and Thirty-Second Indiana. The Turners, a German political organization that lent their name to the Turnverein clubs, worked as Lincoln’s bodyguards at his inauguration in 1861, as the group had proven instrumental in rallying German Americans to vote for Honest Abe. With all those German troops, as one might expect, came a great thirst for German beer. The old one-quart beer ration of the American Revolution was long gone by that point, but beer was still available to the troops. A Harper’s Weekly illustration published during the war shows “The Lager Bier Wagon” trundling through the front lines to supply German soldiers, and one brigadier general even suggested the following tongue-in-cheek plan to get the Yankees out of Missouri: “Burn all the breweries and declare Lager Beer to be a contraband of war. By this means, the [Germans] will all die in a week and the Yankees will then run from the state.” There was more than a grain of truth in this—to go without beer was unthinkable for most Germans, and they went to great lengths to procure it even during the most trying periods of the war.
Predictably, overindulgence, although frowned upon by the discipline-loving German commanders, was not uncommon either, as demonstrated by the many court martial records of German regiments. A Private Frank Kolb of the First Missouri Horse Artillery celebrated Christmas of 1863 by going on a tremendous beer bender and calling his commanding officers “humbuggers and shit asses.” Another private, Jacob Schultz, had at least one beer too many in Paducah, Kentucky, and proceeded to break into a general store and steal a tremendous quantity of envelopes and cigars. A first lieutenant named Louis Hoftsedter became so intoxicated at Jefferson Barracks, he lay on the sidewalk and refused to rise, eventually causing such a row, the king of Bavaria had to send the army a letter on his former subject’s behalf. In one of the most amusing incidents of brew-based shenanigans, another first lieutenant and prison guard named Frederick Klentz released a prisoner without orders from a St. Louis stockade, took that prisoner to Jacob Sched’s beer hall in town, and bought the man multiple rounds of drinks and cigars. All proof that even in the midst of some of the worst battlefield horrors in history, the Germans still made room for a little Gemütlichkeit.
It was the Germans’ fiscal contribution that would secure their place—and their beverage—in mainstream American society. Assembling one of the largest armies the world had ever seen to defeat secessionist rebels was an expensive endeavor. To help cover those sudden costs, Washington turned to the same business that had helped fund the Revolution in 1776 and assisted once again in 1812: booze. On July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed an Internal Revenue Act into effect that required brewers and distillers to pay fifty dollars for a yearly license, a tax of twenty cents per gallon on spirits, and one dollar for every thirty-one-gallon barrel of lager, ale, and porter.
Distillers—many of whom were based in border states—wrung their hands over the sudden increase in taxes. But the emerging class of German brewers, centered largely in the brewing capitals of the Northeast and the rising cities of the Midwest, saw an opportunity. More than a few of them had been involved in the social and political upheavals that had rocked Germany two decades prior, and they recognized that they would need to be organized to help negotiate these precarious times. It was, after all, the inability to cohere that had cost the Forty-Eighters their unified government, and they wouldn’t make this mistake again.
On August 21, 1862, a Forty-Eighter named John R. Katzenmayer, who was a brewer for the firm of A. Schmid & Co. in New York, organized the first meeting of local beer makers. There, they laid the groundwork for a national convention of brewers, and in February of 1863, the first truly national meeting was held, welcoming into the fold the multitude of German brewers from what at the time were considered “western” states. Officially, this new organization—what would become the United States Brewers’ Association (USBA)—existed to “attend to the interests of the General Association of Washington.” Unofficially, their aim was to do everything they could to further the interests of German American brewers and lager beer. Established ale and porter brewers, who at that point still produced a decent portion of the beer Americans consumed, were not invited to early meetings and were only included later as something of a diplomatic afterthought, once the leadership and hierarchy of the organization was firmly established. The conventions were conducted entirely in German, as were all the early publications. German was declared the official language of the brewers’ convention and remained so throughout the 1860s and early 1870s—a fact that still left the Anglo-American brewers of ales and porters largely in the dark as to the subtler points of the organization’s meetings even after they were finally invited.
Thanks to the lobbying efforts of the USBA, not to mention sympathetic midwestern politicians, lager brewers were able to convince Washington that not just beer, but lager beer, was distinct from other, stronger forms of alcohol, more healthful and wholesome, and ought to be taxed at a far lower rate. The dollar-per-barrel tax was decreased to sixty cents, and tariffs were eventually reduced on imported barley—a raw material brewers deemed necessary to augment their own rationed domestic supply during wartime. Lobbyists for the USBA even managed to make the lager that predated the Revenue Act (still conditioning in cellars across the country) exempt from taxation entirely. They explained to the government that it “might have been possible, at some risk and expense, to remove ale and porter brewed prior to September 1, 1862, yet it was utterly impossible to remove lager beer prior to that date without destroying the article,” meaning, of course, lager beer. Lager brewers eventually received a full refund on any taxes they had paid on existing lager beer, while the ale and porter brewers remained on the sidelines, scratching their heads and emptying their pockets. Such a feat of political savvy may seem incredible, but the USBA was adept at demonstrating to politicians the vast amounts of treasure the breweries could provide—assuming they were given the exemptions they needed to thrive. Ultimately, the relationship benefited the government and German brewers alike. Whiskey distillers and ale brewers, who were generally less organized and reluctant to employ expensive lobbying tactics, were essentially left out of the agreement, while the lager brewers knocked back one more drink with Uncle Sam. The lager industry did contribute tremendous sums to the government’s war chest, but they did so in a way that proved mutually beneficial to brewers and politicians alike. In exchange for their assistance with the war effort, they found themselves in a unique position. Suddenly, lager beer was no longer an ethnic peculiarity but a force to be reckoned with. A spokesman for the lager brewers, writing with all the acuity of hindsight some thirty years after the war, would state the following:
Between 1842 and 1863 brewing had developed so rapidly and became so firmly established that it could, doubtless, have held its own ground successfully, even without discriminating legislation; but, on the other hand, it is quite certain that without such legislation it would never have become a national beverage, nor would its progress during the past thirty-five years have been what it actually is. Hence, the introduction of the internal-revenue system really proved a blessing to the trade, not only on this account, but also because it called into existence the United States Brewer’s Association.
The North won the war, and the lager brewers won their own place at the American beverage table. The head of the table, as a matter of fact. By the time Robert E. Lee finally laid down his saber on April 9, 1865, America was well on its way to becoming a lager-drinking country, and the handful of ale and porter brewers that remained were destined not to last. A few ale brewers would survive the wartime and postwar industry cull—Newark’s famous Ballantine Ale, established way back in 1840, is one such malty coelacanth. But generally speaking, the days of the original Anglo-American ales and porters were over. A tradition that went back to the first seasick Pilgrims who set foot on Plymouth Rock, and that was carried on through the tankards of minutemen and the brimming cups of founding fathers, was destined to be supplanted by a clearer, crisper, more effervescent, and in many cases, more artfully made class of beer. The age of the American lager had begun.
What an age it was. Following an awkward adolescence and the rebellious period of the Civil War, the United States experienced one heck of a growth spurt. In a few decades, America transformed from a relatively inconsequential global bystander into a heavily urbanized, industrial goliath. Between 1850 and 1900, the population of the United States more than tripled, from twenty-three million to seventy-six million. In 1850, a mere 15 percent of people lived in cities; by the century’s end, that number was closer to half. In roughly the same time span, petroleum production leaped from less than a million tons to nearly fifty million, and crude steel output went from practically nil to over ten million tons. Immigrants were pouring in as well, attracted by the economic opportunities that all that industry offered. American cities teemed with Germans, Irishmen, Italians, Slavs, and Jews, all looking for labor, all eager to contribute. Much of this thunderous growth took place in the burgeoning capitals of the American Middle West. Midwestern cities were growing to rival the traditional metropolises of the East, and in some instances, even surpassed them. In the 1850 census, of the ten largest American cities, only two were in what is today considered the Midwest—Cincinnati and St. Louis. By the dawn of the twentieth century, half of the ten largest cities would be found in the Midwest, with Chicago second only to New York in total population.
The brewing industry flourished as well. At the end of Civil War, America’s entire brewing infrastructure was struggling to turn out a mere three million barrels. By 1900, that number had reached nearly forty million barrels. The increase in per capita consumption was drastic, growing among drinking-age adults from less than six gallons a year, to nearly twenty gallons—a number similar to what Americans on average drink today. In 1850, the brewing industry’s total capital was along the lines of four million dollars; in just fifty years, it grew 100-fold. Barley production jumped from around 5 million bushels to almost 180 million bushels in roughly that same time period, and hops went from a measly 6,000 bales in 1840, to over 225,500 bales by the year 1900.
The locus of brewing shifted away from the East. On an individual state basis, New York still led the pack at the close of the century, with powerful brewers like George Ehret churning out the suds—his brewery was the nation’s largest in 1877—but the gap was narrowing. St. Louis and Milwaukee both had consolidated breweries that could compete with even the largest on the East Coast, some of which were capable, by the first decade of the twentieth century, of producing over a million gallons a year. This put them up not only with the largest breweries in the country, but the world. And whereas the first conventions of the United States Brewers’ Association had been held in New York and Philadelphia, those that followed after the war would reflect the westward shift of American brewing: St. Louis in 1866, Chicago in 1867, and Cleveland in 1873. By the early 1900s, it wasn’t even a question—the USBA was a midwestern organization.
Apart from tax breaks, what drove this midwestern beer revolution? In part, it was the general prosperity that gilded the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and the influx of cheap labor and materials that poured into the region. But we’d be neglectful not to raise our steins to the brewers themselves, and to their accumulated wisdom from centuries of German brewing. In the old German brewing industry, consolidated, state-sanctioned breweries were fiercely competitive, but united as a group when necessary to protect the industry as a whole. While these brewers understood the importance of tradition, they also appreciated the necessity of innovation. Just as their Bavarian and Rhenish forbearers had embraced new yeasts, new brewing techniques, and novel technologies in the centuries prior, the brewers of the Midwest readily adapted—and adopted—when it proved advantageous.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, they made significant changes to the actual character and quality of the beer itself. Most German American brews of that era, even relatively crisp lagers, were significantly darker and richer than the mass-produced lagers of today—more like the bocks and Märzens of the Old Country, and much less like a watery light beer. But in a hardworking, industrializing nation, there was an appetite then, just as there is now, for lighter, more refreshing beers, something to quench the thirst after a long day at the mill. As a result, the breweries of the Midwest were trailblazers in creating what would eventually evolve into the iconic American pale lager. This was possible in part due to advancements in kilning technology that had occurred just prior to the Civil War. The indirect heat kiln enabled malts to be roasted without direct contact with the heat source, and the strong, smoky, slaggy flavors of yore were largely eliminated, to be replaced by the subtler, lighter flavors inherent in the malted grain. Controlling temperature also became an exact science—suddenly it was possible to produce far lighter, more enzyme-rich malts, which in turn produced paler, crisper lagers. These advancements had helped to popularize pale, crisp Bohemian-style pilsners all across Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was a trend that German immigrant brewers would eventually bring to America as well, as soon as they had accumulated the resources to establish malting kilns of their own.
With American beer becoming lighter and more carbonated in the decades that followed the Civil War, the idea of “coldness” was sold along with it. Beer was increasingly sought after as a source of refreshment by what was, by the late nineteenth century, a hardworking and industrialized nation.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
To augment that softness and drinkability even further, midwestern brewers also began to supplement their mash bills with grains other than barley, turning several hundred years of Rheinheitsgebot hegemony right on its head. The North American variety of six-row barley commonly used in American malts had a higher enzyme concentration than German two-row barley, which made it easier to throw other adjunct grains into the mix. The adjuncts’ primary virtue was price—corn, wheat, and rice from America’s widespread grain farms were generally cheaper than fickle northern barley—but they also made for beers with gentler flavor profiles and paler hues than barley malt alone. Budweiser and Schlitz both were early adopters of rice in their grain bills, and corn, the original American grain, would become a crucial ingredient in many midwestern lagers, including Miller and Pabst.
The quest for a milder, more drinkable beer was only furthered by a steady decline in alcohol content and hop usage across the industry. Improvements in transport and temperature control—both of which will be covered in short order—made spoilage less of a concern, meaning that the preservative properties of alcohol and hops, which had defined American beer since the beginning, became ancillary in much of the country. A general movement toward lighter, crisper beers that began with the first Bavarian lager innovations of the sixteenth century would be continued and perfected in the American Midwest throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as German American brewers adapted the robust bocks and flavorful pilsners of the Old Country to be drinkable and salable in the New. Paler malts, softer grains, subtler hops, and lower gravities all resulted in an entirely new style of beer, one that was largely German in heritage, but distinctly American in its personality.
The painting Custer’s Last Fight, pitching the Budweiser brand beneath, became one of the American beer industry’s first truly national ad campaigns. The painting appeared in taverns and saloons all over the country.
With a crisp, refreshing product to sell to all those hardworking Americans, brewers also changed the way it was sold. In 1896, long before Spuds MacKenzie or the Bud Bowl took America by storm, Anheuser-Busch launched an early version of an ad campaign by buying the rights to the Cassilly Adams painting Custer’s Last Fight. Once the rights were procured, the brewery commissioned another artist to paint a smaller, modified version, which featured even more violence and faux gallantry than the original, printed the Anheuser-Busch name across the bottom, and distributed some 150,000 copies of it to every tavern and saloon that sold its signature Budweiser beer. This highly romanticized version of the Battle of Little Bighorn played up to contemporary notions of western expansion, caught the public’s attention, and helped spread awareness of the beer, all at the same time. The campaign proved so successful that fifty years later, an estimated one million copies had been printed, and the picture had become, according to one historian, “viewed by a greater number of the lower-browed members of society—and by fewer art critics—than any other picture in American history.” Other brands followed Budweiser’s example, and the modern era of beer marketing was born. Breweries began owning and sponsoring beer halls and saloons, with the agreement, not entirely unlike that of the old court-licensed beer halls of Bavaria, that only their beer was to be sold to customers. Suddenly, logos and slogans were everywhere, on posters, ashtrays, beer mugs, and pool tables. For the first time, large midwestern breweries were becoming household names.
As profits rose, workers wanted their share. German Americans not only owned and managed many of the Midwest’s breweries, but they also tended to its mash tuns, checked up on its brew kettles, put the finished beer into barrels, and transported it to distribution centers. The same liberal spirit of progressive politics and social organization that had bound the Forty-Eighters in a common cause one generation prior made the brewing industry an early example of organized labor in a part of the country that would become famous for it. When steel mills were just getting off the ground, and automobiles not yet a glimmer in Henry Ford’s eye, the workers at German breweries were forming industrial unions to protect their rights. According to one report, there were some 2,347 workmen employed by breweries in 1850. By 1880, that number stood at 26,220, more than a tenfold increase. The rapid expansion that the brewing industry had experienced, and hoped to continue experiencing, was contingent on their involvement. Consequently, workers demanded to be compensated fairly. The very earliest attempts at organized labor can be found as far back as the 1850s, when German workers began forming trade associations and mutual aid societies in St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the latter city, workers would form the Brauer Gesellen Union in 1879, lobbying for and eventually winning through boycotts a reduction of the workday and increase in the minimum wage. In 1886, brewery workers formed the National Union of United Brewery Workmen, an almost exclusively German American alliance that held considerable sway in the Midwest for close to a century, until it merged with its longtime rival, the Teamsters Union, in 1973. Happy workers produce good beer, and breweries were generally able to expand their production without the ugly growing pains seen in other, more exploitative industries like coal or steel.
It would be technology, though, that would ultimately pave the way for the massive growth of the midwestern breweries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the decades following the Civil War, the United States experienced a burst of scientific innovation; entire industries were revolutionized, as steam power, electricity, and a host of other new technologies enabled what had essentially been cottage industries to become large-scale, commercial endeavors capable of mass production. Just as their predecessors in Germany had readily adopted microscopes and thermometers, so too did German American brewers incorporate the latest inventions of their day into their brewing regimen. In 1876, the Frenchman Louis Pasteur published Etudes sur la Bière, which demonstrated a heating technique for producing beer devoid of contamination. By rapidly bringing the finished liquid to a temperature just below boiling, the process made it possible to store beer for far longer periods of time. When paired with new techniques for filtration and forced carbonation, the result was shelf-stable beer that could be sold crisper, cleaner, and more bubbly than ever. For years, brewers had depended on the technique of kräusening to add a champagnelike kick to their beer. It did work, but it also relied on the late addition of active—and unreliable—yeast into a fermented brew. With pasteurization, carbonation, and filtration available, suddenly that old Bavarian trick was no longer the only way to get a foamy head on the top of a crystal-clear lager. For better or for worse, the days of volatile, hoppy, sediment-heavy beers were numbered in America. Once again, German American brewers were using the latest techniques to produce a more stable, more clarified, and more drinkable beer—something those who appreciated the complex flavor profiles of traditional lagers surely lamented, but many more celebrated with a lively Prost. Pasteurized beer wasn’t a “living” thing filled with active yeasts and the occasional bacterium, but a nearly sterile and static product with an extended shelf life.
It didn’t stop there. This new, even paler variety of American lager was soon to be served in a whole new way, as improved bottle-making technologies meant that beer no longer had to be transported primarily by the barrel. What had once been a laborious process of blowing and molding had become by the end of the 1800s a far more efficient, mechanized affair. In 1898, the American Owens machine was able to produce a mind-boggling twenty-five hundred glass bottles in an hour—bottles that could readily be filled with a pasteurized, freshly carbonated lager capable of sitting in groceries and taverns for weeks on end.
Basic mechanization, made possible through advancements in steam power, would also do its part in taking an industry whose methods had changed little since the Middle Ages fully into the modern era. Steam engines capable of continuous rotary motion had been known to science since the late eighteenth century; but in the late nineteenth century, industrialists came to recognize their full potential, and German American brewers were certainly no exception. Even as early as 1865, with the nation still reeling from the Civil War, breweries were using steam to render their process more efficient and productive. Steam not only processed grains and moved product—it provided a controlled heat source to boil the wort. The sheer efficacy of this new technology is explained in the following account, regarding a German American brewery from that era:
The engine is sixteen horse power. It can, at the same time, grind the malt, sift it, throw it into the mash tub, let in boiling water that it has made to boil, stir up the malt and water, draw it off, pump it up stairs and throw it into the kettle, heat the kettle of liquid until it boils, throw it out into the coolers, cool it, force and carry it off into vats, ferment it, chafe it, and draw it off beer. With a little practice the engine could be taught to drink beer.
The steam engine vastly transformed an industry that for hundreds of years had been reliant solely on manpower; steam power made mass production possible, in the brewing industry and many others as well.
Two other recent inventions played perhaps the largest roles, changing what had been a locally consumed product into a national beverage: refrigeration and rail transportation. The first was made possible by improvements in compression-based cooling technology just after the Civil War. The second came to pass when developments in steam power met the catalyst of western expansion. Both would combine to alter the beer industry forever.
As early as 1860, breweries were using an early artificial ether compression refrigeration system made by Jacob Perkins to cool their product. More refined designs followed, and by the late 1870s, the trade publication The Western Brewer was already forecasting a revolution in refrigeration was in the making, with ice machines quickly to replace the lagering cellars and natural icehouses that had come before. By 1891, this prediction had proven quite astute, and the same publication announced, “almost every well appointed brewery is refrigerated by machinery, and nobody thinks of questioning their value.” German Americans with names like Krausch and Jungenfeld led the field in the development of refrigeration systems and sold them to breweries across the Midwest. Aboveground stock houses became a standard feature of larger breweries, and for the first time, thanks to refrigeration and ice production, brewing lager beer was no longer a seasonal activity, or reliant on environmental ice. With artificial refrigeration, proper temperatures for the production and conditioning of lager beer could be regulated all year round. Suddenly, there was no limit to how much beer an ambitious brewery could turn out, and thanks to pasteurization for bottles and refrigerated storage for barrels, there was also suddenly no rush to sell it.
Distributing it was still a challenge. But it was a challenge that America’s emerging rail system would quickly overcome. In truth, functioning steam-engine locomotives had existed since the early nineteenth century. It would not be until after the Civil War, though, during the subsequent industrial boom, that a national railway system would blossom. In 1865, the network of rails in America extended a mere 35,000 miles; by 1870, it had swelled to 53,000. In 1880, roughly 93,000 miles of track were available for shipping, while by 1890, this number had reached 164,000 miles. With all that expansion came a vertiginous drop in shipping costs. In just a few decades, shipping by rail had gone from an expensive and inconvenient way to get goods across the country, to the only way. All that freshly laid track didn’t just open up new portions of the American frontier—it meant goods could travel quickly and cheaply to almost anywhere in the country. Including, as it were, lager beer. The arrival of refrigerated railcars and track-side stock houses suddenly meant there was practically no part of America that was beyond the reach of the larger breweries. New markets were opening up, and local midwestern labels were well on their way to becoming national brands.
The impact of refrigerated railway cars cannot be overstated. They fundamentally changed the brewing and selling of beer. For those who incorporated the new technology, there were untold riches waiting. For those who dawdled or hung their hats on tradition, well, they usually didn’t fare so well. As one might expect, the nimble breweries of the Midwest generally fell into the first category. Take Anheuser-Busch, for example. In 1877, the St. Louis brewery produced just 44,961 barrels of beer—it didn’t even make it on the top twenty list when it came to American breweries. In the decades that followed, though, the company not only adopted the use of cutting-edge refrigerated train cars, it actually began manufacturing its own. By 1895, it had become the second-largest brewery in America, and in 1901, it was right up there at the top of the list with Pabst and Schlitz, coming out at a whopping one million barrels. Now, compare that to the New York–based Hell Gate Brewery of George Ehret. In 1877, it was the largest producer of beer in the country, putting out 138,449 barrels of beer to thirsty New Yorkers. But Ehret generally eschewed refrigerated railcars, opting instead to stay local. As a result, his brewery had dropped to fourth place by 1895, soon to be surpassed by Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz—all of which were located in the Midwest, and utilized artificial refrigeration and national rail distribution to its fullest potential. With beer now being made year round, and for the first time sold to a truly national market, the future for midwestern beer was boundless. The big breweries had nowhere to go but up. On the eve of the twentieth century, they found themselves quenching the thirst of an entire country: beer had once again become the American drink. Not too shabby for a scrappy bunch of German refugees who had come to America a half century before, filled to the brim with hops and dreams.
And they proceeded to do exactly what those with sudden success and riches are told never to do; they let it all go straight to their heads. That first cohort of German American brewers came from a tradition of Rhenish dukes and Bavarian princes using breweries as private piggy banks, so it should come as no great shock that when the bucks really started coming in, they shifted away from the values of the Forty-Eighters and reinvented themselves instead as true beer barons. As the new monarchs of the Middle West, they engaged in acts of ostentation that would put the rest of the Gilded Age crowd to shame.
Take the Prussian-born Frederick Pabst, for example. When the twenty-eight-year-old waiter and part-time steamer pilot purchased a half interest in his father-in-law’s failing Milwaukee brewery in 1864, he was hardly what one might consider a captain of industry. By the 1880s, however, he was captaining one of the largest breweries in the country, and spending his vast fortune as boastfully and profligately as one might expect. In 1889, he had created his own Pabst beach resort in Whitefish Bay, capable of entertaining as many as ten thousand visitors in a single day. To compete with his rivals, he turned the traditional German beer garden into a rollicking, oompahing spectacle, installing carnival rides, Ferris wheels, concession stands—in effect, creating one of the first truly American mega-amusement parks, all built on beer. His follow-up, Milwaukee’s Pabst Park, would complete the transformation from beer garden to amusement park by featuring a roller coaster with fifteen thousand feet of track and a gigantic “Katzenjammer palace” funhouse. As for his famous blue ribbon insignia, the beer never actually won such a prize at any festival; old Fred liked to place a blue ribbon around his “Best Beer”—named, in fact, after his father-in-law, Phillip Best—and let those in attendance draw conclusions for themselves. In 1892, the company bought nearly one million feet of silk ribbon, which Frederick required workers to hand-tie around every bottle of his Best Select. With his vast brewing fortune, he would even go on to buy a German opera house and a stock farm for raising Percheron horses. When he died in 1904, he had the largest brewery in America to his name and had become the wealthiest man in Wisconsin.
Built in 1891, the Pabst Building was Milwaukee’s first skyscraper, and a visual representation of the power that the city’s German American brewers commanded.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Not one to be outdone, Joseph Schlitz was Frederick Pabst’s top rival and archnemesis. From his humble beginnings as a brewer’s bookkeeper, Joseph eventually took control of his employer’s brewery, married the former owner’s widow, and became powerful enough to trade punches with the most prominent brewers in the city of Milwaukee. He transformed a little brewery that had once struggled to turn out 150 barrels in a single year into a sprawling industrial complex that spanned eight city blocks. Always the shrewd marketer, Joseph rarely failed to capitalize on world events to promote his famous Milwaukee beer. After the Great Chicago Fire—which destroyed much of the city’s brewing infrastructure—he supplied the whole town with free suds, making sure they remembered where that beer was coming from: the Schlitz slogan, “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous,” would eventually be adopted to capitalize on that act of goodwill. Sadly, Joseph’s career at the helm of the brewery was cut short—he died in a shipwreck in 1875 at the age of forty-three—but his bold legacy would live on in the decades that followed. To make sure Pabst knew his amusement parks weren’t the only ride in town, Joseph’s successors created Schlitz Park, complete with a bowling alley and the novelty of “electric lights,” as well as the elegant Schlitz Palm Garden, right beside the Schlitz Hotel. When Commodore Dewey and his men captured Manila during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Schlitz brewery sent thousands of celebratory bottles to the victorious sailors; disapproving temperance societies were told that beer could help stave off the effects of malaria. While Joseph would not live to see it, his brewery would surpass his old archrival Pabst in 1902 with a total output of over one million barrels, making Schlitz the biggest beer brand in Milwaukee, the United States, and, yes, even the world.
Expanded facilities and a thriving distribution network helped Schlitz beer spread well beyond its home in Milwaukee. But for local deliveries, they still used horses.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
One of the most visible symbols of beer baron extravagance was the Schlitz Palm Garden in Milwaukee. Though ostensibly a beer garden, it had little in common with the humble lager patios the first German immigrants had frequented.
As the head of what was to become America’s most powerful beer dynasty, Adolphus Busch cultivated a personality that was larger than life—a curious amalgamation of a German nobleman and an American tycoon.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Without a doubt, however, the most grandiose, the most truly baronial of all the midwestern beer barons was the always oversized, always outspoken scion of St. Louis brewing, Adolphus Busch. As a pioneer in both pasteurization and refrigerated distribution, the immigrant from Kastel, Germany, had grown his own father-in-law’s brewery into a national giant by the time he was in his thirties. With all that success came tremendous amounts of both fame and fortune, and with a personal income estimated at two million dollars a year—an almost unthinkable amount of wealth at a time when average annual salaries were still in the hundreds—Adolphus could afford a little extravagance. He dressed to the nines in richly tailored European finery, and he sported a lavish goatee attended to by his personal manservant and barber. Indeed, so regal was his bearing, even William Howard Taft referred to him as “Prince Adolphus.” He built mansions in St. Louis, Pasadena, Cooperstown, and even back in old Germany, on the banks of the Rhine. When he built his palatial estate in Pasadena, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie took note, eventually resulting in the city’s “Millionaires’ Row,” as other industrial titans followed his lead and built houses nearby. The opulence didn’t end, though, when Adolphus walked out the door. Thanks to a private railcar capable of pulling right up to his mansion at 1 Busch Place, actually named The Adolphus, he could travel the country in unimpeded luxury and inimitable style. Everywhere he went, he championed the cause of his Budweiser beer.
The winter residence of Adolphus Busch, in Pasadena, California. Not bad for an immigrant from a little town on the Rhine. Toward the end of his life, the beer baron did engage in philanthropy and donated a considerable portion of his wealth to charitable causes.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
In just a few decades, Anheuser-Busch went from a relatively small local brewery in St. Louis to the largest producer of beer in the country, opening satellite breweries and shipping its product to towns and cities across America.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
The grand ambitions of the midwestern beer barons, when coupled with the developments in distribution and marketing that were transforming the industry, would eventually allow the unthinkable to occur: the unseating of Germany as the world capital of beer. In 1911, the United States actually knocked the Vaterland out of its top position, becoming the largest beer-producing country in the world with a grand total of sixty-three million barrels. To state it simply, America had changed. In half a century, the nation transformed from a whiskey-drenched backwater of small-time farmers to an industrialized, beer-chugging colossus. It had evolved from a former English colony with a handful of ale breweries to a truly distinct nation populated by a host of diverse ethnic groups that liked their lager pale, crisp, and carbonated. And the industry, not to mention its consumer base, only seemed to be growing. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, as it turned out, quite a bit. Not everyone in America was keen on seeing immigrants rise in the ranks, and not all who watched this demographic shift celebrated it with a swinging stein. The slight shock many Anglo-Americans felt upon first encountering Sunday drinking and beery good times in the mid-nineteenth century had fermented by the beginning of the twentieth into flat-out resentment. The sight of German beer barons flaunting their wealth certainly didn’t help, but the sinking of the Lusitania by German torpedoes in 1915 sealed the deal. Whatever traces of goodwill toward the German American beer industry that remained after World War I were quickly rendered moot by the passing of the Volstead Act. In one of our nation’s most shocking bouts of reactionary politics, alcoholic beverages, not to mention the German beer halls, Irish taverns, and Italian wine shops where they were served, were made illegal on January 17, 1920. Overnight, beer went from being a mildly intoxicating staple to a controlled substance that could land you in jail. Prohibition had begun.
Granted, it wouldn’t totally ruin the industry. A handful of breweries were able to weather the thirteen-year storm by producing soft drinks and malted products, and they would emerge bigger and more consolidated than ever before. American beer would never quite be the same, though. In an effort to turn a profit as quickly as possible after all those years of crippling prohibition, an even paler, more watery product would be developed and mass-produced, to be served up in cans across the country. While it may have helped quench the thirst of a weary worker during the Great Depression, a parched G.I. in the midst of World War II, and even a few hungover coeds on MTV Spring Break, the final product bore only a passing resemblance to the rich and hoppy lagers that German immigrants had first brought to this country.
Although, when you’re sitting here in the Cleveland Hofbräuhaus, sipping on a tall Maß of dunkel while Frank Ziwich & His International Sound Machine prepare for a second set, you can still get a taste of all that was lost.
Something pretty damn delicious.
Take it away, Frank.