Breweries

American brewing before Prohibition was a German industry conducted in English, and the numbers were extraordinary. The peak came in 1873 with 4,131 breweries operating in the United States — nearly every town of any size had one, because beer did not travel well and had to be made close to where it was drunk.

Lager is what changed the business. English-style ale ferments warm and quickly; lager ferments cold and needs months of storage near freezing. German brewers arriving in the 1840s and 1850s brought the method and then had to solve the storage, which they did by digging caves and packing them with lake ice cut in winter. Whole hillsides in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Pottsville are tunneled underneath for that reason. Mechanical refrigeration in the 1880s made it possible to brew lager anywhere, and pasteurization and rail refrigeration made it possible to ship it, which is what allowed a handful of firms to go national.

The great brewery lithographs belong to this period and they were advertising. A brewer commissioned a bird’s-eye view of the entire plant — every building, the stacks smoking, the yard full of wagons, rail cars on the siding, sometimes at an angle no vantage point could actually provide — and gave framed copies to the saloons that carried his beer. They are part architectural record and part boast, and they should be read with that in mind. The buildings are usually accurate. The bustle is not.

The tied house arrangement is why the saloons appear in the photographs at all. A brewery would furnish a saloon, supply its fixtures and its sign, and in exchange the place sold only that brewery’s beer. Photographs of a bar with one name on every surface are documenting a contract.

Prohibition arrived in January 1920 and the industry vanished. What survivors did to stay alive is the interesting part. Some made near beer, which required brewing real beer and then removing the alcohol. Anheuser-Busch made ice cream, baker’s yeast, truck bodies and corn syrup. Yuengling opened a dairy. Coors made ceramics. A great many simply sold malt syrup, which was marketed for baking and was bought overwhelmingly by people making beer at home, a fact everyone involved understood perfectly well.

Repeal came in 1933 and about seven hundred and fifty breweries reopened, a fraction of what had existed. Consolidation did the rest through the following decades.

Beer gardens are the other subject that comes with this one. German brewers built large outdoor gardens with tables, bandstands and family seating, deliberately positioned as respectable places where a man could bring his wife and children on a Sunday. That was a direct argument against the temperance case, and it was fought over in city after city through the ordinances governing Sunday sales.

For anyone working with this material, the wagons are worth attention. Draft teams delivering kegs were a brewery’s most visible advertising, the horses were matched and groomed to be looked at, and photographs of them are as much about the company’s reputation as about transport.

Seven Masts Was One Too Many