Tag Archives: Pabst Brewing Company

History

Signs of the Times

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My wife and I visit Cincinnati, OH several times throughout the year. Our oldest daughter lives there, so we take every opportunity we can to spend time with her. Plus, we both really like Cincinnati. It is an interesting and vibrant city. For me, it holds some special memories. It was the first large American city I ever visited. I arrived in the United States in 1985, to attend graduate school at Miami University in Oxford, OH. To get from Oxford to Cincinnati is about a fifty minute drive, so it became a favorite destination during my two years at Miami.

Every time my wife and I visit Cincinnati it is usually for a couple of days, which gives us enough time to visit a museum or park or some other attraction that we had never visited before. On our most recent trip, we made a visit to the American Sign Museum (AMS). According to its website, the AMS is the “largest public museum dedicated to signs in the United States”. The 20,000 square feet museum has over two hundred items on display, the vast majority of which are neon signs. The signs date from the late nineteenth century up thru the 1970s. As you might imagine the signs for a plethora of businesses and products – drugs, paint, gasoline, restaurants, bars etc. Some of the signs catch the eye more than others. A 1963 McDonald’s sign is particularly eye-catching. It features Speedee, a character who was eventually phased out in favor of Ronald McDonald. Another classic piece of Americana on display at the AMS is a Big Boy statue, which dates from the 1960s.

The McDonald’s sign on display at the American Sign Museum
A 1960s era Big Boy statue

Not surprisingly, there are also a number of beer signs. So I thought I’d use the remainder of this blog entry to look at some of the brewery/beer signs and tell the story behind them.

  • Sunshine Beer: Sunshine Beer was one of the beers brewed by the Sunshine Brewing Company of Reading, PA. The brewery, opened in 1880, was owned by Peter Barbey & Son. Colloquially, the beer was known as Sunny. Some old television commercials advertising Sunny can be viewed here. Sunshine Brewery closed in 1968 and the building was demolished during the 1970s. A video of the brewery being demolished can be found here.
  • Kaier’s Beer: Kaier’s Beer was brewed by the Chas. D. Kaier Brewery of Mahanoy City, PA. Kaier was a German immigrant, arriving in the United States at the age of nineteen in 1857. He opened the brewery opened in 1880. Kaier was quite the entrepreneur. In addition to the brewery, he owned forty taverns, an ice company, an opera house, a hotel, and a host of other business in Mahanoy City. During Prohibition, the brewery remained operational by producing both legal (no greater than 0.5% alcohol by weight) and illegal beer (3.2% alcohol by weight). The illegal beer was transferred by a pipeline down the Mahanoy Creek to a barn on the city’s Vine Street where it was put into kegs. The brewery had ‘spotters’ stationed on all roads leading into Mahanoy, who would inform the brewery when Federal agents entered town. Keg filling operations were then temporarily suspended. By 1951, Kaier’s was one of the largest breweries in Pennsylvania, producing 183,500 barrels of beer. In 1966, the brewery was sold to Henry F. Ortlieb Brewing Co. of Philadelphia, who closed the brewery in 1968.
  • Seitz Beer and Ale: Seitz was a brewery in Easton, PA. Opened by Frederick Seitz in 1821, it was the town’s first brewery. At its peak in 1933, the brewery employed seventy people and produced 70,000 barrels of beer. In 1874 Seitz built a bottling plant, allowing the brewery to become the first brewery in Pennsylvania to sell beer in bottles. To keep the doors open during Prohibition, Seitz produced a non-alcoholic brew called ‘cereal beverage’. At the same time, Seitz was pumping beer by a hose under the Delaware River to neighboring New Jersey. New Jersey had not ratified the eighteenth amendment banning alcohol. As a result the Federal ban on alcohol was not as severely enforced in the state. Similar to the Kaier Brewery in Pennsylvania, Seitz were tipped off when Federal agents were about to show up. Seitz eventually closed for business in 1938.
  • Broadway Brewery: Broadway Brewery started out its life as San Francisco Brewery in 1853. The founder and owner, Jacob Frederick Sprecht, was a German immigrant. By 1862, the brewery was under new ownership and was renamed Broadway Brewery. The name reflected the brewery’s location on Broadway Street. In 1893 the brewery was destroyed by a fire. By August of that year a new brewery had been built and was up and running. Although the name was retained, the new brewery was located on 19th Street. By 1899, the brewery was producing twenty thousand barrels annually. It had fifteen employees and eight horse-drawn beer wagons, which delivered beer to San Francisco saloons. On January 17, 1917, the Broadway Brewery became part of the California Brewing Association (CBA). CBA was a co-operative designed to give member breweries greater buyer and selling power. By the end of the year, however, the Broadway Brewery was closed.
  • Ballantine Beer: Ballantine Beer was brewed by P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company, founded in Newark, NJ in 1840. Its founder, Peter Ballantine, was a Scottish immigrant. At its peak, during the 1940s and 1950s, it was the third largest brewing company in the United States. Its popularity during this period was helped by the fact that Ballantine was the first television sponsor of the New York Yankees. Starting in the mid-1960s, due to competitive pressure, Ballantine entered into a period of decline, from which they would not recover. In 1972, Falstaff Brewing Corporation purchased Ballantine. The new owners closed the Ballantine brewery in Newark, choosing to brew Ballantine’s various beers elsewhere. In 1985 Falstaff was purchased by the Pabst Brewing Company. Over time Falstaff and Pabst modified the recipes of the various Ballantine beers. A number of Ballantine beers are brewed today, including the Ballantine IPA. The Ballantine neon sign on display at the American Sign Museum is in its original crate. As the label on the top right hand corner of the crate indicates, the sign was manufactured by Adversigns Inc. of Berwick, PA in the 1950s, and was shipped to the Penn-Sheraton Hotel (now the Omni William Penn Hotel) in Pittsburgh, PA
Sign at the American Sign Museum explaining the history of the Ballantine beer sign

These are just some of the beers signs on display at the American Sign Museum. There are others, of course, including signs for Heilman’s Old Style Lager, Hudepohl Beer, and Schoenling Beer. These signs are an important piece of American brewing history. It is great to see that they have survived the decades and, thanks to the American Sign Museum, are here for the general public to enjoy.

History, Ohio, Toledo

Toledo History and Hops

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The tour started at Maumee Bay Brewing Company

Last month, I went on a tour organized by the the Toledo History Museum. The tour was titled “History & Hops Brewery Tour”, and combined some general Toledo urban history with the history of the brewing industry in the city. The two-hour tour started at Toledo’s oldest and largest modern-day craft brewery, Maumee Bay Brewing Company (established 1995; white star on map below). Gathered outside of the brewery as we waited on the bus to start our tour, I counted about twenty fellow tour participants.

Our tour guide was Tedd Long, Vice President of the Toledo History Museum. Tedd provided commentary for the tour, which he supplemented with short video clips. Tedd started off by noting the historical importance of the brewing industry in Toledo. Indeed, from the early to mid-1800s up until the early twentieth century it was one of the leading industries in the city. If I heard Tedd correctly, there were fourteen breweries in the city of Toledo in 1900.

Map of Toledo Breweries That Existed at Some Point Between 1838 and 1972. Source: Maumee Bay Brewing Company

We made a number of stops along the tour.  I won’t cover them all in this blog entry, but will rather hit on a few highlights. Our first stop was in east Toledo, at the corner of Oak and Front Streets (number 7 on map). This was the site of the Home Brewing Company, which existed between 1904 and 1919. The brewery was a five-story structure. Interestingly, the brewery was owned by a syndicate of saloon owners. The syndicate ownership structure gave the saloon owners control over the price of the beer. At its peak, the Home Brewing Company produced 40,000 barrels of beer per year.

Our second stop was at the intersection of Front and Main Streets, also in east Toledo. Toledoeans will recognize this intersection, as the iconic Tony Packo’s Restaurant is located there. This intersection was the location of the original Buckeye Brewery (number 9 on map). The brewery was established in 1838, and was owned by a German Brewmaster, Julius Kohler. In 1854, Kohler purchased a brewery  at the corner of Bush and Champlain Streets (number 1 on map) and shifted his brewing operations to this location. The brewery, which was a small, white, wooden frame building, was purchased by Kohler for $2,400. Our tour also included a stop at the Bush and Champlain Streets location. Over the years the Buckeye Brewery underwent numerous ownership changes, while also gaining capacity as a result of building additions. By the 1870s, the brewery was producing between fourteen thousand and nineteen thousand barrels of lager. In 1880, it was the fourth largest brewery in the city.

Another stop was at the intersection of Summit and Elm Streets, the site of the Finlay Brewing Company (number 4 on map). The brewery opened in 1853. It started off brewing Ales and Porter, but in 1869 switched to producing Lager. In 1874, Finlay Brewing Company produced 12,000 barrels of beer. By 1881, production had increased to 54,000 barrels. Finlay Brewing Company was the first Toledo brewery to sell its beer outside of the city, when it expanded its market reach to include Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York. It was also the first Toledo brewery to bottle its beer.  The bottling of beer, of course, was made possible by the invention of the automated bottling machine by Michael J. Owens, who worked for the Toledo Glass Factory (owned by Edward Drummond Libby). Prior to bottles, beer was sold in kegs. Today , Toledo remains a center of beer bottle design and innovation – a topic I covered in a previous blog entry.

 

Maumee Bay’s Brewery Manager, Craig Kerr, leads us through the beer tasting portion of the tour

Another stop that we made on the tour was the building that currently houses the Spaghetti Warehouuse restaurant, at the intersection of Lafayette and Superior Streets. Constructed towards the end of the nineteenth century, this building was the Hoppe and Strube Bottling Company. Hoppe and Strube bottled beer for a number of breweries including the Pabst Brewing Company from Milwaukee, WI and the Maumee Brewing Company, whose brewery was located right next door.

These are just a few of the stops we made on our tour. As I reflected on my afternoon, visiting the sites of old Toledo breweries, it struck me that most American cities have a brewing history. It is a history that should be preserved and told. Thankfully, the Toledo History Museum have taken on that task in Toledo. Back in March 2017, I took a guided tour of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, OH and learned about that neighborhood’s rich brewing history.  The tour was organized by the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation,  a not-for-profit group, part of whose mission it is to preserve and tell the story of the neighborhood’s brewing heritage. Just the other day, I came across this piece, in the St. Louis Dispatch about the Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum Beer Baron Tour. Around forty burial sites in the cemetery have a connection with St. Louis’s brewing history. The annual Beer Barons Tour gives people an opportunity to learn about some of the city’s beer entrepreneurs. These are important histories. We should preserve them and share them.

Following the bus segment of the tour, we returned to the Maumee Bay Brewing Company for beer tasting in the brewery’s cafe. The beer tasting was led by Brewery Manager, Craig Kerr. We sampled six Maumee Bay brews – Cherry Vanilla Porter, Coffee Cream Ale, Dreamin Demon (Belgian Strong Dark Ale), Glass Hopper IPA, Oktoberfest, and Mango Jerry (Gose). The background to each beer, including information on the ingredients was provided by Craig Kerr. I have sat through a lot of craft beer samplings over the years and this was perhaps the best. Craig did a fantastic job of describing each beer, as well as providing information on the general brewing process, and the function of the different ingredients.

FurtherReading:

Musson, Robert A. 2011. Brewing Beer in the Glass City, Volume I. The Buckeye Story. Medina, OH: Zepp Publications.

Musson, Robert A. 2018. Brewing Beer in the Glass City, Volume II: Huebner, Koerber, Maumee Bay and the Rest, 2nd edition. Medina, OH: Zepp Publications.