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.

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

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.