Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

Best and Company was in business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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