by Maureen Ogle
The staff at the St. Louis Republican quantified the point. Between March and mid-September of 1854, they calculated, St. Louisians had consumed some eighteen million glasses of lager. “And yet,” they mused, Germans “contributed the smallest ratio to the sick list [and] the smallest number of convicts or criminals.” More to the point, the Germans “prosper[ed] in health, worldly goods and happiness.” The point was clear: Temperance crusaders insisted that alcohol led to degradation and crime, vice and decay, but Germans stood as living proof that it was possible to combine alcohol and respectability, pleasure and decency. A Buffalo newspaper editor chimed in with a possible explanation for the conundrum: American drinkers drank to get drunk and swilled “liver-eating gin, and stomach-destroying rum.” But Germans sipped lager as an accompaniment to other pleasures, such as singing and dancing and card-playing, and enjoyed lager’s yeasty heft as more of “a kindly sedative than a stimulus.”
Juries in several cities confirmed the growing belief that lager beer posed no threat to the nation’s future. In February 1858, one George Staats, a Brooklyn brewer and proprietor of a lager garden, went on trial on charges of violating the city’s Sunday drink law. Staats’s lawyer offered an ingenious defense: His client was innocent because lager beer was not intoxicating.
Men of science took the stand to explain that, at 3 percent alcohol content, lager could intoxicate only if consumed in extraordinary quantities. Or, as a reporter for the New York Times explained, “if it takes a pail-full of bier to make a person drunk, and the same person could get drunk on an eighth the quantity of rum, then lager is not an intoxicating drink, but may be a wholesome beverage.” Men of more practical experience agreed. Witness after witness testified to drinking excruciating quantities of lager—twenty to ninety pints a day—with no ill effects. The jury retired, debated the case for three hours (presumably without the benefit of lager to clear their minds), and returned to declare both Staats and lager not guilty.
Three months later, an identical case unfolded before a judge in Manhattan. Physicians took the stand to defend George Maurer against a charge of selling intoxicants on Sunday. One analyzed lager at three different New York breweries and concluded that, when consumed in moderate quantities, lager could not and did not intoxicate. Another reported that he had watched men imbibe as many as sixty glasses of lager without any evidence of intoxication. A third informed the jury that “he was in the habit of ordering [lager] for females after their confinements, and with good results.”
Professionals of another kind followed them to the stand, among them a portly German who volunteered the information that he regularly drank more than one hundred glasses of lager a day and never got drunk. In fact, he added, in case the jurors doubted his word, he had consumed twenty-two glasses that very morning before reporting to the courtroom. And so it went during four days of testimony. The jury retired, contemplated the facts for over seven hours, and reported they could not agree on a verdict. The judge, perhaps longing for a glass of lager, sent them and Mr. Maurer home.
The editors of Harper’s Weekly provided further evidence for lager’s benefits: “Good lager beer is pronounced by the [scientific] faculty to be a mild tonic, calculated, on the average, to be rather beneficial than injurious to the system.” The editor of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Union concurred: “There is no denying the fact,” he wrote, that under the regime of “total abstinence American women are sadly degenerating,” adding that one “good, rollicking fast-liver could clean out a regiment” of temperance types “in ten minutes.” Queen Victoria drank beer on a regular basis, he pointed out, as did German women, and they were “as robust as any women in the world.”
Even the editors of the New York Times, who groused that lager had become “a good deal too fashionable for . . . the morals of young citizens,” conceded that it was better than the alternative. When that state’s legislature passed a bill banning the sale of wine and spirits, Americans flocked to lager beer gardens. A reporter’s investigation revealed the truth: Many New Yorkers formerly “in the habit of drinking one or more glasses of rum, gin or brandy, every day” now consumed lager instead, evidence, he claimed, of people’s willingness to forgo “the stronger [alcoholic] beverages” in favor of the “very weakest.”
So it went around the country, as non-German Americans rendered their own verdict: Lager was both good and safe. By the late 1850s, “lager bier” saloons lined the streets of cities large and small, and a profusion of new summer gardens dotted leafy suburbs. There men and women danced to German bands, thrilled to the exquisite voices of German choral groups, enjoyed opera and dancers and comics, and relaxed over glasses of fresh lager. In Buffalo, families that once picnicked at Forest Lawn cemetery—the only green space in town—now thronged Westphal’s Garden to enjoy lager and music. Respectable businessmen and artisans learned that they need not endure the humiliation of slipping furtively into a grimy tavern for beer; they could stroll Westphal’s greenery with wife on arm and children straggling behind. Everyone—German, Irish, American—looked forward to that city’s St. John’s Day Festival. “A German festival is always full of life, spirit and fun,” commented one local newspaper editor.
So, too, in Cincinnati, where one man marveled at the change: Lager beer, he informed readers of his guide to that city, “forms refreshment to one-half of our native population . . . [and] is driving out the consumption of whiskey . . . ” A Richmond, Virginia, man agreed. “Lager has gone ahead of all other beverages,” he claimed, and Germans were that city’s “gayest citizens,” ones who knew how to “enjoy their hours of relaxation.” Thanks to the émigrés, American life had entered a “new and pleasant phase.”
An Englishman who spent the 1850s in the United States also testified to the change in tastes. “A dozen years ago,” he wrote in 1862, at the conclusion of his stay, “brandy and whiskey were the popular drinks; now they have, in a great measure, given place to this lager-bier, with its three per cent. of alcohol . . . [N]obody liked it at first,” but now “everybody . . . everywhere” drank it in “immense quantities.” Americans had embraced the pleasures of café life, and he advised the temperance crowd to come up with other “wholesome, palatable, and invigorating drinks, which people could drink and talk over . . . The use of lager-bier proves the practicability of this course.”
LAGER'S NEW POPULARITY among Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities spurred the growth of breweries nationwide, nearly all of them owned by Germans who hoped that lager mania would pave their way to wealth. Ten new breweries opened in Milwaukee alone during the 1850s.
Among the newcomers was Valentin Blatz. He had trained as a brewer in his native Bavaria before emigrating to Milwaukee in the 1840s, where he began his American life working for another beermaker, John (or Johann) Braun. But Blatz wanted more, and in 1851 he pitched the first yeast in his own brewing vat. He revealed the expanse of his ambition a few months later when Braun died in an accident: Blatz married the man’s widow and took control of his brewery. Like the Bests, he had devoted the 1850s to expansion, building a larger brewhouse and more extensive malthouse. Unlike the Bests, Blatz paid for the projects by pilfering the estates of the children of his now-deceased former employer. Blatz arranged for a lawyer friend to be appointed as legal guardian to the children and their inheritance; the friend opened the door to the money and Blatz helped himself.
August Krug, too, longed for a larger operation. In 1849 he had added a brewery to the restaurant and saloon he owned on Chestnut Street, and an opportunity for growth presented itself a year later, when his father arrived from Germany bearing eight hundred dollars in gold coin and Krug’s eight-year-old nephew, August Uihlein (pronounced E-line). Krug placed the boy in school and invested the coin in the brewery. He purchased more land and excavated a 150-barrel lagering vault, a clear signal that he planned to run on the same turf as Phillip Best. Krug could manage the brewery and restaurant, but he needed help keeping an eye on the numbers. In 18
55, he hired a bookkeeper named Joseph Schlitz.
But in December of that year, Krug tumbled down a hatchway and landed hard on the floor below; a few days later he died, leaving his estate to his wife. Schlitz wasted no time in offering the widow his life savings in exchange for a partnership. In 1858 he sealed the deal by marrying her, hiring August Uihlein as the new bookkeeper, and changing the company name to Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.
Phillip Best’s brother Carl suffered a different kind of loss. He had not joined the family brewery, preferring to stick with the vinegar factory he had founded. But in 1849 he sold that, and he and a business partner purchased land for a new brewery three miles west of Milwaukee in the relatively unpopulated Menomonee Valley. They christened their venture the Plank Road Brewery, named for the wooden roadway that ran past their door (today’s State Street). The partners hoped to sell part of their output to the farmers who hauled grain into town one way on Plank Road and supplies back the other. When the partner ran the brewery into debt and then absconded, Carl and younger brother Lorenz carried on until young Lorenz died; Carl, either bereft or inept, let the brewery slide into bankruptcy.
Thirty-year-old Frederick Miller, who had emigrated to the United States a few months earlier, leased the property in 1855, then purchased it outright a year later and set about to make his family’s American fortune. He had begun training as a brewer fifteen years earlier, and by the time he arrived in the United States had achieved the status of brewmaster and managed his own brewhouse. Another century would pass before the small outfit he helmed joined the ranks of the world’s great breweries, but in the late 1850s, his talents earned a good living for his family. He lured Milwaukeeans to his relatively distant location with a garden filled with tables, shade trees, and a multicolored, aromatic array of formal flower beds that cascaded down the sides of the bluff behind the brewery. Customers enjoyed homemade breads and cakes and specially prepared hams. Women sipped a house specialty, mocha coffee, while men clutching beer steins thronged the bowling alley. Children romped to the strains of orchestras and choruses that performed under the roof of the open-air pavilion. Miller would succeed where Carl Best failed, and today all that remains to memorialize Carl’s efforts is a section of his lager cave, now the last stop on the visitors’ tour at Miller Brewing Company.
PHILLIP AND JACOB JUNIOR enjoyed the competition, which only spurred their own ambitions. By the late 1850s, the modest brewhouse on the hill, symbol of their émigré hopes and the limits of their original capital, had outlived its usefulness. In 1857, the pair plowed their profits—some $20,000 a year (over $400,000 in today’s dollars)—into a new plant: an imposing two-story brick complex adorned with turrets and Gothic windows, with a life-sized statue of lager-swilling Gambrinus, the mythical inventor of lager, perched on top. The new brewery could be seen from almost everywhere in the city, testimony to Phillip and Jacob’s ambitions and to the importance of lager to Milwaukee’s economy. But its crowning glory lay hidden from sight: The “vaults,” or lager cellars, consisted of several blocks of flagstone corridors surmounted by arched brick ceilings and lined with hundreds of rows of puncheons sized to hold thirty barrels, or about one thousand gallons, of lager.
The decision to expand forced them to live with stomach-wrenching risk. In order to earn a return on their investment, they had to operate at full capacity. Milwaukee’s growth continued apace, but the contest for customers grew more heated each year. Chicago’s growth was, if anything, even more astonishing, and the brothers could count on selling several thousand barrels there each year to taverns around that bustling city. But even that outlet bristled with uncertainty: They had to buy or rent real estate in Chicago, both for their office and for warehousing the beer. And they had to hire a reliable agent to manage their Chicago affairs—lining up customers, ordering ice, and hiring teams and drivers to deliver the beer. All of it—the new plant, the larger vats, the Chicago branch, the soaring payroll—forced the men to the edge of their means.
What is most remarkable about this moment in the history of what would become the world’s largest brewery is that Phillip and Jacob played their hand just as the nation’s economy skittered into a two-year recession. The so-called Panic of 1857 spawned a string of bankruptcies and foreclosures that reached from the urban coast to the rural frontier. The impact crashed across the Midwest, where investors in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa had dumped millions into railroad projects, using loans from chronically wobbly banks that crumpled under the impact of first recession, then depression. In Milwaukee, beer sales plunged: The 100,000 barrels produced by the city’s brewers in 1857 fell to 42,000 in 1859.
That may explain why, just a year after building the new brewhouse, the brothers parted ways, Phillip claiming the brewery and Jacob the real estate—a couple of lots and a large brick building—that they owned in downtown Milwaukee. Years later, an aging Milwaukee saloonkeeper claimed that the brothers rolled dice to determine the division of property. According to this account, Phillip won the toss and opted to keep the brewery, betting, apparently, that good times would return and so would the demand for his beer.
It’s hard to imagine so shrewd a businessman as Phillip Best risking so much on chance. On the other hand, he never lost touch with the hard-driving roustabout within. On more than one occasion, he galloped his horse down East Water Street and charged through the doorway of the Menomonee Saloon, one of the city’s most popular watering holes. As the men draped across the bar or slouched in chairs watched, whooped, and hollered, the equally amused barkeeper shooed Best out the door. Phillip tied his horse at the rail outside and then strolled back inside, shouting an order to “‘set ’em up’ for the house.”
As with the dice-rolling partnership split, there’s no way to know if the horse tale is apocryphal. But both have a ring of truth: If we know anything about Phillip Best and the handful of brewers who laid the foundations of fortunes in those early days of the brewing industry, it is that they embraced risk. After all, Phillip had turned thirty the year he left Europe for the United States. By the late 1850s, he’d long since passed the first flower of youth and understood that this gamble might not pay off, especially given the number of players who crowded the table. Like him, ambitious brewers in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities were busy adding steam engines and larger vats to their brewhouses. Also like him, they relished the competition from the hundreds of new breweries that had opened to accommodate Americans’ new passion for lager.
Phillip’s choice, like his earlier decision to risk his adulthood on America, paid off. By the time he gained sole ownership of the brewery, he could measure his American success by more than his company’s profits. A Democratic governor honored his contributions to Wisconsin politics by granting him a commission in the Milwaukee Dragoons militia company, and a grateful Republican governor elevated him to the rank of brigadier general in a division of the state militia.
In 1857, Phillip reigned as Prince during Milwaukee’s first Lenten-season Carnival. He presided over a lavish reception on opening night and sat enthroned on the lead wagon of a parade that sashayed through the city’s streets the next day. Behind him marched horn-tooting musicians and beribboned stallions carrying local dignitaries. A river of wagons flowed behind, loaded with men and women attired in ornate costume and mask: A majestic King Gambrinus waved to the delighted onlookers; Bacchus greeted his subjects; two “apostles of Temperance” perched on another wagon, and the crowd roared when one fell off and into the muddy street.
By any measure, German or American, Phillip had succeeded. Among the city’s two dozen or so brewers, only Val Blatz produced more lager, and Best Brewing lagged by fewer than two hundred barrels. As the decade turned, the landscape that Phillip surveyed from his hilltop empire contrasted dramatically with the one he had first seen back in 1844. Then, he looked down on a sea of leafy green on one side and a small town on the other. Now Milwaukee, population forty-five thousand, sprawled i
n all directions. Rippling layers of forest had given way to houses and roads. Phillip owned not just two small lots, but several city blocks. And beneath his feet lay thousands of barrels of German lager, the stuff of his American dreams.
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About the Author
MAUREEN OGLE ais a historian and the author of several books, including In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America and Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Her website can be found at www.maureenogle.com. She lives in Ames, Iowa.
