The Gipfel Union Brewery (417 Chestnut, now W. Highland Ave.) brewed British and American-style ales and porters. Both the Owens Brewery and the Blossom brothers’ Eagle Brewery (Northwest corner of 8th and Prairie, now 8th and W. Milwaukee’s early breweries produced a wide range of beers familiar to local tastes. Difficulties in securing equipment, materials, and starting capital-especially during the financial panic of 1857, and the Civil War-and the growing competition in the area strained the solvency of Milwaukee’s early breweries, and most closed within a few years after starting. The Best Brewery-predecessor to the Pabst Brewing Company-acquired their first brew kettle in 1844, by appealing to a local iron maker to construct one with iron brought in from Racine and Kenosha, on the promise of future payment and free beer for life. The first batches of Owens’ Milwaukee Brewery were produced in a five-barrel brew kettle composed of a wooden box lined with copper, with barley shipped in from Michigan City, Indiana. Initially, brewing equipment and materials were difficult to come by in frontier Milwaukee. Milwaukee’s early breweries were small, one- to two-story, wood-frame structures, which housed the entire brewing process-from malting to conditioning-and the residence of the brewer and his family. The Milwaukee River provided water essential to the brewing process, and the ice necessary for maintaining the proper temperature for the conditioning of German lager in storage cellars that brewers dug into the bluffs along the river. Most of these early breweries were located just east and west of the Milwaukee River, north of downtown. These were primarily small artisanal shops, formed through family connections or brief partnerships that served customers in the immediate vicinity or through a connected or affiliated saloon, beer hall, or restaurant-much like modern brewpubs. īrewing proved to be a dynamic and volatile business in early Milwaukee as approximately thirty-five breweries were established between 18. Herman Reutelschöfer established Milwaukee’s first German brewery on the northwest corner of Hanover and Virginia shortly thereafter. Clybourn), known as the Milwaukee Brewery and later the Lake Brewery. Owens, William Pawlett, and John Davis-who established the city’s first brewery in 1840 near the North Pier (Lake Michigan) on Huron Street (now E. Although German brewers are most known for their role in shaping the industry from its earliest origins, it was a group of Welsh immigrants-Richard G. European immigrants brought both a local market for traditional beer styles of their homelands and the skilled brewers able to produce such beverages. Milwaukee’s brewing industry formed in the early 1840s, and developed rapidly along with the burgeoning frontier settlement. According to Thomas Cochran, one of the industry’s major historians, “Milwaukee’s beer became famous throughout the world within the course of the first three decades of its manufacture.” The city and the industry grew up together and have prospered and weathered several phases of boom and bust, changes in taste, and in the political regulation, taxation and prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Brewing beer has been a central industry in Milwaukee since the mid-nineteenth century and frames the city’s identity-more than any other single industry.
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