Think of cooking with beer as more than sticking a 12-ounce can of Bud up a chicken’s ass, putting it on the grill and waiting for the bird to reach a nice golden brown. (But then again, the simplicity of this practice is so darn appealing).
We (and I mean you and me) will be looking at moving beyond just beer to kick-up a food recipe. Get inspired and think of all the components of beer; dried malt extract, malt syrup, yeast, grains, and even the more abstract items such as maltose…and beyond!
Put on an apron, grab a beer, and let’s get started.
From May 8th to the 11th, I had the opportunity to make the beer rounds in Saint Louis, all part of a junket of beer tastings, an introduction to a to-be-released product (more on this shortly) from Anheuser-Busch, a beer/food dinner and much, much more, including this impromptu history lesson on beer and brewing in Saint Louis. Since brewing history is right up my alley, I was pleased when local beer historian Henry Herbst led a collection of U.S. beer writers through a short review of important Saint Louis beer events. This took place at the Square One Brewery, owned by Steve Neukomm, while we sampled a few beers and lunch.
We eventually left the hospitality of everyone at the brewpub, including brewing consultant (Dr.) John Witt, and headed for a private tasting of a new American ale at A-B. More coming…
”The beer that made Milwaukee famous” … do you remember that slogan? Well, the American beer and a small town in the middle of Germany bear the same name: Schlitz.
And while the link between the two is not particularly strong, they do have Germany and beer in common.
Beer played a prominent role in the development of the small town in northern Hessen near Fulda.
The family Schlitz — who ruled the town of Schlitz — lost its brewing rights in the town to the citizens of Schlitz when the family chose the wrong side in a local uprising and wound up with the losers. But the family did not give up its feud, and in 1725 Friedrich Wilhelm von Schlitz founded a new brewery outside the town to rival the one in town and to maintain some influence over the townspeople.
The beer that made Milwaukee famous was originally brewed there by one German and got its name from another, Joseph Schlitz, who arrived in the country from Mainz. Schlitz worked as a bookkeeper for the brewery’s founder, and when he died, Schlitz took over the company, married the owner’s widow and gave the brewery his name.
The town of Schlitz was first mentioned in history books when Archbishop Richolf of Mainz consecrated a church on the hill of Schlitz in September 812. By 1439, it was officially recognized as a city with a fortified castle and defensive wall. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the castle and fortifications were converted into residential dwellings with a growing population.
Today, Schlitz is a charming and peaceful town, ideal for a stroll on cobblestone streets between half-timbered houses and centuries-old sites.
The main attractions are concentrated on the hill at the center of town. A string of four castles, watchtowers and walls formed a ring atop the hill. Today, only the Hinterturm — a tall tower — and parts of the Vorder- and Hinterburgs — two of the four original castles — can be recognized. With a little bit of imagination, one can assemble the remains of the structures and visualize what they looked like.
An excellent place to get a good view of the town and surrounding area is the towering Hinterturm, once part of the Hinterburg. Almost 150 feet high and built in the 14th century, it offers a splendid view over Schlitz and the surrounding landscape.
During the Christmas season, the tower is wrapped to resemble a candle and is topped by a large electric light that resembles a flame that can be seen from a long distance.
The tower is among the few medieval towers in Germany that has an elevator. It is operated by friendly Georg Eichenauer, who also sells tickets and acts as a guide on top.
And if you are afraid of heights, he will bolster you with a taste of schnapps and bitters produced by the Schlitz Kornbrennerei, Germany’s oldest grain distillery. You can get a glass in Eichenauer’s Turmstube, where he sells the distillery’s products and other souvenirs of Schlitz.
Aha is the name of the well-composed bitter of herbs, roots and berries from the forests around Schlitz that Eichenauer serves up.
“Aha!” you will say after your first taste, and then “Prost” as you toast the town of Schlitz.
Information: For information, call the tourist office at 06642-97013 or e-mail info@schlitz.de. The town’s Web site is www.schlitz.de
From Stars & Stripes By Peter Jaeger, Stars and Stripes European edition, Tuesday, May 6, 2008
“I imagine it will be priced somewhere between a higher-priced craft beer and a great quality pseudo-craft beer like Blue Moon.”
And that seems to be a problem with its sales. As one liquor store sales manger has noted, label owner Pabst has overpriced it.
Part of the problem, he said, is Pabst’s pricing. At $9.99 for a 12-pack and $5.99 for a six-pack, it’s more expensive than Budweiser, about the same as Michelob and almost as expensive as more upscale brews such as Samuel Adams. “It’s just overpriced,” he said.
And that’s a shame because you know damn well that the only other thing that could give Schlitz a push in sales would be a strong marketing and sales campaign. But this is the Pabst Brewing Co., whose sales luck with its flagship brand has been based on a non-existent ad and/or media campaign, relying instead, on nostalgia and a good mix of shallow-pocketed college kids who look at the “popular-priced (read: cheap)” beer as a God send. in the case of Schlitz, Pabst has decided to position it as an expensive “super-premium” priced beer…and still use no marketing and sales oomph behind the brand.
A few years ago, I organized 2 study groups for a marketing consultant group that was working for Pabst, trying to understand why Old Style sales were so sluggish in Chicago, where it had once ruled supreme. Old Style was another beer in the Pabst Brewing Co.’s portfolio. We came up with a couple of viable options, but many of them began with the opening phrase, “You have to throw more money at the brand,” and when anyone said this, the beer distributors in the group just sighed as their eyes rolled over.
There’s a hell of a lot of baggage behind the demise of Schlitz, detailed in my book, Beer: A History of Brewing in Chicago. Like Old Style before it, Schlitz was Chicago’s #1 selling beer, ignoring Budweiser’s reign as the nation’s top-selling beer. Today, it’s just another beer, unless Pabst gets serious about Schlitz and either runs a pantsload of sales, positioning the beer, or starts running an ad campaign.
In September of 1977, a group of Leo Burnett’s top officials met in their 10th floor conference room in the Prudential Building in Chicago to view four commercials using the resurrected gusto theme. The commercials had been put together quickly, a reaction to Schlitz’s insistence on getting something ready as soon as possible.
Burnett employees had researched their commercial ideas by taking a simple storyboard with a sketched sequence of the proposed commercials to the Woodfield Mall in nearby Schaumburg, Illinois. Passers-by were asked by the Burnett people if they understood the commercials. Because of the urgency imposed upon the advertising agency by the brewery, the Burnett people simply wanted to make sure that their initial efforts were on the right track. As a result, they did not ask for the subjects’ opinions as to whether they either liked the product or its proposed style of presentation. With assurances that the test subjects simply understood the concept of the storyboards, the four commercials went into film production.
The commercials varied from one featuring a Muhammad Ali-like boxer with a full entourage to a rugged outdoorsman with his pet mountain lion. In each of the four commercials, an off-camera voice asked the lead characters to give up their Schlitz beer for another brand. The commercials, as Richard Stanwood, at the time Burnett’s director of creative services, would later recall, were meant to be “interruptive.”
At the screening of the new commercials, the Burnett people watched as the boxer told a disembodied voice that he was going to knock him “…down for the count” for even suggesting a switch from the Schlitz label. The outdoorsman in one of the following commercials told his pet mountain lion to calm down after his choice of Schlitz beer was also challenged and snarled back to the animal, “Just a minute, babe. I’ll handle this.”
The group of fifteen Burnett creatives approved the series of commercials without objection as did Schlitz representatives who viewed the commercials soon after.
The reactions to the commercials once they went public were almost immediate; people hated them. Burnett officials were appalled at the reaction.
Jack Powers, who managed the Schlitz account at Burnett, was stunned by the swift public response to the commercials. “I can assure you that we have no desire to threaten the people of the United States. It (the commercials) was supposed to be fun, tongue-in-cheek stuff.”
At Schlitz, the feeling about the unexpected consumer backlash to the series of commercials was much worse. “A really great tragedy-—really, really bad,” a brewery spokesman admitted.
Ten weeks after the commercials first began to air, Schlitz management ordered them pulled. Soon after, the Leo Burnett ad agency was fired by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.
The short-lived run of commercials would go down in advertising history as “The Drink Schlitz or I’ll Kill You” ad campaign.
I fed his producer a bunch of info about the former Schlitz saloons in Chicago. It’ll be interesting to see if I get a “Contributor” mention.
From the WTTW site;
Ask Geoffrey Is there something in your neighborhood you’ve always wanted to know more about? Our resident Chicago expert Geoffrey Baer joins us to answer many of those questions in a new segment called “Ask Geoffrey.”
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I hope the topic gets the attention it deserves.
There’s a barrel full of fable that surrounds the origins of Porter, some of it disputed by The Zythophile , but to add fat to the fire, London Porter is a very interesting site that also delves into the origins of London Porter and much, much more.
I found the site’s reasoning of leaving butts behind (no pun intended, well, maybe just a little) for maturation purposes and moving on to large-scale vatting—and the switch to attemperated beers—of particular interest.
Start with the “Intro” link in the header and follow along the rest of the links for an interesting read.
On Monday, breweries throughout the U.S. celebrated the 75th anniversary of the end of National Prohibition. The thing is, according to the Constitution, National Prohibition ended Dec. 5, 1933.
The “Noble Experiment” was caused by a confluence of events that eventually pitted prohibitionists against the “cabal” of German-American-owned saloons and breweries. Congress gradually fell under the relentless lobbying efforts of the well-financed Anti-Saloon League, showing a willingness to end the manufacture and sale of alcohol with the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment that brought us the income tax (on a side note, April 15 is just around the corner!). In 1920, Congress reveled in a whopping $5.4 billion in income taxes. The often-taxed-and-licensed drink trade was forgotten, the feds no longer needing the tax funds they produced.
At this time in U.S. beer history, the brewing industry was still under the influence of German and German-American brewers. Lager was the most popular beer, not a surprise with wide-girthed Braumeisters still turning out the golden brew. One demonstrated point of their pride of product during the pre-Prohibition era was the brewers’ insistence of a lagering period of at least one month. Now with events as chaotic as they were prior to April 7, and with FDR’s delayed signing of the C-H bill on March 23, they would have had to be clairvoyant to have good-quality and properly aged beer conveniently ready for April 7.
So how did they do it? They used weak, and I would go as far as to claim inferior beer. In Chicago alone, there were 5 legally-licensed breweries that were pumping out real beer and then extracting the alcohol from the beer and selling it as “cereal beverage,” in other words, near beer. I made an earlier reference last April that the beer was “weak-assed” and some beer blogger made the remark with some disdain that there was nothing wrong with weak beer, or as geeks like to put it “session beer.” I agree; there is nothing wrong with lighter-alcohol session beers. If your group is babbling at the bar after something like 3 barleywines or Imperial Stouts, it might be an early end to your little bier klatsch…and that’s no fun. But think about what you would do if you were a brewer back then. How would you handle the grain and hops bill if you knew that in the final process, you would be required to boil the hell out of the beer and collect the vapors of alcohol for shipment to a government-bonded warehouse where alcohol was stored? Would you start with a nice heaving load of fine Moravian malts, maybe throw some crystal malt in for color and a little more body, and then dip into your supply of “noble” hops for character; maybe some for bittering and then topping off the batch with a touch for some added nose?
Of course not! You’d probably use some indifferent malt—and certainly not a lot—and most likely the minimum amount of hops (and who knows how old those hops were?) Why strive for a quality brew when you knew that the beers would be stripped of alcohol and then, either at the local speakeasy or on the delivery truck, the beer would be injected with alcohol through the bung-hole of the wooden barrel, giving rise to the Roaring Twenties speakeasy standby, “needle beer?”
To give you another example of the quality of the beer that was consumed on April 7 and somewhat beyond, city and federal agents were hitting the streets and testing beers in Chicago on April 7, 1933 to make sure the brewers were conforming to the 3.2% alcohol limit. Not one beer sample was in violation. On the contrary, the agents remarked that the beers were well below the legal limit. Why? Because the beer that rolled into the streets of the U.S.A. on April 7 was the indifferent beer that had been brewed for alcohol extraction, brewed to be near beer. It was brewed with the least amount of grains and hops and probably hard to argue that it had been aged for at least a month. What would be the purpose?
After the euphoria and initial beer supplies ran out throughout U.S. breweries, the suds factories started turning out “green” beer, beers that demonstrated little lagering, if any at all. It became so bad that Blatz (and others) began running full-page newspaper ads, thanking FDR for bringing “Democratic” beer back to the masses while pledging to the President and all beer drinkers in the country that they would release no beer, despite the demand, until it had gone through a proper period of maturation. That wasn’t “session beer,” my blogging critic, that was shit beer they were drinking in the aftermath of April 7, 1933.
(CNN) — At the stroke of midnight, American beer drinkers were no longer breaking the law when they broke open a beer.
Breweries and beer lovers around the country are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the return of beer on April 7, 1933, as the Prohibition era was drawing to a close.
It wasn’t quite the end of Prohibition, and it wasn’t quite beer, but after 14 thirsty years, it was close enough.
—snip—
Bob Skilnik, author of eight books about beer, including “Beer & Food: An American History,” holds that the December date is more significant and that the quickly brewed April 7 beer probably was of poor quality.
Readers have to realize where the beer that night came from. It was beer that was ready to be dealcoholized. The pre-Prohibition brewers used to make a big deal about the length of their beers’ maturation…at least one month. The C-H Bill, however, gave them only 2 weeks to get beer bottled or kegged and ready for the market.
You can be sure that any beer that was about to be stripped of its alcohol was a beer without the choicest hops or a decent grain bill. What would be the purpose if the beer was going to be stripped of alcohol?
This became more obvious as the beer continued to flow from the breweries in the later weeks. The public started to complain that the beer tasted “green,” i.e., not mature. Pabst even started a newspaper campaign that pledged that no beer would leave their brewery until it was ready.
So people can talk nostalgically about the 3.2% beer all they want, call it “session beer” or “small” beer or whatever; it was poorly crafted beer ready for a vigorous boiling to extract the alcohol.
I can’t wait! This is the beer I was raised on, long before certain people at Schlitz got greedy, leading to Schlitz beer becoming known as “Schitz” beer.
The story of the rise and fall of Schlitz, especially in Chicago where it held the top beer sales position for years, is described in my best-selling book, Beer: A History of Brewing in Chicago.
The downfall of Schlitz, combined with a bottler’s strike at Anheuser-Busch in 1976 allowed Old Style, a sleeper brand that had been in Chicago since the early 1900s, to take over the Chicagoland beer market. OS distributors took their battle for supremacy to neighborhood taverns, bottle by bottle and case by case until the brand dominated more than 40% of the local beer market.
The problems of the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company were brought upon themselves and a board of directors who refused to acknowledge their production mistakes, the sudden death of CEO Bob Uihlein, Jr., and no real leader to take over the business when Bob died, a leader who could handle the meddlesome Uihleins.
At one point, G. Heileman and owner Russ Cleary were poised to buy Schlitz when the Uihlein family-dominated board of directors decided to end it all and sell. At the last minute, the Justice Department stopped the sale, claiming an unfair dominance of the market with the merger. It was a sham of a claim since the combination of G. Heileman and Schlitz would have held about 16% of the national market while Anheuser-Busch already held around 27%.
From Wall Street down through the brewing industry itself, the merger was considered to be a life saver for Schlitz and a boost to G. Heileman which was trying to shed the mantle of being just a regional brewery. It was a perfect match. The feds thought otherwise.
Stroh eventually brought Schlitz but the merger was a disaster. After the family-owned Stroh gave up in 1999, the Schlitz label went to Pabst.
What most beer drinkers don’t realize is that while Pabst owns the label, they actually don’t own any breweries. Their portfolio of once proud regional brands are now brewed by Miller.
I really hope they bring back the original formula and make the brand available again as a draft, bottled and canned product. After Stroh closed, you could only get canned Schlitz beer, which dried up a lot of draft accounts in Chicago. It was a staple at Southport Lanes, for instance
The problem now is, how do you reposition Schlitz as a premium or super-premium beer? It’s had no advertising budget, no media exposure, no nothing for years, just a reputation as a cheap beer that sat on shelves and accumulated dust. The trick will be to be able to convince young beer drinkers that Schlitz is once again a quality product and worth every penny. I imagine it will be priced somewhere between a higher-priced craft beer and a great quality pseudo-craft beer like Blue Moon.
Chicago was it’s number 1 market. It might have been the beer that made Milwaukee famous, but it was Chicago beer drinkers who really made it so.
“What was was once a trite beer history canard has become an outright lie,” says beer historian Bob Skilnik. “I can only hope that the apparent rewriting of U.S. brewing history is either an innocent result of poor research and not a shameful display of industry greed, just for the sake of a bump in beer sales.”
(PRWEB) April 3, 2008 — Bob Skilnik, author of “Beer & Food: An American History” (ISBN 0977808610, Jefferson Press, Hardcover, $24.95), argues that industry embellishments and poor research have distorted the true date of Repeal on December 5, 1933, which signified the revocation of the 18th Amendment and the enactment of the 21st Amendment and brought back the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages.
“Congressional events leading up to April 7, 1933 allowed only the resumption of sales for legal beer with an alcoholic strength of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight (abw), weak by today’s standards. Congress had earlier passed the so-called Cullen-Harrison Bill which redefined what constituted a legally ‘intoxicating’ beverage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill on March 23, 1933. The bill’s passage took the teeth out of the bite of the Volstead Act of 1919 and raised the Prohibition-era legal limit of alcoholic drinks from .05% abw to 3.2% abw.”
And this newsreel which shows the economic impact of the end of Prohibition;
It’s already started and I find myself this week screaming at my computer screen, the TV and a few newspapers, and as it now appears, beer writers, breweries, and at least one brewing trade organization.
(ED. NOTE: Julia Herz has suffered through me periodically checking on the Association of Brewers website and its period of misinformation about Repeal. She has, however, gone out of her way and changed their website info in an effort to get the history right. And for this, I tip my hat to her and the AB and their 75 Years of Beer celebration.)
“I recommend…the passage of legislation…to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Beginning Of The End
By 1932, National Prohibition was dying. Its dry policy and enforcement had caused a generation of Americans to be raised with a casual disregard of the law. Probably no issue had done so much to divide the country since the Civil War. After some political maneuvering, Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, had finally declared himself an advocate for Repeal. Incumbent President Hoover, however, continued to state his belief in National Prohibition, effectively becoming a political lame duck even before the finality of the upcoming presidential election in November.
The economic logic of Repeal was eloquently expressed by August A. Busch of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in St. Louis. In 1931, Busch had issued a pamphlet titled An Open Letter to the American People, sending a copy to every U.S. Senator and Congressman and taking out ads in leading national magazines explaining his position on legalizing the production and sale of beer. With the country suffering from the throes of the Depression, Busch proclaimed that the legalization of beer would put over one million people back to work, including farmers, railroad employees and even coal miners. In addition, the St. Louis brewer argued that the government would save the $50 million a year it was now wasting through its efforts to enforce Prohibition. Taxation of beer would also help the federal government recoup the estimated $500 million in revenues it had lost since the beginning of Prohibition.
Attending a meeting in February of 1933 of the National Malt Products’ Manufacturing Association at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, and knowing that the tide had turned, Busch declared himself “100 per cent for beer” and boasted that his St. Louis brewery was ready to restart the production of beer as soon as the law would permit. The Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago was so sure of the relegalization of beer that the faculty announced the resumption of their regular five month training course for brewers in January of 1933. The sweet smell of malt was in the air.
Support in Washington for the reintroduction of 3.2% beer began with an opinion by Representative Beck of Pennsylvania that Congress already had the power to legalize beer and that the Supreme Court would more than likely uphold any favorable congressional action. After some political foot dragging, President-elect Roosevelt finally added his opinion to the debate, saying that he favored the 3.2% beer bill that now was pending in the Senate. The Senate continued negotiations on a bill to legalize beer and made no change to a proposal to tax a barrel of beer at the rate of $5, effectively acknowledging the eventual reinstitution of the legal brewing industry. On February 15, 1933, the Senate took the debate even further when it voted 58 to 23 to begin formal consideration of a resolution proposing repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Later that same day, the Senate passed its approval of the Blaine resolution, proposing repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. The issue was then passed on to the House of Representatives. When Speaker of the House Garner heard of the quickness of the Senate’s actions, he commented surprisingly, “The vote was better than most of us anticipated. We will pass the amendment here Monday- I should say, consider it.”
With a slip of the Speaker’s tongue, there was little doubt on what the outcome of the vote in the House would be.
The same day, the Illinois State Senate also voted its approval of repeal of the Illinois dry laws and the state Search and Seizure Act which had been invoked by State Attorney General Edward Brundage back in July of 1919. Brundage’s narrow interpretation of the law had shut down the sale of beer and booze in Chicago six months before National Prohibition actually took effect.
3.2% Beer
On February 20, 1933, Congress passed the repeal of the National Prohibition Amendment and submitted its final approval to the states for ratification. In Springfield, Governor Horner presided at a meeting of state senators and representatives and agreed to a June 5 election for a state convention to decide if Illinois delegates would vote for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. With the anticipated results of the state convention being in favor of Repeal, the resumption of the manufacturing, transportation and sale of beer in Illinois was eminent. Horner confirmed this when he indicated his readiness to sign the necessary bills invoking revocation of the Search and Seizure Act and the state prohibition laws as soon as they came to his desk.
On March 13, President Roosevelt used the bully pulpit of his office to formally recommend to Congress a looser interpretation of the Volstead Act, which limited alcohol in beer to one-half of one percent. “I recommend to the Congress the passage of legislation for the immediate modification of the Volstead Act, in order to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer…” Upon hearing Roosevelt’s recommendation, Governor Horner signed the bill repealing the two State of Illinois dryenforcement laws, now leaving the enforcement of National Prohibition to the federal government.
Finally, on March 21, 1933, the United States House of Representatives completed action on the Cullen-Harrison bill, permitting the resumption of the manufacture and sale of 3.2% beer and light wines in those states that were now legally considered wet. The next morning, President Roosevelt was scheduled to sign the bill, but a bureaucratic mix up postponed his signing until March 23.
In the meantime, Roosevelt talked of a possible amnesty for violators imprisoned for the manufacturing and sale of beer up to an alcoholic content of 3.2% by weight. In Illinois, there were 3,380 incarcerated federal Prohibition offenders. Roosevelt’s sentiments were perhaps more economic in scope than benevolent. The release of Illinois Prohibition violators, along with the release of similar offenders throughout the United States, would save the federal government millions of badly needed dollars. The President’s amnesty proposal was held by Congress for consideration. With a fifteen day wait required after Roosevelt’s signature, 3.2% beer would again be available on April 7 in nineteen states that had removed their dry laws. Wet advocates cheerfully anticipated that an additional fifteen states would soon join these wetstates.
One day after Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison bill, the Justice Department quietly announced that it was dropping its National Prohibition exhibit at Chicago’s A Century of Progress. No reason was given; for Chicagoans, no reason was needed.
New Retail Outlets For Beer
As Chicago prepared for the resumption of legal beer, local issues of home rule, licensing, taxation and dispensing unfolded, especially after the wording of the congressional beer bill declared 3.2% beer as non-intoxicating, a legal technicality needed to nullify the alcoholic restrictions of the Volstead Act. With this ruling by Congress, and concurrence of federal opinion by Illinois Attorney General Otto Kerner, Chicago’s saloons would no longer hold domain over the retail sale of beer as they had done before Prohibition. As a non-intoxicant, beer could now be available in such places as grocery stores and drug stores, even Ma and Pa corner stores. In a meeting of city officials, lawyers advised acting Mayor Corr and key city alderman that simply the repeal of the Illinois prohibition law did not revive the old liquor laws. As a result, the sale of this 3.2%, non-intoxicating beer, now having fallen into the same category as soda water or ginger ale, would be unregulated in off-premise sites unless the Chicago City Council and Springfield acted quickly to correct this unexpected legal quirk.
The City Gets Ready For 3.2% Beer
Unfazed by the political logistics of the resumption of beer, local old time beer establishments made ready. At the Berghoff on West Adams, eighty-year old Herman J. Berghoff proudly displayed Beer Retail License Number 1, issued by the City Collector’s Office for the serving of beer at his famous bar. Installed in 1897,the Berghoff’s wood inlaid bar from Amsterdam, which still serves as the focal point of this Chicago landmark, was made ready for business. In pre-Prohibition days, Berghoff had estimated that he sold as high as forty-two barrels of beer a day. Anticipated demand for the golden nectar seemed just as positive.
At the Righeimer bar on North Clark, Acting Mayor Corr and a host of local politicos rededicated the establishment’s famous 100 foot bar. Corr had been thrust into this position after Mayor Cermak had been shot by a crazed assassin while meeting with President Roosevelt in Miami, Florida. Sadly, the man who represented the local wet interests for so long died just weeks before he could see the return of beer to the city and nation.
Clerks at the City Collector’s office worked overtime to take care of the rush of new applicants for beer licenses. Unexplainably, the City Council had already passed the required ordinance providing for the $150 licensing fee for saloonkeepers in December, 1932, four months before legal beer would flow again in Chicago. Seven hundred and forty-one saloonkeepers had actually paid the fee for the first half of the year even though they were in violation of state and federal dry laws. The Chicago City Council tried unsuccessfully to pull off a similar revenue enhancing stunt back in 1929. At the time, there was a movement afoot in the council to license the 5000 bartenders whom regularly poured illegal drink for thirsty Chicagoans. With a $10 annual fee, it would have meant an additional $50,000 income to the financially desperate city. Referred to committee for further study, the idea was abruptly dropped from the council agenda when someone mentioned that National Prohibition was still in effect. It would be hard to license bartenders when, in theory, there were no bars. By April 7, more than 2600 bars were legally licensed to sell beer, a dramatic drop from the over 7000 licensed bars of pre-Prohibition days.
City breweries began a hiring spree of several hundred with promises of an additional hiring of one thousand more men and women by April 7, as the bottling of beer in Chicago began on March 25. At the Schoenhofen Company, two eight-hour shifts began a daily regime of filling 14,000 cases of beer a day. The politically connected Atlas Brewing Company, granted the first license to resume the brewing of real beer in the Northern District, including neighboring Milwaukee, began plans to bottle 20 to 25 thousand cases a day. Realizing that they’d probably never fill all their outstanding orders by April 7, even with a planned hiring of 200 to 300 more employees, Atlas President Charles Vopicka ordered outdoor posters to be printed for distribution throughout the city during the early morning hours of New Beer’s Eve. Under a picture of a smiling Uncle Sam hoisting a beer, the posters asked for the indulgence of any customers who had not yet received their promised beer delivery. At the Prima Company, management estimated that they would soon begin the bottling of over 3,000,000 bottles of beer a day. The brewery had recently been expanded to a 500,000 barrel capacity in anticipation of Repeal. Employees of the United States Brewing Company on North Elston decorated the exterior of the plant with flags and bunting. A picture of Franklin Roosevelt hung above the entrance of the brewery, edifying the man who represented Repeal to the grateful brewing industry. Coopers readied thousands of new wooden barrels, as did bottle makers their containers, for delivery to breweries. Fifteen hundred beer delivery trucks were prepped for the big night, supplemented by moving vans, milk wagons and coal trucks. Federal inspectors started to make the rounds of Chicago’s seven licensed breweries, measuring the aging tanks, also used for the computation of federal tax due. A final industry estimate, days before the resumption of beer in Chicago, figured that approximately 15,000 men and women had found work in breweries and related industries in Chicago. A heady sense of festivity was settling over Chicago.
There was, however, a sobering note to all the gaiety at the breweries. District police captains quietly placed guards at all the breweries to discourage any possible attempts at hijacking when the trucks finally rolled out for deliveries.
When’s The Party Begin?
In an amusing misunderstanding prior to the big event, E. C. Yellowley, head of the Prohibition Department in Chicago, ruled that the local delivery of beer could begin at 11:01P. M. on April 6, which would correspond to 12:01 A.M., April 7 in Washington, D. C.Yellowley’s interpretation of the commencement time though, was clarified by United States Attorney General Cummings who ruled that legal beer deliveries would begin at 12:01 A. M. in each respective time zone.
Illinois House Representative Fred A. Britten thought he had a better idea on when beer deliveries should begin in Chicago. In a telephone conversation to the Attorney General, Britten suggested that the commencement time for the serving of legal beer would better serve Chicagoans interests if it began as early as 10:00 P. M., April 6. When Cummings reminded the imploring state representative that federal law distinctly stated that beer deliveries could only begin at 12:01 A. M., April 7, Britten in an amazing display of political chutzpah, suggested a solution to that little time problem. “Chicago will set all the clocks ahead two hours at 10:00 P. M.“, he explained to the skeptical Attorney General. “The City Council will pass the ordinance,”he assured Cummings. To emphasize the seriousness of his request and the careful planning he was ready to carry through to get fresh beer to thirsty Chicagoans, Britten added this assurance to his request. “The trucks will leave the breweries at 10 with all streets cleared and motorcycle squads as escorts.”The U. S. Attorney General could not be persuaded to allow Britten to implement his bizarre plan.
12:01 A. M. ?
As New Beer’s Eve moved closer to reality in Chicago, the Chicago Hotel Association started to put pressure on the brewers and the local hotels, urging the hotel owners and managers not to take delivery of beer until 7 o’ clock Friday morning, hours after beer could legally be sold in the city. John Burke, president of the association and manager of the Congress Hotel expressed his concerns that a wild night of revelry in Chicago might endanger future repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which still needed to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of all the states. “We feel that we should be careful not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg” he emphasized, and added that the anticipated celebration “…might give a black eye to things at the very beginning,” a very real concern.
Hilmar Ernst, president of the Prima Company and the Illinois Brewers’ Association, brushed off Burke’s criticism. The problem, if there was one, he noted, was a problem for the hotel men, not the brewers. “Even if the hotels want to begin selling at 9 or 10 in the morning, we’ll have to start delivering at midnight to get them supplied. Our brewery alone now has orders calling for the immediate delivery of between 200,000 and 300,000 cases and there will be a lot more by the 7th.”Ernst failed to mention that local breweries had also collected over $2,000,000 in deposits and guaranteed delivery. The I.B.A. president pointed out that the hotels were placing the biggest orders. Worried that delaying the sale of beer until the morning would cut hotel owners out of the huge volume of beer sales that was anticipated, Burke and his concerns were pushed aside by hotel owners and managers.Even a Chicago Tribunesuggestion in favor of later day deliveries was ignored by the brewers. “The public demands it (beer) at once,”sighed Anton Laadt, general manager of the Atlas Brewing Company.
W-G-N radio, anticipating the wild night ahead and the historical significance of it all, scheduled special programming throughout Thursday evening and Friday morning to broadcast from the Atlas Brewing Company at 21st and Blue Island. Radio personality Quinn Ryan was scheduled to give an on-site description of the beer manufacturing process straight through to the loading of the beer on to the waiting trucks ready for delivery. The brewery was preparing for delivery of 2,000 barrels and 100,000 cases of beer to retailers on the first night. Additional off-site radio pickups from the Palmer House and the Blackhawk Restaurant would allow at home celebrants to join in Chicago’s New Beer’s Eve festivities. CBS Radio Network arranged a radio hookup to broadcast the festivities in the Midwest’s most important brewing centers of Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis.
A Warning From The City
Because of the quickness of the reinstitution of 3.2% beer and the time consuming efforts needed to debate, write and implement new legislation, the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois discovered that they currently had no regulations on their books to legislate the sale of the soon to be legal beer. The City Council urged Chicagoans to behave themselves during the celebration and warned hoteliers and would be beer retailers that the Council’s course of action on the eventual regulation of beer would be determined by how well the retailers conducted themselves in the first few weeks of beer sales. In some Loop hotels, cards and table tents were prepared for placement in their dining rooms, informing patrons that hotel management was forbidden by federal statue to provide ice, glasses or ginger ale while the customers awaited the serving of beer at 12:01 A. M.It was a little white lie, but hotels feared that celebrants, using hotel provided set-ups, might mix them with bootleg liquor, causing their establishments to be shut down by snooping police or federal agents. Particular attention was to be paid by Chicago police to the more famous Prohibition-era night spots. Clubs like the Frolics, the Chez Paree, Follies Bergere, Vanity Fair and the Green Mill along with the College Inn and the Terrace Garden were warned to be on their best behavior.
Throughout the mix of confusion and anticipation, there seemed to be a sense of serenity coupled with the festivity of the upcoming big event. No one really anticipated any trouble. “Why shouldn’t there be a little celebration?” a night club manager was quoted as saying. “Doesn’t the country need to add a little gaiety to it’s gloom, and is there a better time than right after the legal restriction is first lifted to see whether 3.2 beer can be trusted to add to it?”State’s Attorney Courtney added to the beery mellowness of the moment saying that he expected no trouble.
Jacob Rupert, New York brewer and President of the United States Brewers’ Association wasn’t so sure and recommended that Chicago’s breweries delay their shipments until the late morning. The local brewers cried that they would be swamped by back orders if they waited until morning and continued with their plans for a 12:01 A. M. delivery time.
Beer And Food
Absent from the local papers for years, ads for the Berghoff Brewing Company of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, reappeared in the Chicago Tribune. In a back handed reference to Milwaukee’s Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company, the Berghoff advertised it’s beer as “The Beer that made itself Famous”.Long forgotten ads for Schoenhofen’s“Good Old Edelweiss”and Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, “The Old Favorite”, started popping up in the Chicago papers. In a matter of days, beer began a metamorphosis in the city papers, changing from an Old World German concoction, an intoxicating product of the “brewery interests” as it was sinisterly portrayed in years past, into a refreshing family staple that Mom could now add to her weekly grocery list.
“…Profitable beer merchandising will take into account the successful adaptation of food sales strategy…” advised Modern Brewery Age, an industry trade publication. Local stores took heed. As if overnight, beer joined hands with food and, as a result of this marriage of retail convenience, finally became the drink of moderation.
The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) heralded the arrival of realbeer to their local stores. To accompany the customer’s supply of beer for the week-end, the A&P ads listed Grandmother’s Rye Bread, liver sausage, butter pretzels, kippered herring and Spanish salted peanuts. It was everything a Chicago family needed to “…make it a gala week-end—right in your own home.”Hillman’s reminded the shopper that they, too, would be carrying beer, “…And Don’t Forget the Accessories!”which included Limburger cheese and frankfurters. Loblaw-Jewel proclaimed that they had “BEER at its best!” The Mandel Brothers department store on State Street rushed to open a new shop called The Tavern, equipped to sell beer steins, six favorite brands of beer and all the foods that go with them. The store’s Men’s Grill Room quickly converted half of the shop to replicate a German beer garden. The Walgreen drug store chain announced that it had also made arrangements with local breweries for a limited supply of bottled beer to be placed on shelves for sale at their outlets. On April 7, their featured daily luncheon special was a roast beef sandwich and a bottle of beer for a quarter, beer now available at their soda fountain counter. Sales later that day were reported as “phenomenal”.
On the North Side, a new pretzel company opened to meet expected demand. Pretzels were becoming big business in the city. One snack food plant manager described the industry’s reaction to legal beer. “We…are ready to turn out pretzels by the billion.”Even the local press got in on the food and beer relationship. Mary Meade’s food column in the Chicago Tribunesuggested making a Rye Bread Torte with dark bread leftover from “your beer party,”and discussed how pretzels were now back in style. Chicago families were getting ready for beer and a new classification of food, beer snacks.
New Beer’s Eve
At 12:01 A. M., Friday morning, April 7, 1933, the drinking light was turned on in Chicago and legal, “democraticbeer” was reintroduced to the public. With cheers for President Roosevelt ringing through the air, Prohibition agents and city police, supplemented with Brink’s bank guards, allowed the brewery trucks to leave the plants and make their deliveries. Things got off to an embarrassing start near the Atlas Brewing Company. Acting Mayor Frank Corr, Atlas President Charles Vopika, Coroner Frank Walsh and a host of other Democratic Party hacks and functionaries had gathered at the Iroquois Club at 11 P. M. where the guests had been assured that legal beer would be served an hour before the official deadline. They were forced, however, to wait with the rest of Chicago’s eager beer drinkers until beer was finally delivered to the Iroquois and tapped for serving at 12:15 A. M.To their delight, and to the delight of thousands in the city, the beer was conveniently delivered cold from the brewery, saving the valuable time the pre-Prohibition retailer usually needed to ice it down. After a beer or two, acting Mayor Corr stepped before the W-G-N Radio microphone and hailed beer as a hope for prosperity. Atlas Brewing Company President Charles Vopika next came forward and proudly announced that the first case of bottled beer from his brewery was on it’s way by airplane to President Roosevelt in Washington, D. C.
Delays were worse at the Schoenhofen Company. Soon after midnight, trucks and cars were stretched over a mile as crews loaded the beer as quickly as possible. At the Prima Company, management had scrambled to hire an additional 300 extra trucks for city and county deliveries and had charted an entire train to brazenly get some deli
