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Beer Has Been Part Of America

Beer had been part of America from its first settlement by Europeans. Or, more precisely, the lack of it had. The Mayflower, which was headed south, had to make an unplanned stop near wintry Plymouth because, as William Bradford noted in his journal, “We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere.” (Their hogsheads of ale, a crucial provision on long voyages since water would not keep, had been maintained by the ship’s cooper, John Alden, who decided to stay on in the New World.) Forced to drink fresh water, always a cause for nervousness in those days, one colonist, with either pride or surprise, found that “those that drink it be as healthful, fresh, and lusty as they that drink beer.” Farther south in Virginia there was more bitterness about being stranded without good English ale: “There remained neither taverne, [nor] beer house,” wrote a new immigrant. “Had we beene as free from all sinnes as gluttony, and drunkennesse, we might have been canonized for Saints.”

But beer was food, and soon the colonists began to brew their own, from malted barley imported from England or from malted local corn. Small beer, weak in malt taste and alcohol and meant for immediate drinking, was a standard beverage at meals. Table beer, ship’s beer, and strong beer were more powerful brews meant for keeping. Everyone drank beer. Gentlemen kept barrels in their cellars next to their wine. Harvard College had its own brewhouses, and students were served dinner and supper and two “bevers” between; morning bever was bread and a pint of beer. In 1648 an ailing niece of Gov. John Winthrop, Jr., praised her husband to him: “I am sory he shold sofer soe much for me he drinks water that I might drink bere.”

Despite all the cultural factors in their favor, Englishstyle ales, as well as the Dutch-style beers brewed in New Amsterdam, were quickly eclipsed by other beverages as the settlements grew. Beer couldn’t keep long, and it wasn’t stable enough to be shipped over the vast spaces and widely variable climates of the New World without going flat and sour, so it was commercially viable only for local consumption in a few towns. Some farmers turned to cider for everyday drinking, but mostly people drank rum, distilled from cheap West Indian molasses, and then, as American grain fields developed, whiskey. Both rum and whiskey, which could be shipped anywhere and kept indefinitely, became very, very popular.

So popular, in fact, that by the late eighteenth century American leaders were actually strategizing about how to promote the making and drinking of beer. One reason was patriotic: England was doing a thriving export business in beer to the colonies, while suppressing the development of American industry. The colonists retaliated by boycotting English beer and buying American. “It is to be hoped,” wrote the maltster Sam Adams in 1750, “that the Gentlemen of the Town will endeavour to bring our own OCTOBER BEER into Fashion again, by that most prevailing Motive, EXAMPLE, so that we may no longer be beholden to Foreigners for a Credible Liquor, which may be as successfully manufactured in this Country.” In 1789 George Washington wrote to Lafayette: “We have already been too long subject to British prejudices. I use no porter or cheese in my family, but such as is made in America: both these articles may now be purchased of an excellent quality.” (Washington was a steady customer of the Philadelphia brewer Robert Hare, whose porter, introduced in 1774, quickly won a reputation throughout the colonies and the Caribbean.)

The second reason for the promotion of beer was a desire to wean Americans away from their taste for the hard stuff—“temperance” in its original sense, before it was redefined by evangelical reformers several decades later as a synonym for abstinence. Both reasons were cited by the newly arrived Joseph Coppinger, who in 1810 petitioned President Madison to establish a national brewery in Washington, D.C.: “As a National object it has in my view the greatest importance as it would unquestionably tend to improve the quality of our Malt liquors in every point of the Union. And serve to counteract the baneful influence of ardent spirits on the health and Morals of our fellow Citizens.” Madison passed the letter on to Jefferson, who had recently begun experimenting with home brewing for the needs of Monticello (a job he assigned to Peter Hemings, the brother of Sally). Jefferson replied: “I have no doubt, either in a moral or economical view, of the desirableness to introduce a taste for malt liquors instead of that for ardent spirits … The business of brewing is now so much introduced in every state, that it appears to me to need no other encouragement than to increase the number of customers. I do not think it a case where a company need form itself on patriotic principles merely, because there is a sufficiency of private capital which would embark itself in the business if there were a demand.” But that, thanks to a remote city in Central Europe, was soon to change, and the change would transform American popular culture.

The beer Jefferson knew did not resemble what was poured at the American Association games in spring 1882 because until 1842 all beers everywhere were dark or cloudy or both. In that year brewers in Pilsen, in the Austrian province of Bohemia, discovered a process for making a clear, golden beer. The general type became known as lager, because it required storage, or lagering, in cold caves for several months before it was ready to drink. Introduced at the same time that mass-produced “glasses” were replacing opaque wood, leather, and ceramic steins, the new golden lager was light, stimulating, and visually exciting, and it took Europe and America by storm.

Colder and more refreshing than British ale, lager first appealed mainly to the German immigrants who were pouring into American cities in those years, more than a million of them by the 1850s, but it soon spilled over to the wider market. The New York Times in the mid-1850s sniffed that lager was “getting a good deal too fashionable.” And soon the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce noticed a growth in beer drinking due “in no little degree to the taste which has been acquired for ‘lager’ as a beverage, not only among the native German population, but all classes.”

A new cultural institution arose to feed the new frenzy: the beer garden. Distant but recognizable ancestors to the amusement park, the gardens, which could be either open to the air or enclosed “winter” gardens, welcomed families on Sunday outings and featured live music. They had tables and chairs instead of bars, and they were known for their food. New York’s Bowery had some of the fanciest, and beer gardens were also popular in St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. The suburbs of Chicago had several, which, according to one observer, served 3,000 people a day in the summer: “The waiters, most of them fine-appearing elderly gentlemen, dressed in black, serve beer, wine, and soft drinks to the people out in the open, while at tables beneath the roof, dinners are being served. The garden is brilliantly lighted with Japanese lanterns hanging from the trees. The lights, the trees, the starry heavens above, the moon gliding now and then behind the clouds, soul-stirring music, now strong and full, now soft and sweet, make this a charming spot where lovers delight to come, where the businessman, returned from the crowded centers of the city, comes with wife and child, and the business cares float gradually away, borne on the lighter strains of music. Old men with their pipes find in this place a never-ending source of pleasure, and will sit by the hour philosophizing and reminiscing over a single glass of beer.” Festive places where people of all ages came to dance, flirt, eat, and relax, the beer gardens transformed the drink they served. Beer was no longer food. Now it was fun.

New American lager brewers established firms whose names would be familiar more than a century later. In 1842 the Prussian Schaefer brothers, Frederick and Maximilian, set up the first commercial lager brewery in New York City, and two years later Philadelphia had one, the forerunner of C. Schmidt and Sons. In Milwaukee the daughter of the brewer Jacob Best married the steamboat captain Frederick Pabst; her brother Charles set up a lager brewery in 1848 and seven years later sold out to a young brewer fresh from Germany named Frederick Miller. In 1856 in the same city the brewer August Krug died, and his widow married the bookkeeper Joseph Schlitz. Eberhard Anheuser, a St. Louis soap manufacturer, acquired a small brewery in 1860 and then had the good fortune to acquire a son-in-law as a partner, a talented salesman named Adolphus Busch.

Lager had to be brewed, stored, and shipped low temperatures, and the brewers created a huge market for natural ice. (Milwaukee’s early prominence as a brewing city was due partly to the availability of lots of natural ice.) Millions of tons were cut from frozen rivers and lakes and shipped each year. At first brewers lagered their beer underground. The Schaefer brothers in 1849 carved caves in the solid rock under their brewery at Fiftieth Street and Fourth (now Park) Avenue. A reporter toured Best’s vaults in Milwaukee in 1864 and wrote, “A prominent traveler and political writer who was one of our party, informed us that it very much resembled the Bastille.”

The Civil War would turn out to have been the high point of whiskey’s popularity. By the 1870s Americans had clearly chosen beer over spirits, and lager over ale. Breweries had always been regional, by necessity, but now a national market opened up to the big firms with capital to invest in new technology. Lager, if kept cold, was more stable than ale, and advances in bottling, refrigeration, and railroad transportation, along with the introduction of pasteurization (invented by the French chemist while studying the fermentation of beer), meant longer shelf life and the ability to ship beer long distances without spoilage. (The advent of the crown bottle cap in 1892 would extend shelf life even further.) Adolphus Busch was the first to see what all this made possible: the creation of a national brand. Near Pilsen was a town, once home to the royal court brewery of Bohemia, that made a slightly sweeter version of golden lager whose recipe Busch felt was ideally suited to American tastes. The town was called Ceske Budejovice, but it was better know by its German name, Budweis. The Budweiser brand, created in 1875, would make Busch a very wealthy man.

The temperance movement, and especially the powerful Anti-Saloon League, targeted the saloons as places of prostitution and vice. As the movement gathered momentum, ice water began to be served in restaurants and at banquets and public occasions, and women and respectable middle-class men stopped drinking, at least in public. That left the saloons to immigrants and workingmen. (And to the desperate dinner guests who, an English traveler noted, “would be ashamed to be seen with a glass of beer at their dinner and prefer to go to the bar, where they are not so likely to be seen.”)

Where once these men would have drunk whiskey, now they drank beer. Excise taxes introduced during the Civil War had raised the price of whiskey, so distillers began making an aged, higher-quality product aimed at the middle class. The more lightly taxed beer became the ordinary man’s drink. Social stigma soon followed. A Colorado physician, noting that opiates were a “growing and fashionable vice among the rich—especially the fashionable women,” went on to concede that this was only natural since “whiskey and champagne are painful in their after-effects rather than pleasant,” and “beer is vulgar.”

Such, at any rate, was the view from above toward the end of the century, and it was reinforced by the naturalist novels of the period. The beer drinkers in Stephen Crane’s 1893 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets fit the bill—laborers and immigrants all: “The vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted labor. Men with calloused hands and attired in garments that showed the wear of an endless trudge for a living, smoked their pipes contentedly and spent five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for beer. … The nationalities of the Bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions. Pete aggressively walked up a side aisle and took seats with Maggie at a table beneath the balcony. ‘Two beehs!’” Beer is the alcoholic ensign of class degradation, and the heroine’s final ruin is marked by the appearance of a beer-soaked demon: “The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons. … The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. … When almost to the river the girl saw … a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. … His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped.”

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