The United States of Beer: A Freewheeling History of the All-American Drink by Dane Huckelbridge

Author:Dane Huckelbridge [Huckelbridge, Dane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

After having to make do with tepid, murky ales that were unreliable and often sour, Americans across the board welcomed crisp, refreshing lager beer with open arms—although some other aspects of German culture took a little getting used to.

Following the failed revolutions of 1848, and the subsequent tide of German refugees, a new sight began to appear in many midwestern cities: the beer garden—a far cry from the smoky, all-male taverns and saloons that Anglo-Americans were accustomed to.

This is not to say that beer did not exist in the Midwest before the arrival of Germans. It most certainly did. According to some accounts, the Iroquois were brewing a mildly alcohol beverage from the sweet sap of sugar maples long before Mrs. Butterworth came to town. So sacred was the sugar maple, the Iroquois had their own form of thanksgiving ceremony dedicated to it, and they venerated the trees with ceremonial fires and offerings of incense and tobacco.

The motley collection of French fur trappers and traders who settled the region also brewed. It’s easy to forget the Gallic love of beer, given their reputation for viniculture, but it was precious to the French centuries before the arrival of Roman vineyards. Beer never faded in popularity in the monasteries of the north, where Frankish monks would go on to refine the use of hops and facilitate its spread through Germany and the rest of Europe. It was only logical, then, that when French missionaries traveled into the colder, damper parts of the northern Mississippi, they resorted to what they knew how to make best in such places: beer. As one early visitor to French Illinois noted, “Wheat and Indian Corn grow very well . . . their beer is very good.” In Kaskaskia, Jesuits had established a frontier mission by the 1760s that consisted of “two hundred and forty arpents of cultivated land, a very good stock of cattle, and a brewery.” A brewer named François Colman was turning out cold ones for fur trappers and river men in the Missouri settlement of Ste. Genevieve as early as 1779, and Jacques Delassus de St. Vrain was advertising that he had “erected a manufactory and taken into partnership an experienced European brewer” in St. Louis by 1810. His brewery would later change owners, but its genesis was entirely French.

Among them of course were the more traditional Anglo-American and Palatine brewers who came from the East with their ales and porters as well. A Davis Embree was already brewing both in Cincinnati as early as 1810, and even shipping some of his excess downriver to New Orleans. By 1832, a Cleveland newspaper was advertising both ale and table beer, with the local beer trade soon to be dominated by a brewer in the Flats part of town named John M. Hughes, whose “Hughes Ale” would become a local favorite. Detroit followed suit in 1836, when “a single brewery upon the River road” owned by Emerson, Davis & Moore began selling suds, and Chicago beer took off that same year, when the city’s first mayor, William B.

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