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Pre-prohibition Brewery Structures
Beer brewing became a major industry in the United States, in the second half of the 19th century. By the early 1910s, there were large, industrial breweries scattered throughout the United States, particularly in cities. A number of factors including xenophobia and political system that was biased towards rural voters contributed to the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which prohibited the sale of alcohol. This was followed by the Volstead Act which outlined the ways that the 18th Amendment would be enforced. The 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act effectively killed an entire industry. Beer brewing directly employed 75,404 people in 1,250 breweries in 1914. Beer brewing had required the construction of thousands of specialized buildings throughout urban America. The passage of national prohibition made all of those buildings functionally obsolete. Some brewers tried to continue by producing non-alcoholic beer. They were mostly unsuccessful. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, the market for beer, brewing technology, and the design of industrial buildings had changed. Most of the pre-prohibition brewery structures were never used to make beer again after 1919. Many of those structures were reused for other purposes though and many are still standing 100 years later. The main focus of my study has been the distribution of those structures. Prior to 1919, breweries had been distributed fairly evenly throughout the industrialized and urbanized parts of United States. Their even spatial distribution combined with their uniform period of closure presents a unique opportunity to study the post-obsolescence lives of similar industrial buildings in a wide variety of contexts. The following is an examination of the structures themselves.
Earlier I posted a few articles about the geography of the brewing industry in 1898. I'm still working on a comparison between the structures of the brewing industry as they stood in 1915 and what remains today.
The breweries of the 19th century came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. The essential qualifier for breweries according to most statistical sources, after the Civil War, was the possession of a license or a revenue ID to brew beer. But this didn't indicate much of anything about the material reality of a production facility. In the 19th century, and today as well, beer could be produced with a few simple pots in any kitchen, in any type of building. Larger industrial breweries were highly specialized structures designed to produce beer. Smaller breweries might have been housed in storefronts or in outbuildings behind taverns. A clear and accurate system of brewery classification has eluded me. But studying the material component of the brewing industry without recognizing that breweries were not all alike makes no sense. The most important difference between various 19th century breweries, in my opinion, is the quantitative difference of size. However, the qualitative differences in breweries that made ale versus those that made lager or those built in different periods are also substantial.
The easiest way to measure a brewery's size or scale, given the available historic information, is by equating size to productive capacity or output. The output of breweries is and was normally measured in 31-gallon barrels. The relationship between size and output wasn't always consistent though. Breweries became more efficient as technology improved and so were able to produce more in the same structures. Historic production information is easier to find than other comparative statistics but there are big gaps in the production statistics I have found, and production information was usually self-reported. The last two years of research inform the following general observations: A brewery producing hundreds of barrels per year or less, could be housed in almost any structure. Brewers required substantial, permanent, structures to produce thousands of barrels of beer per year or more. The larger, multi-story, industrial breweries that have been my main interest produced tens of thousands of barrels per year or more. The largest breweries in the US, in the pre-prohibition period, were campuses of buildings spanning several city blocks that produced over a million barrels per year.
The book American Breweries II by Dale Van Wieren has been immensely helpful for this study. However American Breweries II (AB2) does not include production information. AB2 does list years of brewery operation. I have digitized and mapped all of the breweries mentioned in AB2 that operated prior to 1919. I can sort and filter these, close to 8,000 records, to find breweries that operated in a given year. This provides a good base of comparison for other sources. The US Census and the United States Brewers' Association (USBA) published statistics including; number of brewing establishments, barrels produced by state, and national totals for every year after 1863. The Civil War was financed in part by a tax on beer at $1 per barrel. Brewers continued to refer to this as the “war tax” up to the early 20th century. The records that stemmed from collecting that tax became the basis for the most accurate national brewing statistics. Unfortunately, tax records for individual establishments are not available. The production information I have about individual breweries comes from a variety of sources. I have digitized a survey of individual breweries from 1878 and 1879 that was included in the USBA publication: Beer, Its History and its Economic Value. I've also digitized production figures from American Brewers' Review: Brewers' Guides published in 1896 and 1898. Other production information came from capacity notes on fire insurance maps and mentions in contemporary trade journals. I have not been able to find a uniform production survey published after 1898.
The largest number of operating breweries, in a given year in the 19th century, was 4,131 in 1873 according to The United States Brewers' Association. The American Breweries II data set only lists 2,332 entries for breweries operating that year. I can't explain the discrepancy. But I think the 4,131 number is probably inflated. The 1878-1879 United States Brewers' Association Survey counted 2,422 brewers operating in either or both of those years. 1,043 of those breweries produced less than 500 barrels per year. 1,029 of those produced more than 1,000 barrels per year. 428 produced more than 5,000 barrels per year. Only 250 were producing over 10,000 barrels per year. The most common brewery in the 1870s was a very small facility, likely no bigger than a small house or smaller. These breweries usually employed just the owner and maybe the owner's immediate family. Sometimes they operated only a few months out of the year. They may have merely supplemented the owner's income rather than entirely supported the owner. The number of very small breweries rapidly dwindled as the 1800s progressed. By 1898, the number of breweries producing 500 barrels or less in the US had dwindled to 334. There were 682 breweries in 1898 producing more than 10,000 barrels. The total number of operating breweries in the US continued to decline until prohibition took effect. But the amount of beer produced kept increasing. The breweries that I'm most interested in were housed in single, or in campuses of, specialized industrial buildings that were built for the purpose of brewing beer. In general, those breweries produced 10,000 barrels per year or more.
Number of brewers per year
Number of barrels produced per year
The smallest breweries were built with the cheapest, most readily available materials. This almost always meant wood. In some western locations, rubble or uncoursed stone was used. Small wooden breweries would have been common in eastern cities in the mid-19th century. To my knowledge, none of them survive today. There are quite a few surviving, or remnants of, small primitively constructed 19th Century breweries in the western mining districts. The Gilbert Brewery in Virginia City Montana is a good example of small brewery construction in wood.
Gilbert Brewery Virginia City Montana, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress
The Gilbert Brewery is currently used as a venue for the Brewery Follies, a cabaret show that compliments the historical tourism economy of Virginia City.
Small breweries in the later part of the of the 19th Century, especially in the west, rarely made their own malt. They purchased malted barley from specialist malt producers. The minimal brewery arrangement would have contained a hearth to support a brew kettle made out of some kind of metal, hopefully copper. The brew kettle would have been positioned above a mash tun usually made of wood. Hot water would be drained from the brew kettle into the mash tun to be mixed with ground malt. After steeping, the mixture would be strained and returned to the brew kettle to be boiled with hops. Once finished, the hot liquid would be cooled in open air in troughs and then be drained into barrels for fermenting. Almost all of the required equipment in a very small brewery could be constructed with wood. Breweries that produced a thousand or fewer barrels per year didn't necessarily have any specific indicative form. They were not specialized industrial buildings. The smallest of them were designed and built by the brewers themselves. Their form was dictated by limited knowledge of construction and their materials by availability. The remnants of small breweries are hard to find in eastern urban landscapes. They often did not appear in fire insurance atlases. Address information for them is often hard to find. They are easier to find in the sparse built environments of western towns. Material Culture of Breweries by Herman Wiley Ronnenberg is an excellent book that focuses on the physical stuff of pre-prohibition brewing. Most of his work has been studying smaller western breweries.
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