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Pre-prohibition Brewery Structures
Brewery business was sometimes conducted in remote offices. The business of the Buffalo brewery in Sacramento, for example, was conducted at the the Ruhstaller Building which was many blocks from the brewery. Today the Ruhstaller office building is still in use. The Buffalo brewery was demolished decades ago. In many cases the brewery office was a part of the brewery campus. Offices were often ornamented structures that stood apart from the rest of the brewery buildings architecturally. Brewery offices have been suitable for many other uses and are frequently among the surviving buildings of brewery complexes.
Fresno Brewing Company offices, Fresno California
The Fresno Brewing Company offices are the only surviving part of what was once a large brewery complex. The building is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Fresno brewery was reopened in 1933 but closed permanently in 1942. The building has been used as a storage facility and by a tent and awning company since.
Dick Brothers' brewery offices (on left), Quincy Illinois
The Dick Brothers' brewery complex is one of the best preserved pre-prohibition brewery campuses in the country. Almost all of the significant buildings are still standing and largely unaltered since 1919. The brewery office, on the left, has Distinctive Beaux Arts styling that separates it from the rest of the Romanesque brewery buildings. The brew house is immediately to the right of the office in the photo above. To the right of the brew house are the stock house and a carriage/utility building. The Dick Brothers' brewery reopened after 1933 and operated until 1951. The brewery campus is currently being reused and redeveloped as an arts district.
Eberhardt and Ober brewery offices (on right), Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
The Eberhardt and Ober brewery office building is on the right in the photo above. To the left of the office are the brew house and the stock house. This brewery complex has been re-occupied by a brewer. The brew house building is the center of new Penn Brewery's operations.
The brewing industry went through a dramatic consolidation in the late 1800s and early 1900s along with an equally dramatic increase in output. This mirrors in many ways what was happening with other industries in the US during that period. The new tools of capitalism, including the corporation and trust, facilitated the pooling of ever larger sums of investment capital. Advances in science and industrial process equipment allowed for massive increases in the quantity of beer a brewing company could produce if they were adequately capitalized. From the 1890s on, it became more common for entire brewery complexes to be built at once as opposed to the piecemeal construction of brewery buildings over the years. When breweries were designed and built in the same project, they could be more efficient. The architects that designed unified breweries, though, often referenced the traditional separations of specialized structures with ornamentation, different roof heights or other superficial means.
Joseph Herb Brewery, Milan Ohio
Joseph Herb Brewery was built in 1905. The functions of the brewery were housed in distinct looking sections of the building. From left to right were the office, the stock house, the brew house and the boiler house. The building is currently used to manufacture agricultural nutrients.
Elk County Brewery, St. Marys Pennsylvania
The Elk County brewery built in 1900 had a separate office and bottling house on the left in the photo above. The alley that separated it from the brew house and stock house was later filled in with a new structure. The buildings currently house an advanced materials manufacturer.
Consumers Brewery, St. Louis Missouri
The Consumers Brewery in St. Louis was built in 1896. Functions of the brewery were divided among sections of the main building and several ancillary buildings were constructed as well. The ancillary buildings have since been razed. The functions of the main structure above, from left to right were; boiler/mechanical, brew house, entrance and racking room, and stock house. Brewing was resumed after 1933 and stopped permanently in 1984. The building has been mostly vacant since.
The Consumers brewery (1896) above, the Dubuque brewery (1895) and the Grain Belt Brewery (1892) below, were built at the height of specialist brewery design in the US and at the height of Victorian industrial architecture. All three breweries were comprehensively designed by specialist brewery architects. In the late Victorian period, industrialists were still willing to pay for quality aesthetic design and opulent ornamentation on new production facilities. The scale of factories of all kinds including breweries had grown throughout the 19th century to massive size. Images of the central plant, whether it was brewery or textile mill, were often used in product advertisements. Factories of all kinds were expressions of their owner's personality and culture in the urban landscape. The 1890s were before trucking made locations in urban areas, next to rail road tracks, less desirable. This often meant building up instead of out. As the 20th century progressed, industrial facilities became more dispersed less tall and less ornamented. The elegant minimal factory designs of Albert Kahn in the 1910s morphed into utilitarian factory design by the 1940s. New industrial buildings of all types started looking like plain boxes. The evolution of brewery design was cut off abruptly in 1919. Surviving pre-prohibition breweries are always representatives of the period before modernist industrial architecture. The breweries built in the 1890s are representative, in my opinion, of the pinnacle of pre-modern, Victorian industrial architecture. Many of the best surviving examples are badly deteriorated and threatened with demolition
Dubuque Brewing and Malting Company, Dubuque Iowa
The stock house of the Dubuque Brewing and Malting Company brewery is on the right in the photo above. The brew house is at the far left. The main mechanical equipment was housed in the left-center section.
Dubuque Brewing and Malting Company, Dubuque Iowa
The mechanical section is in the center in the photo above and brew house is on the far left. This massive facility was constructed in 1895 and operated until 1915. It was never used to produce beer again after closing in 1915. The building has been marginally used by various tenants since. It is badly deteriorated and threatened with demolition.
The Grain Belt Brewery, Minneapolis Minnesota, photo: Laura Hedlund
The Grain Belt, or Minneapolis, brewery is an outstanding example of Victorian brewery architecture. The main brewery building in the photo above included brew house functions on the left and a stock house on the right. The brewery resumed production after 1933 and continued to produce beer until 1975. It has since been purchased by an architectural firm and renovated. It now houses the offices of that firm as well as other office tenants. Several of the other buildings of Grain Belt's pre-prohibition brewery campus are extant and have been adaptively reused.
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