Winnebago County's 2018 Beer Production

February 28, 2019, 5:34 am

≪ Previous: The Beer Here: Oshkosh Lager

Brewery production reports for 2018 have now been released in full by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. The monthly reports list how many barrels of taxable beer each Wisconsin brewery produced during the past year. A barrel of beer, by the way, contains 31 gallons or the equivalent of 6.8 cases of beer.

The numbers within the production records tell only part of the story, so I'll include some additional info after the charts. Here's what we're seeing in Winnebago County (click the chart to enlarge it)...

And here are the numbers for 2018 compared to 2017 (Fifth Ward, HighHolder, and Omega are not included; they did not have a full year’s worth of production in 2017).

Production is down 10% at Bare Bones and 12% at Fox River. That may be an easy takeaway, but it's nowhere near so alarming as it first may appear.

Bare Bones got off to a rocky start last year. Through the first five months, production was down by almost 19%. A contributor to that was overproduction at the end of 2017, creating a surplus of beer that lingered through the first quarter of 2018. By spring, Bare Bones was back on track. The brewery's production levels for the remainder of 2018 were on par with its 2017 output. Still, Bare Bones appears to have reached a plateau, at least for the time being.

The Fox River story is entirely different. In 2017, Fox River reached capacity in terms of how much beer it could produce at its own breweries. So in 2018, the brewery moved part of its BLU Bobber production to the new Hinterland Facility in Green Bay. The beer produced in Green Bay doesn't get included in Fox River's production reports. If it did, Fox River's would have seen an increase in output for the year.

Fox River's combined output for its Appleton and Oshkosh facilities was 2,627 barrels, making it the largest brewery in the Fox Cities area for the second year in a row. Appleton's Stone Arch, which held that title previously, remains second but has fallen further behind. Stone Arch's 2018 production of 2,074 barrels is down 10% from its 2017 output of 2,783 barrels.

Lion's Tail in Neenah had a banner year with production up 16% to 547 barrels. Juice Cloud, the brewery's popular New England style IPA, has had plenty to do with that. Production at Lion's Tail has risen steadily ever since the introduction of Juice Cloud in the summer of 2017.

Fifth Ward also had a good year, producing 433 barrels. That’s a significant amount of beer for a self-distributing brewery in its first, full year of production. Output at Fifth Ward during the last six months of 2018 was up 23% compared to the first six months of the year.

Omega and HighHolder, the two nano breweries in Winnebago County, appear to be doing well. But it’s difficult to draw a bead on new breweries of this size. HighHolder only reported for nine months of the year, so its numbers aren't indicative of a marked trend. Omega, averaging about two barrels a month during its first full year of production, will almost certainly see its output increase in 2019.

Oshkosh alone produced 2,186 barrels of beer in 2018, an increase of 11% over 2017. That's healthy growth, but for a brewing scene as young as this one is, I would expect it to be somewhat higher. One of the local brewers recently expressed his concern to me that not enough new craft beer drinkers are being cultivated in this part of the state. He mentioned that you seem to see a lot of the same faces in brewery taprooms and at beer events. I've noticed that too and it's not a good sign. If there's a weak point here, it's that all the breweries seem to be mining the same, narrow craft-beer demographic.

Infinite growth is definitely not the end all and be all when it comes to beer, but it does tell you something about the condition of a local beer scene. We're in good shape here, but the 2018 numbers present a somewhat muddled picture. In that respect, they’re fairly reflective of the state of American craft beer as a whole.

On a final note, you may have noticed that Barrel 41 of Neenah and Emprize Brew Mill of Menasha are not accounted for here. Barrel 41, which opened in November, has yet to enter the Wisconsin production reports. I suspect that will change when the first of the 2019 reports are released. Emprize, which has been selling its beer since at least July of 2018, has never been listed. The how or why of that remains a mystery beyond my knowing.

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Sour Beer in Bottles

March 4, 2019, 11:01 am

≫ Next: Winnebago County Beer

≪ Previous: Winnebago County's 2018 Beer Production

Here’s a couple of bottles with 140 years between them.

The clay bottle is from the 1870s when Leonard Schiffmann was bottling his sour, Berliner-style Weissbier at his brewery on Doty Street. The glass bottle is from Fifth Ward, which recently began packaging its sours in bottles. Fifth Ward becomes the first Oshkosh brewery in more than 100 years to bottle this sort of beer.

For a deeper dive on sour beer in Oshkosh, check out this postcovering the older breweries, and this post that explores Fifth Ward’s sour program.

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Winnebago County Beer

March 5, 2019, 5:43 am

≫ Next: The Cellar is For Sale

≪ Previous: Sour Beer in Bottles

Finally! The book I wrote last year about the history of brewing in our fine county is about to be released.

The official launch of Winnebago County Beer will happen Saturday, April 6 at Fox River Brewing Company in Oshkosh. I'll be there from 1-3 pm with plenty of books in tow. If you can't be there (or can't wait), the book is currently available for pre-order at Amazon. In the meantime, check out the Facebook event page. Hope to see you on April 6!

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The Cellar is For Sale

March 7, 2019, 5:23 am

≫ Next: When Wilhelm Kohlhoff Brewed Peoples Beer

≪ Previous: Winnebago County Beer

Dave Koepke plans to start a brewery. That’s created a dilemma for him. Koepke is owner of The Cellar Homebrew shop, which he moved to Oshkosh from Fond du Lac three years ago. At the time of the move, Koepke was already entertaining the idea of launching a brewery. Initially, he thought he could operate both businesses in tandem. His view on that has since changed.

“I realized that I can't manage this and get a brewery off the ground at the same time,” Koepke says. “The shop is one of those businesses where the owner has to be here and know the customers. The brewery isn't going to leave me enough time to run this business the way it needs to be run.”

Inside The Cellar.

Koepke now has The Cellar up for sale. "I'd like to find somebody in the next couple of months to begin taking over and train them," he says. "I'm basically going to be available until December 31. I'm going to be doing other things, but the person who takes over will have me until the end of the year to walk them through the transition."

Koepke opened The Cellar in Fond du Lac in 2009. He moved the business to Oshkosh in 2016 to be more centrally located among homebrewers in the Appleton - Oshkosh - Fond du Lac corridor. His current location at 465 N. Washburn Street, is just off Highway 41 and includes a warehouse along with the retail space.

"I've priced it very reasonably," Koepke says. "You couldn't buy all this, put it in here, and start this business for what I'm asking. Everything is in place. This is going to be a turnkey business when I sell it."

As for his brewery in planning, Koepke is currently exploring his options. "I don't have a spot yet," he says. "Right now I'm looking at Fond du Lac or Oshkosh. More than likely, it will be a brewpub, not just a brewery and taproom."

In the meantime, Koepke is still at The Cellar helping area homebrewers with their beer. "I just want everyone to know that I’m not closing the store," he says. "I’m not going to abandon the customers who have built this business. I've been doing this 10 years. I've put a lot of time in building the clientele and the reputation. It's not like the business is capped. It's still growing. It's been great, I've really enjoyed it, but I just can't do this and do a brewery build-up at the same time."

Koepke says he’s open to talking with anybody who may have questions or an interest in what running a business such as The Cellar entails. He can be reached using the contact information on The Cellar's website.

↧

When Wilhelm Kohlhoff Brewed Peoples Beer

March 17, 2019, 6:28 am

≫ Next: Untangling the History of Ted Mack and Peoples Brewing

≪ Previous: The Cellar is For Sale

Wilhelm Kohlhoff worked as a brewer at Peoples Brewing Company in Oshkosh from 1953 until 1968. This wasn't his first brewing job. Kohlhoff had come to Oshkosh from Germany where he worked at a small brewery in Stettfeld, Bavaria (more on Kohlhoff's background can be found here). The brewery in Stettfeld was nothing like what he encountered at Peoples. "Oh yeah, that was all different," Kohlhoff says shaking his head. "All different."

When Kohlhoff arrived in Oshkosh, Peoples was at its peak. The brewery's production had climbed to 35,000 barrels of beer annually. Kohlhoff became one of 41 full-time employees at Peoples. He was assigned to the brewhouse where his job was to see Peoples Beer through the first phase of production culminating in the delivery of wort to the beer cellars for fermentation.

Wilhelm Kohlhoff in the 1950s

Kohlhoff is now 91 years old. He still recalls details of the brewing process he followed at Peoples. He also still has the original, handwritten notes he made when he first went to work in the brewhouse. They form a step-by-step, minute-by-minute outline of his brew day. The notes are written in a mix of German and English and give temperatures in degrees Réaumur, a unit of measure favored by many brewers of the period.

The brewing process at Peoples was defined by the brewery itself. Built in 1913, it was a prototypical, four-story, lager brewery with a detached bottling house. This was a gravity- or tower-style brewery. Gravity was a prime mover of solids and liquids through the system. Kohlhoff worked his way, from top to bottom, thousands of times. "Yeah, I know the whole building through and through," he says looking at a picture of the brewery that was demolished in 1974.

Peoples Brewing Company after it had closed in 1972.

Most of the raw materials that went into Peoples Beer were stored at or near the top of the brewery. They flowed down through the brewhouse being transformed along the way into wort, the sweet liquid that is fermented into beer.

The substrate was water that came from a 530-foot artesian well drilled at the brewery in 1949. "Before that, they had a well that was 300-feet deep and that was not perfect or not soft enough," Kohlhoff says. "Then they drilled another 200-feet deeper and then that water was perfect."

The water was pumped from the well up into a massive holding tank housed in a cupola above the brewhouse. From there, it was drained – as needed – into the hot-liquor tank on the fourth floor. There it would be heated prior to the start of brewing.

The cupola atop the brewery where the main water reservoir was housed.

The recipe for Peoples Beer was classically simple. A 100-barrel batch required...
• 3,200 pounds malted barley (73% of Grist)
• 1,200 pounds corn grits (27% of Grist)
• 50-65 pounds of American and German hops (0.5 to 0.625 pounds of hops per barrel)

Malted, six-row barley came from the Fleischmann Malting plant in Red Wing, Minnesota. It was sent to Oshkosh by train. A rail spur ran between the brewhouse and bottling house. The malt would go from the rail car into an elevator on the south side of the brewhouse and then up to the malt hopper on the fourth floor. The map below is from 1956 and shows the location of the rail spur that served the brewery.

The yellow highlights a rail car making a delivery to the brewery.

In the 1950s, nearly all American beer was made from a grist that included some form of either corn or rice. At Peoples, they used corn grits and the American double-mash method, mashing the grits with 300 pounds of malt in 15 barrels of water. The malt was necessary to provide enzymes needed to convert the corn's starches into fermentable sugars. This cereal mash was performed in a steam-heated cooker fitted with rakes stirring the grist together as it slowly came to a boil. With that set in motion, Kohlhoff would head downstairs to the second floor where the primary mash tun resided.

Diagram of a typical cereal cooker.

The main mash began with an infusion of 2,900 pounds of malt in 30 barrels of hot water. The mash would settle in at 104ºF and rest at that temperature for 15 minutes. The mash tun was also fitted with a steam jacket and stirring rakes. After the rest, Kohlhoff would start the rakes and gradually raise the temperature to 140ºF for another 20-25 minutes. During this time, he would begin recirculating the wort through the mash to help draw out fermentable sugars and create a more uniform environment within the porridge-like mass of water and malt.

A mash tun similar to that used at Peoples.

About 90 minutes into the main mash, Kohlhoff would drop the now boiling contents of the cereal cooker into the main mash bringing its temperature up to 155ºF. He'd then allow the mash to rest for approximately 20 minutes before adding additional hot water and starting the lautering process. This separated the wort from the bed of spent grain and grits, which would later be taken by farmers in the area for use as livestock feed. The wort was run off through a grant, a smaller vessel that helped buffer the flow of liquid into the boil kettle.

The copper boil kettle was perched between the first and second floors of the brewhouse. It was steam-heated and had a 130-barrel capacity. Kohlhoff would add hops to the kettle as the wort was flowing into it and coming to boil. This technique, known as first-wort hopping, was a fairly common practice in American breweries before Prohibition, but much less utilized in the 1950s. Some brewers believed it helped to create a more complex hop-flavor and a less biting bitterness.

A small dose of salt (NaCl) was added to the kettle along with the first addition of hops. The salt was to help blunt bitterness while enhancing mouthfeel and the sensation of sweetness in the finished beer. They did the same thing across town at Rahr Brewing. Both breweries leaned towards the mellower, malty side with their beers. Despite that malt-driven flavor profile, hops were still a major consideration at Peoples.

When Kohlhoff speaks of hops he does so in terms of place of origin instead of breed. "We used German hops and American hops," Kohlhoff says. "Seventy percent of it was German." That probably means Peoples was brewed with German Hallertau and American Cluster. In the 1950s, these were the most commonly derived hops from their respective countries. They were whole-flower hops stored in bales in a second-floor cold room directly behind the brewhouse.

Kohlhoff vaguely recalls that American hops were used for the first-wort addition. He doesn't remember the exact amount. He estimates it would have been about 15-20 pounds. After the wort had been boiling for an hour, a similar sized load of German hops was added. That was followed by two, smaller additions of German hops. Kohlhoff's thumbnail sketch of the hop schedule for the 105-minute boil comes out like so...
• American Hops (~15 pounds) – First-Wort Addition.
• German Hops (~15 pounds) – Boiled for 45 minutes.
• German Hops (~10 pounds) – Boiled for 30 minutes.
• German Hops (~10 pounds) – Boiled for 15 minutes.

At the end of the boil, the wort was drained from the kettle and through a hop jack, a straining device to remove spent hops from the wort.

The flow of wort through the brewhouse from the cooker to the hop jack.

From the hop jack, the wort was pumped up to a collection tank on the fourth floor. From there it drained to the heat exchanger for cooling. Kohlhoff's description of the cooling process suggests Peoples used a Baudelot-type chiller with the hot wort cascading over a rack of refrigerated pipes. This quickly reduced the wort temperature to below 50ºF.

A Baudelot-type chiller.

Kohlhoff’s job was done, but he wasn't shielded from the remainder of the process. Though the brewhouse was his primary concern, he sometimes helped out in other areas of the brewery. "Certain things you had to know, and not just be a brewer," he says.

The wort Kohlhoff made was bound for the cellars for fermentation and conditioning. The "cellars" were in the north half of the brewery on the second and third floors. The red line dividing the image below runs between the brewhouse on the right and the cellars and stock house on the left.

Peoples Beer was a lager beer. It underwent a cold, primary fermentation lasting eight to ten days at 47ºF. When Kohlhoff began working at Peoples the brewery was still in the process of replacing its old, wooden fermentation tubs with glass-lined, steel tanks. I asked him if that change impacted the flavor of the beer. Kohlhoff said, "No, I wouldn't say the flavor, it was a little more clean and a little bit different, yeah."

Kohlhoff would take his first sample of the beer near the end of fermentation. "We'd go in the cellar at 6 days or 7 days," he says. "There was a little valve on the tank where you'd take some off and see how clear it is and how it all tastes." Kohlhoff says everyone at the brewery regularly sampled the product they were making. "We always had a barrel of beer that was right there. All the guys working in the brewery were drinking that free beer."

From the fermenters, the beer would go into the aging tanks in the "Ruh" cellar for several weeks of cold conditioning (lagering). Here the beer would clear and the flavor would develop into something more refined. Kohlhoff doesn't remember the specific duration of the lagering process only that in the summer demand would sometimes have them turning out beer more rapidly than usual. Most lager breweries of this period aged their beer anywhere from three weeks to two months before packaging it.

Detail from a 1953 ad for "fully aged" Peoples Beer

After lagering, the beer was filtered and carbonated. At Peoples, they used a gas collection system to capture CO2 produced during carbonation. The CO2 was then forced back into the finished beer at 2.87-2.89 volumes, which would be at the high end of carbonation for an American lager.

The final product was pale, and medium-bodied, with a mildly sweet malt flavor. An analysis of the beer done by the J.E. Siebel Company in April 1971 may shed more light on the beer's exact properties. Though the report comes three years after Kohlhoff left Peoples, he maintains that the beer changed little if any during the intervening years. After leaving the brewery, Kohlhoff remained in Oshkosh and continued drinking Peoples Beer. He also remained in contact with former co-workers at the brewery. He believes they would have mentioned changes made to the recipe or brewing process. With that in mind, here's part of the 1971 analysis:

Clarity: Brilliant
Color: 3.4 SRM
ABV: 4.62%
IBUs: 18
Apparent Degree of Attenuation: 76.6
Real Degree of Attenuation: 62%
Original Extract: 11.34 (1.046)
Specific Gravity: 1.01035
A note attached to the report remarks, "The sample makes an exceedingly good impression in almost every respect."

Peoples Beer was packaged in kegs, bottles, and cans. The kegged beer was unpasteurized and the kegs were filled in the racking room built specifically to suit that purpose in 1948. This was on the north side of the facility directly behind the cellars and stock house. A portion of the racking and keg-washing rooms remains near the corner of East 15th and South Main streets. Kegs going into trucks for distribution to taverns were loaded off here. Peoples had a fleet of eight trucks delivering beer within a 60-mile radius of Oshkosh.

When Kohlhoff began working at Peoples, the brewery was just beginning its transition to steel kegs from wooden kegs. The wooden kegs were lined with pitch to protect the beer inside from bacteria and wild yeast that might lurk in the raw wood. Here's one of those wooden kegs of Peoples Beer in action at a 1950s house party in Oshkosh.

Photo courtesy of Dennis Hunt.

Beer for bottling and canning was delivered through a pipe running from the racking room to the bottling house. The detached bottling house was a hangover from the years before Prohibition when it was mandated by law that a bottling facility had to be distinct and separate from the brewhouse. The Peoples bottle house is the only piece of the original, 1913 construction that remains intact. It has been incorporated into the Blended Waxes building 1512 South Main.

The former bottling house of Peoples Brewing.

The Peoples bottling plant had undergone a series of substantial upgrades beginning in the 1940s. By the mid-1950s, the brewery had the capacity to fill 50,000 bottles a day. All of the bottled and canned beer was passed through a pasteurizer before being packed in cases. Oshkosh customers often purchased beer by the case off the back dock behind the bottle house.

The loading dock behind the bottling house.

The Seasonal Beers
When Kohlhoff was hired at Peoples, the brewery produced just two beers: the year-round Peoples Beer; and a winter-seasonal named Holiday Beer that was released just before Thanksgiving each year.

Kohlhoff says the recipe for Holiday Beer was similar to Peoples Beer with a couple of additions making the difference. Holiday Beer was brewed to be darker and stronger, with an ABV of just over 5.5%. About the recipe he says, "That was the same beer, but like I said we added all the special malt; it was darker, it was a brown color malt, and then what you used was brown sugar, 600 pounds of sugar in the kettle and that makes the beer a different color, too."

The addition of brown sugar surprised me. I haven't come across other references to lager brewers using it during this period. When I questioned him further, Kohlhoff said there was nothing unique about it, that it was ordinary brown sugar. The "special malt" was a dark Munich malt. Peoples often made mention of Munich malt in its advertising for Holiday Beer.

December 12, 1953; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern.

Both before and after Prohibition, Peoples had produced a bock beer that went on the market in either late-February or early-March. Peoples Bock was discontinued after the 1940 release and then reintroduced in February 1959. It appears the reintroduction had more to do with branding than anything else. Kohlhoff recalls that the recipes for Peoples Bock and Peoples Holiday Beer were identical.

February 20, 1959; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern.

The seasonal beers may have been special, but the beer that still holds a place in Kohlhoff's heart is Peoples Beer, the beer he made day in, day out for 15 years. "That was quite a job," he says. "That brewery was in number one shape. We had everything right on the clock. Everything. Peoples, that was a good beer."

Wilhelm Kohlhoff.

↧

Untangling the History of Ted Mack and Peoples Brewing

March 24, 2019, 8:18 am

≫ Next: An Educational Tasting at Fifth Ward Brewing

≪ Previous: When Wilhelm Kohlhoff Brewed Peoples Beer

Theodore Mack, Sr. of Fairburn, Georgia passed away on February 4, 2019. He was 88 years old. Ted Mack lived in Oshkosh from 1970 until 1982. For two of those years, he was president of Peoples Brewing Company. During that time, it was widely publicized that Mack was the first black man to head an American brewery. But like so much of what's been said and written about Mack's association with Peoples, that statement wasn't quite right.

Theodore Mack, Sr.

In April 1970, Mack led a group of Milwaukee investors in the purchase of Peoples Brewing. In October 1969, six months before Mack and his group announced their plan to purchase Peoples, a group of black entrepreneurs acquired the Sunshine Brewing Company of Reading, Pennsylvania. The news from Reading attracted little fanfare and Sunshine Brewing closed a year later. Its place in history as the first black-owned brewery in the U.S. was almost immediately forgotten.

That distinction was only recently restored by brewery historian Douglas Hoverson after he unearthed a profile of Sunshine Brewing in the November 1970 issue of Brewers Digest. It was part of a feature titled Blacks and Breweries. Ted Mack was also profiled in the piece.

But in April 1970, nobody cared about any of that. It was reported in dozens of newspapers across the U.S. that Peoples Brewing would be the first American brewery to be owned by blacks. That error had already been preceded by another; one that would leave an indelible mark and prove much more damaging.

On the evening of April 14, 1970, the stockholders of Peoples Brewing voted to sell the brewery. Earlier that day, the MilwaukeeSentinal ran a story suggesting that, if the sale went through, white employees of the brewery would be replaced by blacks. Later that day, Mack assured Peoples shareholders that nothing of the sort would happen. The sale was overwhelmingly approved. But by morning, the Sentinal story had already morphed into an ugly set of rumors that the white employees of Peoples would be promptly fired and replaced with blacks from Milwaukee, and that the brewery's name and beer would be changed.

The reaction was as predictable as it was harsh. A host of taverns in Oshkosh immediately stopped selling Peoples Beer. In some cases, the animosity directed towards Mack was full-throated. James Mather, who would later become Oshkosh's Mayor, recalled being in a Main Street restaurant the morning the Sentinal article came out and hearing a "well-dressed gentleman" say, "Well, we better beef up, the niggers are coming to town."

That was just the beginning of it. And unfortunately, for both Mack and Oshkosh, it's the part of the story that has, more recently, come to dominate the narrative of Mack's tenure at Peoples Brewing. It's not an accurate portrayal. To say that what happened in April 1970 was defining of Mack's experience in Oshkosh is as misleading as the rumors that triggered the initial mess.

Peoples Brewing closed in 1972. In the three decades that followed, there was little interest shown in the brewery's history. That began to change in February 2008 with a cover story written by Jim Lundstrom for SCENE, a now-defunct monthly newspaper. It was the first substantial piece published on Peoples and Mack in over 20 years. Lundstrom's article was part of a Black History Month feature and presented the April 1970 incident as an exemplar of race relations in Wisconsin. It’s an excellent, well-researched piece, but it left some readers with the impression that racism played a central role in the downfall of Peoples.

Lundstrom’s article was ripe for conjecture and has incited its share of it. UW Oshkosh Professor Tony Palmeri gave the article his "Required Reading" award adding that, “The piece pulls no punches and delves into the ugly racism existing in the Fox Valley circa 1970-72.” In the August 2012 edition of the SCENE, UW Oshkosh Associate Professor Paul Van Auken used the failure of the brewery to suggest that "certain groups of people have not met the local definition of acceptable." And in the 2012 book Bottoms Up: A Toast to Wisconsin's Historic Bars and Breweries, author Jim Draeger, citing Lundstrum, writes that the demise of Peoples was due, in part, to the “continuing bigotry among white drinkers.”

I love Draeger’s book, but that line is rubbish. White bigotry had nothing to do with the failure of Peoples Brewing.

Let’s pick-up where we left Mack back in April of 1970.

The week after the sale had been agreed upon, Mack returned to Oshkosh to try to quell the rumors. On April 27, he held a press conference at the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce. With City Council President Byron Murken seated next to him, Mack began setting the story straight.

"I've said from the beginning that we're going to continue to produce Peoples beer under that label and that the brewery will, without question, continue with the current 21 white employees," Mack said. "The name is going to stay the same, the beer is going to stay the same, and the personnel is going to stay. I can't understand why all these lies are coming out. Myself and Oshkosh are going to be very much on the spot. If sales are down it would be a blot on all of us... If some think if they don't drink the beer that Ted Mack and his group are going to turn tail, the answer is "No, sir." I grew up in Alabama where they threw rocks at me and called me nigger... I don't scare easily... I will not run, no sir. I want to be happy here making beer."

Mack would spend much of the next two weeks meeting with local groups including the Tavern League, which included some of the people who had stopped selling Peoples Beer. His efforts were undeniably effective. Sales rebounded and Mack began encouraging local investors to buy the stock he would soon issue to help raise additional monies needed to complete the purchase of the brewery. The response was greater than he had hoped for.

On October 10, 1970, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at the brewery to commemorate the change in ownership. Speaking before a crowd of approximately 2,000, Mack expressed his thanks for the outpouring of support. “In these days of confrontation, you make a pretty picture standing there, black, white and brown,” he said. "All the stockbrokers said it wasn't possible to sell this stock... Five weeks after the sale started, you made it possible to buy this brewery."

Mack preparing to speak at the October 10, 1970 ribbon-cutting ceremony.

On January 5, 1971, Mack purchased a home at 1225 Devonshire Drive in Oshkosh where he and his family would live for the next 12 years. He had already become something of a local celebrity. Mack said he received more offers for speaking engagements than he could possibly accept. He was embraced by workers at the brewery. A letter written by Florian Kotloski and published in the Daily Northwestern lays the praise on thick. "My boss, Mr. Ted Mack... Look how well he's used his name to his advantage. Since he's been at the People's Brewery he's accomplished more than the previous regime here had done in all their business years."

There's no question that Mack was doing well in Oshkosh. If he had done as well in places like Milwaukee, Peoples Brewing might still be open today. His plan was to dramatically increase sales of Peoples Beer by creating new markets for the brewery in urban areas. He would use his backstory to attract customers interested in supporting a black-owned business. The plan required building up an expensive infrastructure of advertising and distribution to make headway in places like Milwaukee, Chicago, Memphis. It was a risky venture.

Mack lacked the budget needed to get his message across in places where Peoples Beer was a complete unknown. The new markets he was relying upon knew nothing of the new beer on the shelf, much less the man behind it. A year after Mack had come to Oshkosh, Peoples Brewing was in free fall. Bills were going unpaid and Mack's partners in the business were accusing him of fiscal negligence. The one bright spot was the continued support Mack received locally. It seemed to even surprise him.

“It just doesn’t make sense the way the markets are polarizing and where our sales are getting a good reception,” Mack said. “I’ve been studying human behavior all my life, but since I have been in the brewery business I have found out I don’t know a damned thing about it.”

But the local trade was nowhere near lucrative enough to support the debt Mack had incurred in purchasing the brewery. Production of Peoples Beer was halted in the last week of September 1972. On November 3, 1972, the employees of Peoples Brewing were permanently laid off. The beer in the lagering tanks was dumped.

“It hurt me deeply," Mack would later say. "It looked so beautiful when we came here, although the system tried to mess us up. They told me I couldn’t move to Oshkosh. They told you I was going to replace whites with blacks. We worked like the devil trying to put this together and it made us feel good when we came here to sell stock and white people came through the door all day to buy stock."

Mack remained in Oshkosh until 1982. After the brewery closed, he worked as an insurance agent for New York Life. In 1978, he began working in Milwaukee as director of Crispus Attucks, Inc. His wife, Pearlie, worked as a cashier for the City of Oshkosh Department of Administration. Their four children attended Oshkosh schools.

After it was over, Mack didn't often speak publicly about what had happened at Peoples. But in 1978, while being interviewed about Woody Hayes, his former football coach at Ohio State, Mack touched on how being part of that team had helped him deal with the hardships he faced in Oshkosh.

"The lessons I learned helped me when the brewery closed," Mack told Myles Strasser of the Northwestern. "When I was flying high as president of Peoples Brewery and speaking everywhere and being very successful, it was like playing for a winning program. When I lost everything, I was able to handle that; it didn't destroy me... My only regret is that I don't have time to work for Oshkosh because my job is in Milwaukee now... Oshkosh is a nice quiet town. I've had no problems here."

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An Educational Tasting at Fifth Ward Brewing

March 26, 2019, 7:42 am

≫ Next: The Maibock at Fox River

≪ Previous: Untangling the History of Ted Mack and Peoples Brewing

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to improve your palate and enhance your appreciation of beer is to develop the ability to identify what's gone wrong in a beer when it's not so good. Here's your chance to acquire that skill.

This Sunday, March 31 and then again on Sunday, April 14, Fifth Ward Brewing in Oshkosh will host off-flavor tasting panels using sensory training kits from the Siebel Institute of Technology. Each of the sessions begins at 5:30 pm and will last approximately two hours. There are just 15 seats available at each session, so you'll need to sign up in advance (at the taproom) to secure a seat. Admission is $15. The taproom will be closed during the sensory panels. Here's how it works...

The panels will be led by Ian Wenger and Zach Clark of Fifth Ward. They'll provide a few ounces of a pale, light-bodied beer that's been spiked with a flavor compound from the Siebel kit. Each spike mimics a common off-flavor found in beer. There'll be 12 rounds in all, each representing a different off flavor. At each of the Sunday tastings, a unique line-up of flavors will be presented.

As the beers are sampled, Clark and Wenger will lead a discussion on the particular flavor and its causes. They'll help you put words to what your tasting so you can identify it in the future. This last part is one of the real benefits of doing this type of training. Being able to identify flavors is something many craft beer drinkers struggle with. It's complicated stuff, but with a little help, it's not all that difficult. If you're a homebrewer, this training can prove invaluable. You can't fix an issue with your beer if you can't identify the problem.

"This is the kind of thing we've been wanting to do for a while," Clark says. "It's a way to help give back to the craft beer community around here. There's a lot of knowledge about beer in this area and we want to encourage that and help support it."

For more information, check out the Facebook event page or stop by the Fifth Ward Taproom and talk to your server.

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The Maibock at Fox River

March 29, 2019, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Winnebago County Beer

≪ Previous: An Educational Tasting at Fifth Ward Brewing

Oshkosh has a long – more than 160 year – history of making bock beers. There's one pouring right now at Fox River in Oshkosh that does that tradition proud.

The Beer
It's named, simply enough, Maibock and it's a terrific example that style. This is a golden beer with a stark-white head lacing down the glass as you drink. It begins with a cookie-like malt aroma intermingled with a zesty, floral hop scent. The initial impression is medium-bodied, fairly rich and toasty, but that gives way to peppery, earthy hop flavors leading to a crisp, clean finish. This is where Maibock truly shines. The hop flavor is upfront, but not overdone and creates a delicious balance. At just over 6% ABV, Maibock is nicely warming and pairs well with these coolish days of early spring.

The Backstory
It seems everything you hear these days about Fox River Brewing has something to do with either Blu Bobber or its new affiliate, Red Bobber. But the beers now pouring in the taproom and restaurant in Oshkosh show another side of the brewery. The current list has a quartet of lagers including three different bock beers. They're all quite good and about as far removed from "Bobber" territory as can be. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who's been following Fox River for the past decade.

Head brewer Kevin Bown has been in charge of the Fox River brewhouses in Appleton and Oshkosh since 2009. He's been there long enough to see one hot "new" beer style after another come blazing in and go flaming out. He's made those beers, too. But at the same time, Bowen has kept a steady stream of more traditional styles flowing from the Fox River brewhouses. Among those have been German-style beers that, to me at least, include some of the best lagers being made in Wisconsin.

That German influence began early for Bowen. When he was 16, he visited Germany where he had his first formidable experience with beer. "I was able to drink in German beer gardens," he told me in a 2012 interview. "The beer tasted phenomenal. It was so flavorful. It was nothing like the beer I had had before. That made a lasting impression on me."

It's been more than 20 years since Bowen had that first drink of German beer. Judging by some of the beers he's making these days, the influence is as strong as ever.

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Winnebago County Beer

April 2, 2019, 5:54 am

≫ Next: Thanks!

≪ Previous: The Maibock at Fox River

The launch of Winnebago County Beer is this Saturday, April 6 at Fox River Brewing in Oshkosh from 1-3 p.m. Here’s a peek at what's inside the book.

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Thanks!

April 8, 2019, 6:43 am

≫ Next: National Beer Day with the SOBs at Bare Bones

≪ Previous: Winnebago County Beer

A huge THANKS to everybody who came out for the Winnebago County Beer book release on Saturday. For me, getting to see so many of you all together in one place was the best part of it!

If you weren't able to make it, but would still like a book, you can get in touch with me at OshkoshBeer@Gmail.com and I'll send one your way. Prost!

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National Beer Day with the SOBs at Bare Bones

April 9, 2019, 6:59 am

≫ Next: Bare Bones Pawsome Pilsner

≪ Previous: Thanks!

I couldn't let this go by without making note of it... This past Sunday, November 7, the Society of Oshkosh Brewers (SOBs) celebrated National Beer Day by helping brew a batch of beer at Bare Bones Brewery.

A panoramic shot of the SOBs at Bare Bones. Pardon the distortions.

National Beer Day sounds like one of those phony holiday's made up by an advocacy group, but it actually marks an important date. On April 7, 1933, the Cullen–Harrison Act made beer legal again for the first time since the start of Prohibition in 1920. Prohibition hadn't yet ended, that wouldn't happen for another nine months, but at least you could get a legal beer – so long as it was 4% ABV or less. It was better than nothing.

The SOB/Bare Bones celebration ended with each of the homebrewers taking home a carboy of freshly made wort to ferment into beer.

Wort going into SOB carboys.

This was the first time since the end of Prohibition that an Oshkosh brewery has supplied homebrewers with wort. But prior to April 7, 1933, this kind of thing wasn't unusual at all.

The Oshkosh Brewing Company, in particular, was a main supplier of wort to Oshkosh area homebrewers during the dry years. They sold it in the form of malt syrup, a condensed wort, used by Prohibition-era homebrewers in the same way the SOBs are using the Bare Bones wort to make beer.

I took my carboy of wort home from Bare Bones and dosed it with a thick slurry of lager yeast. It's now in my basement fermenting into beer. I'm thinking I might end up dry hopping it with Hallertau hops. Why not? Other SOBs are going to turn their wort into Belgian-style Saison and English-style ale. Some are going to condition their beer on vanilla beans, others on chocolate. No two will be the same. And that's what homebrew is all about!

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Bare Bones Pawsome Pilsner

April 11, 2019, 5:07 am

≫ Next: The Resurrection of Otto Villnow

≪ Previous: National Beer Day with the SOBs at Bare Bones

This past weekend, Bare Bones Pawsome Pilsner emerged as the winner of the Brew Battles Craft Beer Bracket Challenge. It was an upset win for a pale lager in a bracket heavy with strong stouts and modern IPAs.

The Beer
Pawsome Pilsner starts with a light, bready aroma. If you really dig in you can pick up the faint scent of earthy hops. It's a medium bodied beer with a palate that leans towards clean malt flavors – think fresh bread with a dab of honey. The beer finishes clean and dry. By the time the glass is back on the table, you're ready for and wanting another pull.

The Backstory
Pawsome has been around for a while. It was first brewed at Bare Bones back in January of 2016. But the beer underwent a major overhaul last year after Jody Cleveland took over as head brewer at Bare Bones. Cleveland introduced Vienna malt into the mix giving Pawsome a touch of sweetness and more malt complexity. He also changed the hops going from Michigan-grown Nugget and Chinook to Wisconsin-grown Ultra, a hop similar in flavor to German-grown Hallertau. The arrangement works beautifully. This sort of beer may appear simple, but it's a difficult one to brew. The flavors are so straightforward and uncluttered that any misstep comes immediately to the fore.

What's surprising to me is that an unassuming, lager somehow managed to win convincingly in a field of 24 beers that included just one other pale lager – Ahnapee Brewery’s Helles.

The single elimination, bracket tourney was put together by Justin Mitchell of the Oshkosh Independent. Beginning at the end of February, beers from six different Northeast Wisconsin breweries were judged over the ensuing weekends by tasters at local bars and taprooms until just two remained. Pawsome Pilsner faced Knuth Brewing’s Coffee Stout in the final round to take the title.

In a beer world that fetishizes adjunct-laden stouts and over-the-top hop bombs, it's heartening to see that a flavorful, well-made, lager can still hold its own.

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The Resurrection of Otto Villnow

April 18, 2019, 4:50 am

≫ Next: A Novel Thought at Fifth Ward

≪ Previous: Bare Bones Pawsome Pilsner

Otto Villnow is dead. And this isn't the first time he's been that way.

Otto Villnow, Oshkosh beer bottler, and his wife Caroline, circa 1888.

Otto Villnow was born in 1849 in the north of Germany. He was 17 when the 1866 cholera pandemic visited his homeland. Villnow fell victim to the dread illness and, shortly after, was pronounced dead. They packed him into a coffin and placed him in a vault.

A day and a half later, an attendant discovered that young Villnow was not altogether deceased. He was taken from his crypt and eventually made a full recovery. A year later, Villnow got the hell out of Germany.

He reached Oshkosh by 1873 and took a job at a sawmill. Later, after he had gotten married, Villnow ran a shoe store from the home he and his wife Caroline purchased at what is now 1417 Oregon Street. But in the early 1880s, Villnow took an interest in beer. In particular, the bottling of beer. He converted his property on Oregon Street into a beer bottling plant.

The site of Villnow's bottling operation, formerly 212 Oregon Street.

Independent beer bottling plants became increasingly common in Oshkosh in the 1880s. Government regulation and the troublesome work of getting beer into bottles encouraged brewers to job out their bottling work to others. In Oshkosh, there were more than 20 independent bottlers like Villnow packaging beer in glass.

When I first wrote about Villnow here, I mentioned that he appeared not to have been affiliated with any particular brewery. But about a month ago, while doing research on an unrelated matter, I found that Villnow had worked at various times with two opposing Oshkosh breweries.

First, there was Lorenz Kuenzl's Gambrinus Brewery on Harney Avenue. Here’s an 1885 advertisement for the Gambrinus Brewery from the Wisconsin Telegraph, a German-language newspaper published in Oshkosh. The highlighted text translates into, "The bottles are filled by Otto Villnow."

Wisconsin Telegraph; August 28, 1885.

The Kuenzl/Villnow alliance appears to have soured not long after that ad appeared. In December 1886 Kuenzl sued Villnow for monies owed to the tune of $269.79 (worth about $7,500 today). Kuenzl won the suit and Villnow was forced to pay up. Whether or not that immediately ended the partnership isn't known, but by the end of the decade, both men had moved on. Kuenzl partnered with his neighbor, Oshkosh bottler John Sitter. Villnow, meanwhile, hooked up with brewer August Horn.

August Horn.

Horn was president of Horn and Schwalm's Brooklyn Brewery on Doty Street. Villnow's connection to Horn and the Brooklyn Brewery is confirmed in a brewery ledger from early 1894. It shows that Horn had supplied Villnow with beer pumps, a back bar and mirror, and chairs and tables.

Unfortunately, that ledger lists no address where Villnow might have put Horn’s fixtures to work. City directories during this period also lack any mention of Villnow running a saloon. A possible explanation may be that Villnow was operating on behalf of a private club; he was affiliated with at least two of them in the early 1890s.

In any case, Villnow's ties to the Brooklyn Brewery disintegrated when the brewery merged with the Glatz and Kuenzl breweries in 1894 to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company. After that, Villnow was done with beer. He worked as a laborer and janitor in the years that followed until his retirement in 1910.

Otto Villnow was 64 when he died in his sleep at his home on the morning of November 5, 1913. This time it was for keeps.

Villnow's Grave in Riverside Cemetery.

Villnow's obituary mentions nothing of his days as an Oshkosh beer bottler or his narrow escape from death in 1866. It says he was a shoemaker by trade. If not for his years in beer, that would probably have been his altogether forgettable epitaph.

But a funny thing happened on Villnow's way to obscurity. The bottles he used in the late 1800s became highly sought after collector's items. Only a few of them have survived. His name is embossed on the faces of those bottles. The legacy of Otto Villnow lives on, captured in glass.

Thanks to Alan Lareau and Bob Bergman for help with German words and old, beer bottles...

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A Novel Thought at Fifth Ward

April 23, 2019, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Beer History Tuesday at Oblio's

≪ Previous: The Resurrection of Otto Villnow

Novel Thought is a dark ale that went on tap this past weekend at Fifth Ward Brewing in Oshkosh. It’s a beer that captures the essence of the brewery.

The Beer
It's nearly black with a tan, creamy foam that hangs on the glass. The malty aroma is intense, immediately reminding me of malted milk. Behind that are notes of chocolate, tobacco and a touch of roast. Those malt flavors dominate the palate, yet the beer is quaffable with a clean, bright finish. At 5.5% ABV, it's light enough to be sessionable with just enough heft for these transitional days of spring.

The Backstory
Ian Wenger and Zach Clark, brewers at Fifth Ward, have been kicking around the idea of this beer for years. "This one goes back to our homebrew days," says Clark. "We saw this video where a brewer was doing something he was calling a dirty blonde ale and that stuck in my head for the longest time. We liked that idea of a light dark beer. Once we had the brewery going, we did a pilot batch and that became the original start for Nordheim (a Mild Ale the brewery released last April). "

But Novel Thought is not Nordheim. This is dark ale pared down to essentials. The base malt is Bairds Maris Otter from the 1823 Heritage collection, a low-protein malt that brims with character. Small additions of pale chocolate malt and carafa (a coloring malt) round out the grain bill for an ale that skirts conventional style guidelines. At Fifth Ward, they're calling it a Brunette Ale. That's not saying much. It's not a porter or stout. It's not a mild ale or brown ale. It's something onto itself. "It's those expensive European malts!" Clark says.

But it’s more than that. Over the past few of months, I've noticed a certain house flavor in several of Fifth Ward's beers. I can't describe it. It’s subtle, but I know it when I taste it, and I always like it. This beer has it in spades. It’s the mark of a brewery coming into its own and creating something unique unto itself. And that's what local beer is really all about.

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Beer History Tuesday at Oblio's

May 5, 2019, 2:24 pm

≫ Next: An Illustrated History of the Oshkosh House Saloon and Hotel

≪ Previous: A Novel Thought at Fifth Ward

This Tuesday, May 5, I'll be talking about our local beer history as seen through the lens of Oblio's Lounge. What is now Oblio's has been playing a central role in the beer scene here since 1885.

The talk gets started at 6 p.m. at Oblio's and is on behalf of the Winnebago County Historical and Archaeological Society. You can check out the Facebook event page here. Hope to see you there.

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An Illustrated History of the Oshkosh House Saloon and Hotel

May 6, 2019, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Oshkosh Cock Fight, 1878

≪ Previous: Beer History Tuesday at Oblio's

Here was the scene in the 1890s on the north side of Ceape Avenue just east of State Street.

The wooden building was Edward Luhm's Oshkosh House Hotel and Saloon. It stood across the street from the current Oshkosh Convention Center. Luhm's place has long since been erased. There's nothing but parking lots there now....

That barren asphalt was once part of a roaring neighborhood crowded with saloons, cigar factories, and manufacturing plants. A railroad cut through it running down the middle of Ceape. In the midst of it all was the Oshkosh House...

A German language ad for the Oshkosh House in the Wisconsin Telegraph, October 10, 1884.

The roots of the Oshkosh House stretch back to May 1869 when a German immigrant named Anton Marheine bought the lot next door to Albert Sanford's blacksmith shop near the corner of Ceape and Shonaon (now State Street). Marheine was a Civil War vet and musician looking to get into the saloon business. He partnered with another German immigrant named August Brex and together they launched a beer hall on the property. The creatively named Marheine and Brex Saloon was born. It became one of more than 40 saloons then doing business in Oshkosh, population 12,000. This has always been a thirsty place.

From the 1869 Oshkosh City Directory.

Among the first things Marheine and Brex did was borrow a stack of cash (about $6,000 worth in today's money) from George Loescher, owner of the Oshkosh Brewery on what is now Bay Shore Drive. The money they took from Loescher is a good indication that Loescher's beer was the only kind you'd get at the Marheine and Brex stand. That's typically how these deals worked. And if that’s the case, this would have been among the earliest of tied houses in Oshkosh. In any case, the place was short lived.

Marheine and Brex were barely a year into their partnership when Marheine bailed out and sold the saloon to yet another German immigrant named Edward Luhm. Luhm and his new bride from Beaver Dam, Magdalena, took up residence at the saloon and proceeded to sell beer and have babies. They let out the remaining space to boarders.

The Ritz this was not. And it was not yet known as the Oshkosh House. There was, however, a small hotel then on South Main named the Oshkosh House. The Oshkosh House on Ceape wouldn't be born until a few years later after Luhm's Saloon had burned to the ground. Oshkoshers always seemed to be inspired by fire.

The fifth of Oshkosh's five great fires occurred on April 28, 1875. It ran from the Fox River, crossed over Main and tore east going all the way to Bowen. It took most everything in its path, including the Luhm's Saloon.

Path of the 1875 fire.

The Luhm's rebuilt and then expanded adding a proper hotel and dining room to go along with their beer hall. About 1883 they began calling it The Oshkosh House. Let's look again at that 1890s photo of the place.

The saloon was the portion on the left with the broad windows facing Ceape. The hotel expansion is at the right with a balcony on the second floor. Inside were bachelor flats. There was room for about 20 guests. Most of them were German immigrants who worked nearby. Cigar makers, bookbinders, blacksmiths, tanners, woodworkers... One of the boarders was Charles Maulick who would go on to launch what we know today as Oblio's Lounge. Room and board was $3.50 a week (about $90 in today's money).

From the 1884 Oshkosh City Directory.

The "commodious Barn" was for guests with horses, which were kept behind the hotel. This next image is from 1888 and shows the Oshkosh House stable. Today, it's hard to imagine that scenes like this were once common along Ceape...

Up next we have an 1885 map that presents a good overview of the entire layout of the Oshkosh House Hotel and Saloon. Notice the pig pen at the back of the lot. A little country comfort, right there in the middle of the city.

The Oshkosh House in 1885 at 29-33 Ceape.

Luhm's Oshkosh House also played host to its share of disorder over the years: The odd death of a mysterious stranger, the gassing of a guest, attempted suicide by laundry detergent, brawls... Typical stuff in rowdy Oshkosh back in the day. The Luhm's took it all in stride. Up to a point.

When fellow German expat William Streich began casting aspersions about the goings on at the Oshkosh House and the character of Missus Luhm, Magdalena and her brother – the cigar-making alderman Michael Goettmann – visited the Streich home and vigorously abused its occupants. The Daily Northwestern reported that the "matter caused a great sensation." Streich later sued Magdalena for $5,000 for the "permanent injuries" she inflicted upon his wife.

It wasn't all fun. In the fall of 1891, Edward Luhm was stricken with dropsy. His doctor treated him by draining several gallons of water from Luhm's body. That worked about as well as you might expect. Luhm died two days later on September 6, 1891. He was just 49 years old. Edward Luhm left a 39-year-old widow and three children.

Magdalena Luhm carried on. She became one of just a few women to run an Oshkosh saloon in the 1800s. She didn't always let on that she was in charge of the place. Here's an ad from 1902, published 11 years after her husband had died.

Magdalena Luhm sold the Oshkosh House in 1905. The new owner was John Hilt, one of the former bartenders there. Hilt was born on the North Atlantic Ocean in 1849 while his parents were in transit from their German homeland to a new life in the new world. After reaching adulthood, he worked as a farmer in Calumet County. Hilt gave that life up at the turn of the century and by 1903 was living in Oshkosh and tending bar at the Oshkosh House Saloon.

In the beginning, things appear to have gone quite well for Hilt at the Oshkosh House. So well, in fact, that sometime around 1912, he was able to entirely rebuild the place. The old, wooden hotel was picked up and moved to make way for something more modern. The next image shows the Oshkosh House being moved. Notice the signs on the saloon portion of the building. They’re hard to make out, but they appear to say Rahr Beer.

Hilt's new place was up to date and built and cast brick. Here's a picture of it from 1977...

Hilt stuck plenty into the construction of the new Oshkosh House, about $300,000 in today's money, and wound up with a hotel that probably wasn't worth the expense. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood that was going to attract travelers looking for a nice place to stay. The Oshkosh House was practically surrounded by smoke-belching manufacturing mills. Here's the look of the area from a couple of doors down at Ceape and Court streets, circa 1917.

Things went downhill for Hilt after he built the new place. In 1916 his wife died and shortly after Hilt put the Oshkosh House up for sale. He couldn't find a buyer. Then in 1920, Prohibition arrived and killed off his saloon business. Hilt made a go of it, but not for long. He died in early December 1922.

The Oshkosh House lingered on under a series of new owners, but the saloon that had started it all didn't return even after Prohibition ended in 1933. Beginning in the 1960s, the neighborhood lost most of its manufacturing plants and that stretch along Ceape went into a long, slow decline. The Oshkosh House turned into a flop house. One-by-one, the buildings around it met the wrecking ball. The Oshkosh House got its turn after the City of Oshkosh condemned the property in 1982.

Here's how it looked near the very end in 1981. Notice the abutting, white, wood-frame building with the two gables. It looks suspiciously similar to the hotel portion of the old Oshkosh House that Luhm built after the 1875 fire.

Photo courtesy of Dan Radig.

Ed Luhm was dead 90 years when that picture was taken. He and Magdalena are at rest in Riverside Cemetery.

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Oshkosh Cock Fight, 1878

May 12, 2019, 3:09 pm

≫ Next: A Prequel to Mabel Murphy’s

≪ Previous: An Illustrated History of the Oshkosh House Saloon and Hotel

This isn't directly related to beer in Oshkosh, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least some (and probably quite a bit of) beer involved in this mess. What we have here is a little “news” from the old, weird Oshkosh.

“Quite an exciting cock fight took place at Mehlmann's cigar factory on Waugoo street this afternoon. A workman in Mehlmann’s shop was the owner of a fighting cock, ditto one of the workmen in Neumann’s cigar factory. They concluded to match their fighting poultry, the one whose rooster should whip to become owner of the vanquished fowl. The Mehlmann rooster came out victorious after a fight of nearly an hour. One of the bosses held the water and sponge and a tobacco agent from Milwaukee was the referee.”
- July 28, 1878, Oshkosh Daily Northwestern

By the way, the Mehlmann and Neumann cigar factories were near the southwest corner of Waugoo and State streets. It looked a little different back then. Here it is today...

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A Prequel to Mabel Murphy’s

May 20, 2019, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Foamed

≪ Previous: Oshkosh Cock Fight, 1878

Mabel Murphy's was leveled by fire in the early morning hours of May 7, 2019. In the days that followed, there was an abundance of reporting on the destruction of this popular Oshkosh tavern. A couple of things in those reports struck me.

First was the sense of attachment people had to Mabel’s. It was a theme running through several of the stories about the fire. Oddly, that made me feel somewhat better about it all. I like that we live in a city where people still think taverns are important.

What also stood out were the comments on the historical relevance of Mabel’s. One of the people interviewed by Fox 11 News said, “I don’t know the actual age or anything, but it’s been here as long as I have and I grew up here. It is part of our history here in Oshkosh."

That summed it up nicely. Without knowing the specifics, people here seemed to have an intuitive sense that Mabel’s represented an important part of Oshkosh’s cultural history. And that intuition is dead right.

Mabel Murphy's

City of Oshkosh property records show that the building that housed Mabel Murphy's was built in 1856. But when it comes to construction dates, those records are notoriously inaccurate and I doubt that this one is correct. The 1856 date doesn’t correlate with what appears in Oshkosh directories or with maps of the city issued in the ensuing years.

Detail of an 1858 Oshkosh map. The yellow dot is at the northwest corner of Main and Irving.

And then there’s Albert Ruger's drawing from 1867. Ruger's sketch of Oshkosh includes the intersection of Main and Irving streets. The lot where Mabel's stood is shown as vacant.

Detail of Ruger’s 1867 drawing. The red dot is at the northwest corner of Main and Irving.

What is certain is that from 1856 to 1884, the property at the northwest corner of Main and Irving passed through the hands of more than a dozen owners. None of them either worked or lived at that location. The most noteworthy of those people was Byrd Parker.

Parker was a black man, originally from North Carolina, who came to Oshkosh in 1855 from Chicago. While living here, he became regionally famous for his fiery lectures on civil rights. Parker toured throughout the Wisconsin frontier arguing for black suffrage. Back home in Oshkosh, he led a quieter life.

Parker purchased the Mabel's property on August 9, 1856. For Parker, it appears to have been an investment property. At the time, he was running the Oshkosh City Lunch, an "Eating Saloon" on Main Street near High Ave.

Byrd Parker's Oshkosh City Lunch; Oshkosh Courier February 20, 1856.

Parker sold the Mabel's property in 1859 for a mere $350 (about $11,000 in today's money), which may further support the argument that the parcel had yet to be built upon.

What came to be Mabel's begins coming into focus in 1884. The property had been sold once again, this time to an Oshkosh butcher named Edward Mittelstaedt. It's around this time that the building we all knew as Mabel's was constructed. An 1885 insurance map presents a recognizable outline of the structure at what was then 377 Main Street.

1885 Fire Insurance Map with the new building at 377 Main.

The first business listing there was for a grocery store and broom shop run by a man named Carlos Woodward. That didn't last. Within a couple of years, the Mabel's space was vacant again. And then came Albert Thom and his sons.

Albert Thom

Albert Thom was born in Bernsdorf, Germany in 1839. In 1868, he and his wife, Johanna, and their five-year-old son Reinhold moved to America. They landed in New York and went to straight to Oshkosh, eventually settling in at a home that still stands at 928 Waugoo.

928 Waugoo Avenue.

Albert Thom spent most of the next 20 years working in the sash and door plant at Gould Manufacturing. He quit that in 1887 to go into business with his sons Reinhold and Emil. The Thom's opened a grocery store and saloon at the southwest corner of Main and Irving in a building that has changed much over the years and now houses Calhoun Beach Club. In 1880s Oshkosh, the tandem of saloon and grocery was a common arrangement. It's one that the Thom family would work until the turn of the century.

1889 Oshkosh City Directory.

The Thoms had hardly gotten started before they were eyeing up the newer place across the street. On March 19, 1890, Reinhold and Emil Thom purchased the building that would later become Mabel Murphy's. They paid $3,200 for it, or about $91,100 in today's money, and nearly all of that was borrowed. Their new location mirrored the old one.

The shingle they put above the front door read A. Thom and Son. The Main Street facing portion of the building was where the grocery resided. Albert took care of that. Meanwhile, 27-year-old Reinhold and 21-year-old Emil were in back slinging lager beer. You could visit them there by slipping in the back entrance.

The Thom's Grocery and Saloon, circa 1891. The hanging, corner sign reads Lager Beer.

The saloon did a bustling business. Emil had to run it on his own for much of 1898 and 1899 while Reinhold was away panning for gold in the Klondike. But that didn't pan out and after Reinhold returned they went full in on the saloon. By 1900, father Albert and the grocery business were retired.

Reinhold and Emil were now proprietors of what they advertised as "A first-class bar of wines, liquors and cigars." The cigars were in easy reach. Upstairs was a factory churning them out. It was run by John Wichmann, a veteran Oshkosh cigar maker. Wichmann had started rolling tobacco up there in 1895 and by the turn of the century his 5-cent cigars were being sold in saloons all over Oshkosh. His specialty was something called the "Long Wick."

A 1901 ad for Wichmann’s “Long Wick” Cigar.

Beer, on the other hand, was turning into something of a problem. The Thoms had hooked up early on with the Oshkosh Brewing Company. By 1900, Oshkosh's largest brewery had come to so dominate beer sales in the city that it was able to set the price on beer sold into saloons. That wasn't sitting well with saloon keepers. The brewery kept raising the price on beer forcing saloon keepers to eat the additional cost. Oshkosh's unyielding tradition of nickel beer left them little recourse.

A saloon token good for a nickel beer at Reinhold Thom’s saloon.

The Thoms revolted. In 1902, Emil sold his stake in the saloon to Reinhold and went to work for Schlitz Brewing. He became the brewery's Oshkosh bottler and distribution agent. Reinhold also signed on with Schlitz. He turned the saloon into a Schlitz tied house. That meant that if you went to the Thom stand and ordered a beer you were going get Schlitz. That was all they had. And if you ordered a bottle of beer you would have been handed this...

The association with Schlitz proved no more satisfactory than the one they’d had with the Oshkosh Brewing Company. Emil quit Schlitz around 1905. Reinhold was soon moving in the same direction while trying to cook up a defense against the big-brewery influence that vexed saloon men like himself.

Reinhold helped to assemble a group of Oshkosh saloon keepers looking to launch a jointly-owned brewery. One that would treat its clients more equitably. Reinhold was named treasurer and appointed to the board of directors of the firm. Initially, they called it Peoples Independent Brewing. They later shortened that to Peoples Brewing. It took a few years to come to fruition, but in 1913 they began making beer on South Main Street. Thom’s saloon was among the first in Oshkosh to put Peoples beer on tap.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern June 21, 1913.

It was a heady time for Reinhold Thom. At the start of 1914, he was 50 years old and running one of the more successful bars in Oshkosh. At the same time, he was helping to direct a brewery that was growing rapidly and breaking the stranglehold the Oshkosh Brewing Company had put on the city's saloonkeepers.

The darker building is Reinhold Thom's saloon, circa 1914.
The sign on the side of the building advertises James E. Pepper whiskey.

But there was a shadow being cast over Thom's success. As the decade wore on, the unthinkable became the inevitable. When national Prohibition went into effect in 1920 it put an end to Reinhold Thom's 30-year career as a barman in Oshkosh. He was 57 years old and out of a job. He was also an outlier. Most Oshkosh saloonkeepers immediately turned their bars into speakeasies when Prohibition came. Reinhold Thom didn't.

The old, lager beer saloon was taken out. Reinhold's younger brother Albert moved in. What he put there had nothing to do with what had been there. The name Albert gave the new business seemed concocted to emphasize that point. It was called The Modern Sanitary Bakery.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, February 17, 1920.

It wasn't all white aprons and cakes. Upstairs, they were still rolling cigars. But that ended, too, at the end of the 1920s. The bakery had more staying power. It continued on under a series of different shop keepers until 1939. That's the year that Eddie Kollross rolled in.

Edward L. Kollross had come up the hard way on the south side of Oshkosh. Born in 1898 to disabled, immigrant parents he had gone to work early to help support the family. By the time he was 17, he was running a taxi service with his older brother William. He'd served a brief stint in the Army, but by 1920 he was back in Oshkosh and out of work. So, he went into bootlegging.

Through much of the 1920s, Kollross ran a southside soft drink parlor owned by his sister Mary. The soda was just a front. The place was in actuality a speakeasy with a wildcat brewery in the barn behind it. Kollross didn't make it through the dry decade unblemished. He was arrested for selling alcohol in 1927 and again in 1928. But neither fines nor jail time persuaded him to abandon the "soft drinks" business. He kept right on at it.

After Prohibition ended, Kollross opened a roadhouse bar just west of Oshkosh where he was arrested a couple more times on charges of running a gambling house. By the end of the 1930s, he seems to have decided to clean up his act. He split from his wife and opened Eddie's Tavern in the former bakery at Main and Irving.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; June 29, 1940.

Reinhold Thom still owned the building, but there was nothing left of the saloon he'd once had there. Kollross turned it into a bar and restaurant serving everything from fried chicken to frog legs. The restaurant side would come to be emphasized. By the time Kollross purchased the building in March 1946, Eddie's was known more for its food than its drinks. A month after he had bought it, Kollross sold the building to Irving Wussow, a longtime tavern owner in the area. Wussow continued the trend and turned it into a steak house.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; December 22, 1961.

Beginning in 1946, what is now 701 N. Main Street would remain primarily a restaurant for almost 30 years. Wussow's Steak House gave way, briefly, in 1966 to Red's Korner Lounge, which became the Blue Lantern and then Red Lantern pizza restaurants.

In 1974 it became Mabel Murphy's. Today, 45 years later, all that's left is a charred pit surrounded by chain-link fencing. It's an ugly scar where a place full of life once stood. But this won't stay, either.

Oshkoshers have a long history of being inspired by fire to rebuild something better in place of what was lost. Let's hope that can happen with Mabel's. If not, there's still the history and memories of this place. A fire can't take that.

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Foamed

May 23, 2019, 11:05 am

≫ Next: A Wildcat on Wisconsin Street

≪ Previous: A Prequel to Mabel Murphy’s

Here we have a set of 1940s/1950s foam scrapers for leveling off the head on a glass of draft beer. These were given away by the Oshkosh Brewing Company to taverns serving Chief Oshkosh. These aren’t much called for anymore. Most places now pour a thin head. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine...

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A Wildcat on Wisconsin Street

May 30, 2019, 3:30 am

≫ Next: The Star and Crescent Sample Room

≪ Previous: Foamed

Another long-lost Oshkosh brewery emerges from the swamp of Prohibition... This city was teeming with "wildcat" breweries during that terrible time (1920-1933) when brewing was illegal in the United States. Covert breweries were tucked away in every part of town, from the southside to the Nordheim.

This latest find was most definitely tucked. The photo below shows the area around Wisconsin Street as it approaches the Fox River. The little, red arrow on the right points to the spot where a wildcat brewery was making beer in the summer of 1930.

You couldn't ask for a better spot to put an illegal brewing operation. That part of Oshkosh was packed with factories, warehouses, and lumber yards. They were making everything from sausage to carpet over there. Plenty of noise. The air filled with an array of industrial stink to mask the odors of brewing. Lots of traffic and a passing stream of thirsty workers ready for a few beers when the shift ended.

Below is a map with an overview of the area. This is from 1949 but the details were much the same when the brewery was there. Again, the red arrow shows the location of the brewery.

The problem with this wildcat is that there's almost nothing known about the brewery itself. That's not too unusual with these places. They were secretive enterprises for good reason. What we do know comes from court reporting saying that the brewery was found to have “considerable apparatus” and that both beer and hard liquor were seized when it was raided by Prohibition agents in the summer of 1930.

Despite the scant specifics, there are some interesting “knowns” about this place and the people caught running it.

The head of the operation was Joseph Widzinski. He was born in Posen, Germany in 1903. His family was Polish. They left for America in 1904 after Posen instituted “Germanization” legislation to make life miserable for the Polish-speaking people living there.

Widzinski was two-years-old when the family arrived in Oshkosh. They settled on Graham Avenue in the "Volga" section of the old 12th Ward by the Congress Avenue Bridge. Many of the residents there spoke Russian. Widzinski grew up speaking Polish. He was schooled in Oshkosh and quit after the 8th grade. He got a job as a delivery boy for a butcher shop.

Widzinski was 27 when he went behind the bar at what was then 59 Wisconsin Avenue. There had been a saloon at that site since at least 1893. When Prohibition hit, it became a soft drink parlor, but in name only. It was actually a speakeasy that had been busted by the Feds for selling booze in 1923. Prior to Widzinski getting there in 1930, he was working for a butcher shop across the street from the bar. It appears this was to be his first go-round in the bootleg beer business.

Widzinski hired a bartender who had a bit more experience. Henry Troxell had previously run a roadhouse just south of Oshkosh where he was almost certainly dealing in alcohol. He had been arrested for drunk driving after leaving there one night in 1929. But neither Widzinski nor Troxell had any experience making beer on a commercial scale. The guy who owned their building sure did.

Widzinski's landlord was Carl Rahr, the head brewer for the Rahr Brewing Company of Oshkosh. The Rahr family bought the Wisconsin Street property in 1906 and held the saloon as a tied house until Prohibition shut their brewery down. Now Carl Rahr was using his brewery to make root beer and things of that ilk.

But the Rahr's still owned the saloons that had been tied to the family brewery. Aside from the Widzinski brewery, there are at least four other instances of Rahr properties in Oshkosh being hit with liquor violations during the dry years. The Rahr family was never implicated in any of the busts, but it's hard to believe they were unaware of what their tenants were up to.

On January 23, 1931, Joseph Widzinski and Henry Troxell were taken to Milwaukee where they had the book thrown at them. Widzinski was given a six-month jail sentence and fined $300 (about $4,500 in today's money). Troxell got 60 days in jail. Severe penalties for first-time offenders. The punishment suggests their brewing operation was substantial.

After getting out of jail, Widzinski and Troxell parted company. Troxell took over the property at 59 Wisconsin and re-named it The Avenue Buffett. It became a legal bar again after Prohibition ended in 1933. In its final years, it was the Titan Tap. The property was purchased by the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and torn down shortly thereafter. It's now a parking lot for the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh.

Widzinski's jail time didn’t put him off the bar business. In 1934, he opened the Badger Tavern across the street from where he'd had his brewery.