Zoiglbier

I don't care whether Kvass is beer or is not 'not beer,' that soup sounds healthy and delicious. I'd eat it during the winter.

 

Thinking a bit more about the zoigl culture and it sounds like it has a lot of parallels to old lambic culture. A central brewhouse providing wort for many people, a base recipe that is very flexible within its own parameters, an emphasis on community at the consumption level, just a super cool window into the effects on consumer culture of living in a time when your world was defined by the radius to which you could walk in half a day.

 

The US was founded by immigrants (with all due respect to Native Americans) and I wonder if any culture like this ever came with those immigrants. If it did, is it still alive anywhere?

 

Well I think that's sort of what you see in those old images of bucket growlers. There was a brewery on every corner and you would just walk down and top up.

There's some of it evident in the upper Midwest too. I've encountered the corner house bar in Milwaukee, but I understand it was wide spread in the region and that it's strongest legal protection persists in Duluth. I'm sure many of those original kitchen pubs produced some of their own alcohol

 

The majority of beer produced in Colonial America was homebrewed beer and typically it was the chore of the housewife to make the beer (e.g., a cooking chore). It would have been dissimilar from Zoiglbier in that each home would produce their own wort.

As to whether there would have been beer consumption at a given household for communal drinking and making some money I have never read about this aspect. Maybe some other BA knows more here and can provide references.

Cheers!

 

I suppose a modern day approximation to Zoiglbier might be when a brewery creates a large quantity of wort and then gives 5 gallons to local homebrewers to create their own beer to be entered into a homebrewing competition. Bell's Brewery does this every year, and I think I've read somewhere about it happening with some other brewery too. I presume these homebrewers might share their 5 gallons of beer at home with family and friends, thus the quasi-Zoiglbier culture.

 

My home-brew club used to do this at our local brew-pub (home base) then bring the beers to a future meeting for comparison.

Only trouble was transporting a 5 gallon fermenter home without too much trauma. To the car or the beer.

 

The 'transporting' part was the main reason that I never seriously considered doing it with Bell's. However, I was tempted back when I was homebrewing.

 

I don't know of any places near me that sell wort but my LHBS once a year conducts a wine pressing of freshly harvested wine grapes and I witnessed people bringing home the must (grape juice) in sanitized buckets. I presume when they got home they transferred the must from the buckets to their sanitized fermenters (e.g., carboy).

Cheers!

 

Several of our neighbors home brew; we could share some wort, maybe blend our individual batches, then put a spin on our personal share. This would be a fun event. Do it late March then share with all the neighbors on the 4th of July.

Growing-up we did exactly this with cider. We gathered apples from a bunch of families, pressed them on the Thornberry’s antique mill/press (took up the whole end of a barn) then celebrated the following 4th of July. We had all different kinds of hard and soft cider, sauce, butter, vinegar. Ahh, the old days. Edit * and smoked whiting!

 

You have me curious, can you elaborate on this?

 

Well, buying wort (known at the time as "Liquid Malt") from brewers in 5 gallon tins did happen in the US during that particular episode known as National Prohibition.

(Once came across an empty square tin - like the one in the Pfeiffer's ad - from an upstate NY brewer in an antique shop. Pretty sure the label featured a legal warning about not adding yeast or allowing it to ferment. I didn't buy it - no room in our vacationing vehicle and it was "too expensive". $10 or 20. Always wish I had.)

Lived in the Finger Lakes region and we'd buy varietal grape juice (no seeds/stems/skin - so not "must") by the gallon for fermenting from local vineyards. Just load up 6 or 8 sanitized carboys in their wooden crate into the pickup, so no transferring once they hit the cellar. Friends still do it but, IIRC, from a different business.

From my research, most of the growler trade came out of local bars and taverns and other retailers (like druggists, grocers), rather than breweries. Certainly many cities and towns had local breweries especially in the northeast and mid-west, and most maintained "Sternwirt(h)s" - in-house bars for employees and the general public but I can't imagine many did much of a "take out" growler trade. Granted, many saloons were tied-houses (I take it that's what you mean by "house bar"?)

And there were many states and regions (esp. in the south and the underpopulated rural areas) with few on no breweries - was a long walk to the corner to find a brewery in a lot of the US. And even in a city like, say, Buffalo with 20 breweries in 1890 - who's going to walk past 5 bars and stores to buy a growler at the brewery whose beer was likely on tap at all those bars?

While the "bucket trade" has been romanticized among the nostalgic public and by the current craft brewing industry, the brewing and tavern industries of the 19th and 20th century wasn't too keen on it. Many municipalities banned growlers, which were often associated with underage drinking and unsavory characters. "Growler gang" was a popular term in the yellow press to describe bands of young men and boys in the poor sections of towns.

According to the 1915 US Census:

And a quote from the head of the NJ State Liquor Dealers' Association in 1905.

 

I participated a couple of times at Bells.

There was a homebrew shop down in Dundee MI that would produce wort for homebrewers to purchase back 20 or so years ago. One of the brothers that owned it passed a few years ago. I don't think that is done anymore.

A Zoigl brewery is owned by the people that take the wort and ferment it in their cellers. It is a way of making beer. It is not really a style.

I haven't experienced the true Zoigl culture yet, the logistics didn't work out. Here is a blog from a guy I know in Bayern that does tours of the Zoigl towns, and has had the beers many times. We used his services in Germany to go to some places off the beaten path, and I highly recommend him.
You can see that the beers are different.
https://www.beerwanderers.com/2021/04/dancing-with-mr-z/

I did experience this new "Zoigl" place in the Allgäu after a hike to Kloster Irsee. The beer can be described as a rustic lager.
https://www.beerwanderers.com/2022/09/zoigl-in-the-allgau-why-not/

 

I tried to find some actual reporting on the matter and failed so it could be all urban legend. But what I saw in Milwaukee was neighborhood bars in the first floor of houses in otherwise completely residential blocks. The people I used to visit there told me they were left overs from a time when it was common to have a couple houses in every neighborhood that would run a pub out of their house.

An old friend that was a professional brewer used to do a sailing race in Lake Superior with a couple people from the brewery he worked at. They would spend about a week in Duluth on those trips and what he relayed was that this custom of having pubs right in residential houses in otherwise entirely residential areas was alive and well and he was under the impression that the practice enjoyed some sort of legal protection, at least in certain neighborhoods.

 

I thought you were going to give us insight on that Duluth legal protection.

Many old cities (Chicago very much a case) have old taverns with apartments above them -- and being built to look like neighboring houses.

Hell, the smaller (and almost as old) town in Illinois where I grew up has old taverns on corners with living spaces above.

And yeah, I imagine they had growler fills for take home just like anywhere, but they weren't actually brewing beer.

 

I know there were breweries in Old Salem and Bethabara in and around Winston-Salem, N.C. before the USA existed. These were Moravian settlements mostly originating from the current day Czech Republic.

 

I went looking for that, but I didn't find anything. I may be guilty of spreading urban legends.

The ones I've been to in Milwaukee are clearly residential structures. The one that still stands out in my mind was in a neighborhood of singe family homes and was distinguished on the outside by a neon beer sign hanging in the front window. It's what sparked my questions because it seemed like a random corner house had just decided to start selling beer

 

Sounds like corner bars in Chicago.

And Waukegan, Kenosha, Racine...

 

@unlikelyspiderperson -- you'll enjoy this article. Typical Chicago corner tavern that looks like some of the other apartment houses in the 'hood.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/1...ers-of-80-year-old-bar-hope-to-bring-it-back/

 

Ah, that notoriously pleasant city of Chicago bureaucracy!