Old & Closed Breweries

Missiles back then may have been aimed/controlled by flippers.

 

I wonder if you had to put a quarter in the slot to launch.

 

I used to find nicely intact Atlantic bottles and labels in junk piles that were likely from depression area homes long gone. The brewery was in Charlotte and was well distributed. The whisky and patent medicine bottles were much more interesting....

 

This building was reused in the early 90’s by a short-lived craft brewery, Golden Prairie. Nick Floyd brewed there, and Josh Deth got his start there washing kegs. When the building was demolished in 2012, I managed to salvage some small remnants.

 

Wow. Lousy history of the Muehlebach brewery and other post-Pro brewing in KC in that link.

After Repeal, Muehlebach bought an ice company and built that new brewery at 3rd and Oak, by the late 1940s it was brewing a quarter million barrels a year. Never looked into much but apparently one of the partners in the new KC Muehlebach Brewing Co. was a member of the family that operated the San Miguel brewery in the Philippines.

Schlitz bought it in 1956 and it closed in 1973 (probably too old and inefficient for the multimillion barrel Schlitz at the time).

Apparently M. K. Goetz which had a famous brewery in St. Joseph (known for Country Club Malt Liquor) also had a draught-only facility in KC in the 1940s.

 

Well, there are these drawings (inside and out) from a pre-Pro series of ads...


Contrary to the second article "It was probably brewed at the old Rheingold plant. They did a lot of contract brewing for smaller brands in the late ’70s, usually sold at bargain prices and poorly packaged" Probably? Rheingold bought the Ruppert brands in 1965 when Jacob Ruppert closed - it was not contract-brewed. (Nor was it "poorly packaged" )

The Knickerbocker brand name lasted into the 1990s at least - Schmidt's of Phila. bought the Rheingold labels when they shutdown in the late '70s, and then Heileman continued the brand when they bought the Schmidt brands in the late 1980s, selling it in New England, which was the original brewery's biggest market. In the late 1950s, it was actually the largest selling beer in New England (unknown if that included Red Sox fans ) and before selling out, they did research into building a new plant in Connecticut.

 

Humboldt brewing company at the turn of the 20th century (I think that photo is around 1910?). It was located roughly across the street from Fort Humboldt, where future president Ulysses S. Grant was briefly stationed and noted for his dour moods and excessive drinking, and the current site is a strip mall that sits in front of the larger mall.

At the time of that photo it would have been along the main road with a local rail/dock nexus not far from it behind.

The brand was revived up the road 10ish miles in the college town of Arcata, that space is now a sports bar called HumBrews. The brand was sold to Firestone-Walker for a while and brewed down there but was recently repurchased by family members of the 80s revival owners and they claim to be brewing.

They briefly opened a Cafe in another strip mall in Arcata, in the former home of a Christian cafe/meeting place, but never served any alcohol and closed that venue down in less that 6 months.

 

Thanks for sharing your cool story and picture of the brewery pieces you kept!

Was too late to enjoy the original brewery, but was grateful to try their beers brewed by Argus until they unfortunately closed at the start of lockdowns. Nice that they won a GAFB Gold Medal for their Doppel Alt Beer. Argus was built within an original Schlitz Brewery horse stable.

Photo Source: https://openhousechicago.org/sites/site/argus-brewery/

Photo Credits: Eric Allix Rogers





Goose Island's OG brewpub a few blocks away will shutter as well soon after 31 years.

https://goldenprairiebrewing.com/

Article regarding the resurrection of the Golden Prairie brand.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/dini...0190912-4mmlwwh225a6zoxbneuu32ni2e-story.html

Article regarding the closure of Argus in March 2020.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coro...0200422-h7x5gjxgrbdhtiwtuuxink4diy-story.html

 

Really neat to see all these old buildings that have been posted. I'll add one from where my mother's family is from, Farmington, CT. This one was close by in New Britain, CT; my grandfather's old destruction company now run by my uncle actual took their building down...

Cremo Ale


Brewery...



A local New Britain brewery, Alvarium now brews a line of Cremo beers, not exact recipes, just their interpretations of what those beers may have been. All articles I could find were paywalled, sorry. Kind of neat though...

Cremo Ale - https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/48585/317875/
Cremo Dark - https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/48585/586044/
Cremo Bock - https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/48585/594211/

 

Thanks for the drawings. And for the history.

 

Hence the "Hydrogen jukebox" line in Ginsberg's Howl.

 

Potosi Brewery, Potosi, WI. https://www.yahoo.com/gma/biggest-losers-bud-light-boycott-164851939.html
The location hosts the Amer. Brewers Assn. Museum, a restaurant, and a new brewery. Unfortunately, the website doesn't have photos of the existing old brewery buildings. Google maps views from Potosi Old River Road show some of the old buildings.

 

Correction: American Breweriana Assn.

 

The old Hamms Brewery in San Francisco was derelict for many years and then converted into office space in the 80's. I worked for a company with an office there in the late 00's. Our suite had a huge (like 8' across) concrete chimney sticking up through one corner. The building manager's office was covered floor to ceiling with Hamms memorabilia on display.

Here it is as office:



But it used to have a sign on top with a huge beer chalice that lit up at night. My mom told me when she was a kid it was one of the first things you could see coming into the City at night.




Across the street used to be old Seal Stadium, which was a minor league field, although the Giants used it temporarily their first year after moving from NY. Unfortunately the field is long gone, shopping center now.




Anchor Brewing is about ten blocks away FWIW.

 

Our family visited relatives in Santa Rosa in the 50s. My uncle took my father and me to a Giants game at Seal Stadium -- the only Giants league game I ever went to. (I later saw a Giants exhibition against the Portland Beavers, and the crowd at Multnomah (now Providence) in Portland was bigger than the one at the Seal Stadium game!)

 

In my hometown, the old Neuweiler Brewery is a sad reminder of the long gone days when Allentown, PA was a place where one member of a family could work hard and earn a family-sustaining living. The brewery has been closed as long as I have been alive, but my elders told great stories about its heyday.

When my maternal grandfather was a young man, he lived only a few blocks from the brewery. He told me that he would walk over with a cart and buy a bunch of cases for about 4-5 members of the extended family who all lived in the same neighborhood. He said that there was a small bar and tap at the brewery where anyone could sit down and drink free beer any time the brewery was open. He told me that he'd go to buy beer on his day off. He'd stop and have a few at the brewery. Then, he'd walk the cases that he bought to various family members. At each house, he'd drop off a case or two and have at least one brew with each relative. By the time he got home, he was feeling pretty good.

Sounded like a great way to spend a day off to me!

Periodically, developers and city officials would crow about rehabbing the old brewery, but nothing ever became of any of the fancy talk. Recently, a developer bough the property and started the process of demolishing the old building. I think they are planning on building loft apartments on the site. It's sad that no one ever saw the value of that property and made it into a production facility of some sort.

 

Really neat and fun read; thanks for sharing.

 

Pretty interesting story behind that brewery, which Theo. Hamm bought from the Rainier Brewing Co. in 1953.

(That Rainier Brewing Company was unrelated to the post-Repeal Seattle Rainier owned by Canadian/US west coast brewery magnate Emil Sick).

Rainier Brewing Co. moved to CA in the late teens when Washington enacted state prohibition in 1916. Apparently, when WA went dry, they outlawed brewing in the state but residents could still buy beer from outside breweries and have it shipped to them.

 

In the 1970s a friend and I were driving around Allentown looking at the old breweries (Horlacher* had just closed IIRC) and even toured the Schaefer plant outside the city. Underneath the old wooden loading dock at Neuweiler, there were still cases of empty deposit bottles, with their labels mostly intact. Since bars would typically put any brewer's returnable bottles in any case, there were also many bottles of other brands. Neuweiler used green glass for some of their ales, so I picked up a few Ballantine Ale bottles at the time.

*I recall a cool old VW van with the famous Horlacher logo w/penguin on the door. Nice vehicle but too big for my breweriana collection.

Yeah, a decade ago, Ruckus Brewing Co. (best known for a earlier revival of the Reading Beer brand, pre-Sly Fox) was supposed to move in.
https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/allentown/2013/08/ruckus_brewing_co_gives_more_d.html