I always thought about how humans suffered when the 18th Amendment ushered in prohibition, but if you read the blog you will see how a Brooklyn dog also became a victim of prohibition, but first a little Brooklyn beer history.
I had a beer last night at Brouwerij Lane on Greenpoint Avenue and saw Ed Raven, the local beer maven. Ed asked me if I would talk about the history of beer production in Brooklyn, a topic very close to my heart. Brooklnites have been brewing and quaffing beer since colonial times. Our earliest European settlers were beer lovers, but they were dependent on imported English beer. However, the enterrprising and self-reliant colonists quickly developed their own brews. Many of the founding fathers, in fact, were also home-brewers with their own recipes. By the 1770s, New York City and Philadelphia established themselves as the colonial brewing centers. At least two documented commercial brewers operated in Brooklyn during the 18th century, but it was small scale. Most brews were produced only for home consumption or by mall scale brewers for sale in nearby taverns. The few commercial brewers produced English style brews,such as ale, porter, stout, and common beer, using top-fermenting yeast.
In 1840 American brewing Changed dramatically when a former brewer from Bavaria, John Wagner, brought lager beer yeast to this country for the first time. Lager beer is an effervescent malt beverage, brewed by using the bottom- fermentation process, in which a special yeast settles as residue at the bottom of the brewing vats. Because the process of making this light, crisp brew demanded storage and cool temperatures to achieve fermentation it was termed ‘lager,’ which is derived from the German verb lagern, meaning to stock or store.” Wagner opened a small brewery in back of his Philadelphia home,supplying a nearby tavern. Wagner’s production of lager led to a major switch in the American beer palate, from English to German brews.
The introduction of lager beer to the American market coincided with a massive influx of German immigrants to Brooklyn in the 1840s. The arrival of these thirsty Germans with a taste for their native style beer revolutionized the brewing industry in New York City. The Germans provided a huge new market for German style lager. Two New York City breweries (George Gillig and F & M Schaefer) began to brew lager in the 1840s, S. Liebmann and Sons Brewery (later renamed Rheingold), founded in 1854, was one of the first to use the bottom fermenting process in Brooklyn. As lager gained popularity in the mid- 1850s, the cities where most German immigrants settled became lager producers and also the largest American brewing centers These places including Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis, as well as Philadelphia, New York and of course, Brooklyn, specifically in Williamsburg and Bushwick, where a German community formed and became the heart of New York’s brewing industry. The area boasted a number of features conducive to brewing: an abundant water supply, soil suitable for the construction of underground storage chambers, convenient water and rail transportation, as well as strong local demand. Between the 1850s and the 1880s, many German immigrants settled in a 14-square block area known as “Brewer’s Row, which covered Scholes and Meserole Streets and extended from Bushwick Place to Lorimer Street. At least a dozen separate breweries flourished just in Bushwick. Brooklyn in the 1870’s had become a major American beer brewer. Dozens of establishments, largely run by Germans, flourished in Williamsburg and Bushwick. By the 1880s, Brooklyn was the home to 35 breweries who generated an estimated $8 million in revenue annually. The majority of these firms exclusively brewed lager beer, while the remainder brewed ale or weiss (wheat) beer. Demand and production continued to grow. By 1898, nearly fifty breweries operated in the Brooklyn area [which came to be known as the Brewing Capitol of the United States]. Probably the most prominent of those companies established in Brewer’s Row was Leibmann’s Rheingold brewery, although there were other well-known or colorful firms such as F. & M. Schaefer, George Ehret’s, John F. Trommer’s and Piels. Bushwick produced almost 10% of all beer consumed in the United States during the height of its production.
One of the fans of lager was Brooklyn’s greatest poet Walt Whitman, who frequently visited the German-run Pfaff’s beer cellar in New York City, a hub for bohemian intellectuals and artists. Whitman wrote positively about German immigrants and lager beer in his work, particularly in his essays about the Bowery. Several articles in the Brooklyn Eagle from the 1860s and 1870s documented the growing popularity of lager, with the Eagle even calling it our “National Beverage,” This satisfying brew appealed to people of all classes and to different ethnic groups.
So far the story of beer in Brooklyn sounds like a beautiful success story, but life has taught me that as soon as something good starts a shower of horrible kill joys will come along and destroy it and so it was with beer in the United States. A temperance movement formed with the aim of destroying the sale of alcohol in the United States. These zealots also forced the enactment of “blue laws,” which forbid bars and breweries to open on Sundays, the only day most New Yorkers had off. Old-timers in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the 1940s recalled that the Greenpoint Police were so vigilant in enforcing Sunday Blue-laws against drinking that they inspected people’s packages to check for beer.
I came across a sad article in the March 14th 1920 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1919 loonies in America added the 18th amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the sale of alcohol and decimating Brooklyn’s beer culture. The article described a forlorn dog whom the writer called dubbed growler. Growler grew up in the bar before prohibtion closed it. The article said that Growler was “congenial, friendly and a good mixer.” But after prohibition Growler became listless, sullen and “the most dispirited canine in Brooklyn.” The article labeled Growler as a “conspicious victim of prohibition and the anti-saloon league.”
https://bklyn.newspapers.com/image/686949881/?match=1&terms=growler
Happily, we ended the madness that was prohibition and we can all enjoy a great beer.