Quenching The Thirst
Chapter Three: The Entrepreneurs
(An excerpt)
By Rod Kackley
It is only right that Michigan is growing so many new breweries, so many new craft beers and so many new entrepreneurs in this space. We like our beer. That is our history.
Detroit has Frederick Ams to thank for bringing lager to what would become the Motor City.
The German brewer moved to Detroit in 1848. He was followed by another German, Bernhard Stroh, who also established himself in Detroit. Anyone with any history in Michigan knows how important that name, Stroh, was to Michigan and especially to Detroit. The name “Stroh” was right up their with Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, and General Motors. Two more of their countrymen would follow and Detroit soon had four breweries.
For a couple of centuries beer had a better reputation than water in America. It was certainly safer to drink. Same thing was true for whiskey. Yet, beer did develop a bad name for years in Detroit, in Michigan and across the nation. Same thing happened to whiskey and that was followed by Prohibition. However, once that legislative mistake was erased from the U.S. Constitution, the beer industry was soon flourishing again in Detroit.
Michigan’s 40 breweries were pumping out 3.25 million barrels of beer every year by 1940, with 15 of them operating in Detroit.
Those good times did not last.
By 1962, only two breweries were left in Detroit thanks to a wave of consolidation, acquisition and failure. Soon that number would be down to one. Stroh’s—created by the family of Bernhard Stroh, was the last to fall.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community shows how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan created a cluster of prosperity while the rest of Michigan was crumbling around them.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is available wherever books are sold.
For an autographed edition, click here
John Pannell, an Englishman, built the first brewery in Grand Rapids in 1836. Christopher Kusterer followed him in 1847 and he was followed by the Gottlieb brothers.
Grand Rapid Brewing Company—remember that name it will pop up again—was incorporated in 1892. Prohibition forced a name change and a new business direction for Grand Rapids Brewing Company in 1918. The new name: Grand Rapids Products Company. The new product: a soft drink called Silver Foam.
Furniture City Brewing, even though the name was anything but appetizing, was another of the early players that had to shift direction because of Prohibition selling a non-alcoholic beer known as Nu-Bru. Petersen Brewing changed its name to Petersen Beverage, pushing a drink called Vita.
Just like in Detroit, when Prohibition ended in 1933, beer started flowing again in Grand Rapids and the brewers went back to work making what they loved. Furniture Brewing and Grand Rapids Brewing merged under the latter name, only to become part of Michigan Brewing Co. in 1936.
Four years later, Michigan Brewing would be producing 500,000 to 600,000 barrels of beer a year.
~RTR~
Sixty years later, a new generation of craft-brewing entrepreneurs would bring new life to the tradition of making beer in Michigan. For a preview of that story, please click here.
Quenching The Thirst is the ebook essay in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series that tells the stories of the new wave of entrepreneurs driving the creation of the craft brewing industry in Michigan.
You can download your copy of Quenching The Thirst for just 99-cents by clicking here.
Other excerpts are available on this blog, feel free to scroll through them, or at www.rodkackley.com.
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