Authors: Maureen Ogle
A man could make a fortune on Monday and lose it all by Friday. No matter. The era’s byword—progress—rolled off every tongue. There was room for everyone and every idea. True, the pace of industrial change ground slow and uneven: In densely populated and increasingly urban Massachusetts, young women and immigrants operated clattering machinery that wove millions of yards of fabric each year, while in Milwaukee, A. J. Langworthy could not lay hands on enough metal for one brewing vat and Phillip Best employed a horse to grind his malt. But by midcentury, Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world.
Critics complain about its uneven distribution—the wealthy few possessed an oversized chunk of the bounty—but no one could deny that in the United States, even a common laborer ate meat every day and owned a change of clothes, two facts that left his European counterpart gaping in awe. The young men and women who tended machines and shops—unmarried and still unfettered by responsibility—invested their meager wages in fine caps and jaunty jackets, beribboned bonnets and factory-made dresses. Immigrants watched and yearned as Americans in the burgeoning middle class devoted their cash to comfort: Oilcloth floor coverings gave way to rich woolen carpets; iron stoves replaced pots hung over open flame. Families scrabbling for a living on the frontier crowded into country stores to trade corn and homemade whiskey for hair ribbons and top hats, tea sets and button boots. Singer’s sewing machine allowed women to transform machine-made fabrics into dresses and shirts. All of it—the hats and shoes, John Deere’s plows and Samuel Colt’s revolvers, factory-made clocks and soaps, wallpaper and candles—provided pleasure twice: first in the buying and then in the using.
No surprise, émigré letters to family back home praised an otherwise unimaginable paradise. “[O]ne cannot describe how good it is in America,” reported one awestruck transplant. “In America one knows nothing about taxes. Here one does not need to worry about beggars as we do in Germany. Here a man works for himself. Here the one is equal to the other. Here no one takes off his hat to another. We no longer long for Germany.” “Every day,” he added, “we thank the dear God that he has brought us . . . out of slavery into Paradise,” a sweet fate he hoped to share with the millions still suffering, still living back in Germany “as if under lions and dragons, fearing every moment to be devoured by them.” Another new arrival spoke for thousands when he wrote, “We sing: ‘Long live the United States of America.’”
The Bests’ new home provided inspiration aplenty. Milwaukee sat out in the frontier in what was still a territory rather than a state, but in the decade since the town had been founded, the American passion for converting land into profit had transformed a moribund trading post of a few hundred into a lively metropolis, vibrant testimony to the infinite possibility of America in the 1840s.
To the north and west of the family’s Chestnut Street property lay a thick forest that stretched for miles. Concealed beneath the leafy mass, crude wagon tracks led away from the town and into the western hinterland, where dwindling forest eventually gave way to rolling hills and then the vast grassy sweep of the Iowa Territory, acres of soil that could be planted with barley. To the south and east lay the town itself, visible from atop the Chestnut Street ridge as a mosaic of roofs, chimneys, and steeples, their textures and colors interlaced with a mortar of muddy streets that teemed with people, horses, and wagons. “A fellow . . . can hardly get along the sidewalk,” grumbled one visiting farmer. “[E]very kind of Mechanism is a going on in this place from street hawking to Manufacturing steam Engines and every kind of citizens [sic] from the rude Norwegian to the polished Italian.”
Carpenters, metalworkers, and bricklayers hustled from one job to another, busy converting the city’s vacant lots into hotels, houses, law offices, workshops, and taverns. Farmers, shoppers, and newly arrived émigrés thronged the plank walkways that bordered muddy thoroughfares. Lawyers bustled in and out of the courthouse, signing contracts and settling land claims. Carts laden with produce, building supplies, and grain rumbled through the streets. A clatter of languages and dialects filled the air: German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, and Welsh; the New Englander’s flat, clipped twang; the southerner’s softer drawl.
Thanks to its location on the shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee was one of the most accessible of the nation’s far western settlements. In the 1840s, it served as a gateway through which migrants passed on their way to the vast stretch of rich soil in the territories beyond, or to find work in the Wisconsin Territory’s booming mining and timber industries. Every day, steamers spewing gritty clouds of black smoke and cinder chips belched human cargo onto the wharves.
The lake itself could not be seen from the Chestnut ridge, thanks to the sharp ascent of the Milwaukee’s eastern bank. But when Phillip climbed the steep bluff that hugged the lake’s edge, he marveled at the vast sheet of rippling gray silk that stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, jagged tripods of canvas-draped uprights sliced the horizon. Closer at hand, a jumble of masts cluttered the harbor. Bundles of wheat and timber dangled from the slender arms of cranes, then disappeared into waiting hulls. Grunting stevedores trundled carts filled with the multifarious tools needed to convert a wilderness of river and forest into a respectable example of American civilization: plowshares, iron plates, and saddles; boots, stationery, and shawls; casks filled with raisins, nuts, and oils; crates containing bottles of wine from France and porter and stout from England; dictionaries and primers; gloves, yarn, and fabric.
“The public houses and streets are filled with new comers and our old citizens are almost strangers in their own town,” marveled the editor of one of the city’s newspapers. “One hundred persons, chiefly German, landed here yesterday,” another resident wrote to his brother during the summer of 1842. And more were on the way: In the early 1840s, Germans poured into the territory. Some came after reading a pamphlet published in 1841 by a German-speaking visitor who praised the climate, soil, and opportunity. Those first settlers in turn wrote laudatory letters of their own back home, which fueled still more migration to Wisconsin. By the time the Bests arrived, about one-third of the town’s population spoke German.
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of 1844, with Langworthy’s copper vat installed, Phillip and the two Jacobs, father and son, began brewing, likely with recipes and yeast carried with them to their new home. They had been winemakers back in Germany, but Americans drank almost no wine and so the United States had no tradition of viniculture. Beer would provide the substance of their American dream.
They followed the practices of most German brewers of that time, relying on strong backs and shoulders to brew by hand rather than machine. At the new brewery, an L-shaped, one-story brick structure that also served as the family’s residence, they trundled wheelbarrows of grain, either purchased in town from a farmer at market or ordered from Buffalo, into the shop and dumped it into a capacious wooden steeping vat to soak for a day or two. Then they spread the sodden grain on the floor and waited for the kernels to sprout. The acrospire, the quarter-inch sprout that emerged from the base of each kernel, contained the enzymes (diastase) that would convert barley’s starch into sugar. Germination typically required two or three days, depending on the humidity and the age and quality of the grain. Phillip kept close watch on the pile, stirring and tossing it regularly to add new oxygen and ensure that all the heads sprouted at more or less the same time. A fruity aroma filled the brewhouse (much like the odor of rotten apples, critics complained) as nature conducted the business of turning barley into malt.
When each kernel had sprouted, the men shoveled the malt onto the drying floor, an elevated platform stationed above a kiln. They fed the firebox a steady diet of wood, watching the flames and testing the heat, aiming for a temperature somewhere between 160 and 170 degrees, hot enough to dry the malt but not burn it. With its moisture evaporated, the malt weighed less for the next go-round of shoveling, this time into a storage bin, where it was left to age a few weeks.
When Jacob, Sr., declared ripe both the grain and the time, he and his sons hauled the malt to the grinder. While the horse dragged a heavy stone over the grain, the brothers filled their precious copper boiler with water, heated it to about 130 degrees, and added the ground malt. As it cooked, they stirred it with long paddles, waiting for the enzymes to transform starch into sugar and the water into syrupy wort. When the sugar had dissolved, the brothers drained the wort, rinsed the vat to remove every bit of the syrup, and began cooking the wort again, this time adding hops, the cone-shaped flower of the
Humulus lupulus
. Hops added flavor, aroma, and bitterness to the beer and acted as a preservative, too, by inhibiting the growth of bacteria. In 1844, the Bests most likely relied on hops imported (like the metal for the brewing vat) from Buffalo. Much of the beer’s character and taste emerged from this phase of the operation, and the men heated the mix slowly, constantly monitoring it and the fire’s flames.
After several hours, they drained the wort into large flat pans, there to cool to about 45 degrees, no easy feat in an age when “refrigeration” depended on cold weather or blocks of ice. Luckily, Milwaukee in December and January offered plenty of both. Phillip and his brothers transferred the wort to a fermenting tub and added the yeast—“pitched” it, in brewing parlance—then held their breaths and waited. This was make-or-break time. Assuming the yeast had survived the trip from Europe and was alive and healthy, soon white foam would crawl across the wort’s surface. If none appeared, their work was in vain.
To their relief and joy, about ten hours after the first pitch, a thin band of foam appeared. Some ten or twelve hours later, froth covered the entire surface. It dissipated and drifted down to the bottom of the vat, where it continued to work, turning the wort into beer. The brew fermented in its tub for seven to ten days. Then, leaving the yeast behind, the men drained the beer into pitch-lined barrels (the pitch protected the beer from the taint of wood) and transferred the kegs to a cellar beneath the brewery, where the beer aged in cool temperatures.
Now the waiting began—anywhere from two to six months, during which the beer’s flavor mellowed and the yeast precipitated. Jacob and his sons passed the time converting barley, wine, and cider into whiskey and vinegar, tasks that required less labor and time than did brewing. In February 1845, they introduced (or, in the case of the vinegar, reintroduced) Milwaukeeans to the Best family of products in advertisements in the city’s German-language newspaper: “Best & Company, Beer Brewery, Whiskey Distillery & Vinegar Refinery . . . on the summit of the hill above Kilbourntown. Herewith we give notice to our friends that henceforth we will have bottom fermentation beer for sale.” The family promised to provide its “worthy customers” with “prompt and satisfactory service.”
Best and Company was in business.
T
HEY WERE NOT ALONE
. Everywhere that Germans went in the 1840s, beer flowed close at hand, and several hundred immigrant brewers opened their doors during the decade. New York and Philadelphia claimed the lion’s share, with forty breweries founded in Philadelphia and several dozen in New York. But beer also foamed freely in other cities where Germans congregated in large numbers: St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Brooklyn, Chicago, and, of course, Milwaukee, where ten brewers set up shop during the decade. (For years, beer historians have credited John Wagner of Philadelphia with introducing lager to the United States, but the title of first lager brewer probably belongs to émigrés Alexander Stausz and John Klein, who founded a tiny outfit in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1838.) Like the Bests, these other pioneering German-American brewers cultivated a local market, selling beer to customers who lived around the corner or a few blocks away.
The Bests were not their city’s first German brewers. That honor belonged to Simon (sometimes called Herman) Reutelshofer. According to one of the laborers who helped build the brewshop, the proprietor tapped his first keg in May 1841. It was nearly his last, presumably because he lacked either the skill or the customers. Within months his business teetered on the brink of collapse. The would-be beer baron went hunting for an infusion of cash, and, to his everlasting regret, found salvation in the person of one John B. Meier (sometimes spelled Meyer), also a German émigré. Reutelshofer wanted a mortgage, but Meier presented him with a contract to buy the property. Reutelshofer, who either ignored the fine print, could not read a document that may have been written in English, or was illiterate, unwittingly signed away his livelihood.
Meier ordered Reutelshofer to vacate the premises. The brewer, still unaware that he no longer owned the shop, resisted. Meier grabbed his dupe and “then and there with divers sticks and clubs and with his fists gave [him] . . . many blows and strokes about his head, face, breast, back, shoulders, arms, [and] legs.” Not content with his handiwork, Meier hurled Reutelshofer to the ground “with great force and violence” and “kicked, struck and . . . choked him.”
Poor Reutelshofer recovered neither pride nor property. He sued his attacker, demanding $2,000 in damages and the return of the brewery. A judge ordered Meier to pay a mere $150 and dispatched a sheriff to seize the building and its contents and return them to their original owner. Nothing doing. Meier had already deeded not only the brewery but everything else he owned to his father-in-law, Franz Neukirch. Reutelshofer’s claims against Meier fell into the category of lost causes. He never collected the monies due him, never regained possession of his brewshop, and dropped out of sight not long after the Best family arrived in Milwaukee.
Had he known, Reutelshofer might have taken comfort in numbers. His failure typified the experience of most brewers who set up shop in the 1840s (except, we hope, in the matter of the trickery and violence that separated him from his brewery). Many failed after a few years, likely due to inexperience or poor management. Others limped along for a decade or two before being bought by new owners who changed the name.