Oshkosh Classics: The Story of Our City’s Beer in 12 Recipes

Here's the story of our beer culture told through recipes that span 175 years of brewing in Oshkosh.

Oshkosh Classics is a 32-page, magazine-sized booklet with full-color illustrations throughout. Beer recipes are the core of the booklet, but anyone with an interest in Oshkosh brewing history or the city’s social history will find it interesting. The story goes beyond beer. It’s about community.

Oshkosh Classics has been a long time coming. I began searching for recipes from old Oshkosh breweries about a dozen years ago. My sole intention was to replicate what were then lost Oshkosh beers. As I found recipes, I scaled them to homebrew batch size and got brewing. I wasn’t too surprised to find that some of the old recipes produced great beers. After all, people in Oshkosh once loved these beers.

Rolling another barrel of Gambrinus Brewery Beer into an Oshkosh saloon in the early 1890s. A recipe for the brewery’s black lager is included in Oshkosh Classics.

As it often is with homebrewers, I had a strong impulse to share what I was doing. It was easy finding people who understood my obsession. I’ve been a member of the Society of Oshkosh Brewers homebrew club since 2010. This kind of thing is what the SOBs are all about.

In the spring of 2023, I suggested to the club’s board that we collect these recipes into a booklet. And off we went. I spent most of this past winter writing and designing the booklet, and thanks to SOB Rob Bearwald, we were able to have it professionally bound and printed on quality paper. Our humble, little beer book turned out better than any of us could have expected.

Some SOBs checking out their copies of Oshkosh Classics. Photos courtesy of Staci Saunders.

The SOBs’ release party for Oshkosh Classics will be at Bare Bones Brewery on Saturday, April 20, beginning at noon. In addition to the booklet release, SOB members will be sharing free samples of homebrew made from recipes included in the booklet.

Here’s a bonus: that same day, Bare Bones Brewery will release Peoples Bock made from the original recipe used at Peoples Brewing of Oshkosh in the 1950s and 1960s. Peoples Bock will be available on draft and in collectible cans.

There are only 300 copies of Oshkosh Classics, and I doubt that more will be printed. The SOBs are a non-profit organization and printing something like this is quite expensive. But the club wanted to keep the price of the booklet as low as possible. So, individual copies of Oshkosh Classics will be sold for $5 when purchased directly from a club member.

If you can’t make the release party at Bare Bones, here are a couple of other options…

Saturday, April 27

I’ll have copies of Oshkosh Classics for sale at the B'Gosh It's Good Breweriana Show from noon until 4pm.

Saturday, May 4

The SOBs will host their annual Big Brew behind the The Cellar brew shop at 465 N. Washburn from 9am until noon. This is always a fun, public event with lots of brewing, and food from the Ginger German food truck. This year, we’ll have a stack of Oshkosh Classics with us.

All of us SOBs hope to see you at one of these events. Prost!