Oshkosh Beer: Brewing Wildcat Beer in Oshkosh

Oshkosh didn't quit its beer habit when Prohibition hit in 1920. After the city's established breweries ceased production a swarm of illegal breweries emerged. They were called wildcat breweries. They flooded Oshkosh with beer.

601 South Main Street in Oshkosh, former site of a wildcat brewery.

The wildcats operated in ways that were similar to that of their licensed predecessors. They brewed, they kegged, they bottled, and they distributed. Their beer was sold, albeit illegally, in the same places that had previously taken their beer from Peoples Brewing, Rahr Brewing, or the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

The federal raids that occurred on Oshkosh's wildcats led to court cases and newspaper reporting that shed light on the inner workings of these breweries. More revealing, yet, is a 1980 interview with former Oshkosh bootleggers Cyril (last name withheld) and Ed "Slim" Suda. Cyril and Slim were brewers of wildcat beer in Oshkosh.

Ed “Slim” Suda.

"There were breweries all over town," Slim said. "A lot of them were small places. Some were in the basements of homes."

But this wasn’t homebrewing as we know it today. These breweries made beer on a commercial scale. When the brewery in the basement of the Safford family home on Kentucky Avenue was raided in 1930, Federal agents found more than 2,000 gallons of finished beer on hand. Enough to fill almost 900 cases of beer.

The former home of the Safford’s wildcat brewery at 1627 Kentucky Ave. in Oshkosh.

Producing that much beer in the basement of a home like that one would have been impossible if not for the assistance of breweries that had been established before Prohibition. Those breweries could no longer legally make beer. But they could produce and sell wort.

Wort is the sugary, liquid precursor to beer made from a mash of water and malted barley. It gets dosed with hops and then boiled prior to being fermented into beer. The production of wort in volume required a set of skills, equipment, and real estate most wildcat brewers had little hope of attaining. But there was no need for that. Not when there were so many strapped legal breweries in the immediate vicinity happy to provide all the wort you could ever want.

So, the first step in the brewing process for the wildcats was a visit to one of those suffering, law-abiding breweries to purchase a thousand gallons or so of wort. "We done business in Waupun with Arnold Peterson," Slim said. "Butch Youngwirth (head of another wildcat brewing outfit in Oshkosh) done business over in New London with Knapstein."

Both the Waupun Brewing Company and the Knapstein Brewing Company were being used as wort manufacturing facilities in the service of bootleggers.

The Waupun Malt Company, formerly the Waupun Brewing Co.

"You had to bring it back and dump it in the working tank and add yeast to it and let it work out," Cyril said. The "working tank" was the fermentation vessel where the wort, inoculated with yeast, fermented into beer. The size of these tanks varied depending upon the location of the brewery.

In the home-based basement breweries, the working tanks tended to be smaller and more numerous. Some were made of wood and lined with pitch. Others were earthenware crocks. In these breweries, 50-gallon tanks were often employed.

A typical sort of fermentation tank used in basement breweries.

Larger tanks were used in the breweries that could accommodate them, such as those located on farms or in outbuildings. The working tanks at these breweries typically had a capacity of 10 barrels or more. Large enough to produce approximately 130 cases of beer per batch.

"Most of those breweries had four tanks, some of them five tanks," Cyril said. These were open vessels made of wood. "You'd get the tanks soaked and tight and then you could go right in business," Slim said. "We'd make five batches a week. That would be the top."

"Sometimes it worked faster than others," Cyril said. "You had to wait until it had worked off or else you couldn't get it in the bottle. It would blow the bottle up." It didn't always go according to plan. "A batch might spoil," Slim said. "You could get bacteria in it and it would go sour on you. You had to let her down the sewer then."

In the basement breweries, the aroma of so much beer fermenting in a confined space would have been overwhelming. "They'd have a vent going out the chimney," Cyril said. "The atmosphere took most of the smell."

Where everyone in the neighborhood could enjoy it. These breweries were hardly inconspicuous. But for the most part, they were accepted in Oshkosh. "You couldn't have stayed in business two weeks if the officials would have taken their job the way they were supposed to," Slim said. "But that was out of their line. They didn't care as long as you didn't bother anybody. You were giving the people something that they wanted. They wanted it themselves."

After fermentation, the beer was filtered and transferred to either another set of tanks or barrels for carbonation. "They had carbonating stones they run it through there and they carbonate it," Cyril said. "They didn't catch the regular gas off of the fermenting beer. They had no way of doing that."

Bottled beer required extra steps. "We had to wash all the bottles by hand in them days," Cyril said. "And they had an old steam boiler they used to pasteurize it with. They run that up the smokestack so they didn't see no smoke coming off of the steamer."

Slim recalled a bottling operation they had set up in a home-based brewery in Oshkosh. " I had the pasteurizer in the basement," he said. "Battis made the boiler so you could get it into the basement through the door. We'd pasteurize 125-130 cases of beer at a time. It got hotter than hell down there. After we moved out of there this thing dried up and everything opened up. The old hardwood maple flooring opened up. There was cracks all over in the house from all that steam from pasteurizing beer."

From the brewery, the beer was delivered to scores of nearby saloons that had been rebranded as "soft drink" parlors when Prohibition began. In 1931, federal investigator Frank Buckley said he counted 120 such places in Oshkosh. How many of them sold wildcat beer? "About 100 percent sold it," Cyril said. "If you didn't, you couldn't stay in business."

The wildcat breweries made their deliveries much like their licensed counterparts had before Prohibition. "You didn't hide it," Cyril said. "You put it out in the shed and they rolled it in and tapped it. And they always had some near-beer tapped beside it. All the breweries, they all made near beer... Peoples, Oshkosh, Rahr."

The first iteration of Chief Oshkosh was a non-alcoholic “near” beer produced during Prohibition.

Slim said some taverns had special taps designed to accommodate both the real and near beer. "They had a faucet, you push it one way and the real beer came out and if you brought it back the other way, over center, the near beer came out. Same faucet."

That sense of pretense infiltrated the ranks of those commissioned to enforce the dry law. "Mostly it was the feds you had to contend with," Slim said. "But even if you got raided they were pretty good about it. They'd break some of the bottles. They'd knock the bungs out of the kegs and let it run out, so you lost all of that, but you could help yourself. All you wanted to drink, you know. They'd let you take a pitcher and drink it if you wanted it. They wanted you to go back in business again, the way it looked. They could have destroyed the whole outfit if they wanted it. They could have taken a torch and cut it up and put you out of business. It seemed like they wanted you to stay in business, so they'd have a job."

In 1933, Prohibition ended and they all lost their jobs. Federal officials were concerned that the wildcat breweries would be an ongoing concern. It proved not to be so. Oshkosh's underground beer industry perished almost immediately upon repeal. Legal beer accomplished what Prohibition never could: it put an end to the wildcats.