Beering Up at Dichmann's Grocery

Bottled beer was rare in Oshkosh in 1878. John Glatz & Christian Elser were going to change that.

John Glatz (on the left) with Christian Elser. Their ad for bottled beer was published on March 21, 1878.

Glatz and Elser ran the Union Brewery down at the end of Doty Street. Glatz Park is there now.

The Union Brewery.

But you didn’t have to go to the brewery to get their bottled beer. Their 1878 advertising directs you to Dichmann’s Grocery Store, the largest grocery store in the city.

Two views of Dichmann’s. The store was on the east side of N. Main Street, two doors south of Washington. The photo on the right shows the storefront sandwiched between red lines.

Glatz & Elser were using Dichmann’s to get women to buy their beer. Most of the beer sold in Oshkosh in 1878 flowed through saloons. But few women were in the habit of inhabiting those places. It never helped that the City of Oshkosh periodically banned women from even entering saloons. There were bluenoses at city hall who thought it would discourage vice. The tactic always ended in failure.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern February 27, 1901.

The Glatz and Elser workaround was simple. You placed your order at Dichmann’s and then the brewery would deliver the beer to your door. Thereby evading the nattering prudes who would keep a woman from her beer.

Bottled-beer picnic somewhere near the north side of Oshkosh.

In 1881, the Union Brewery stopped taking orders at Dichmann’s and installed a phone at the brewery. Now you could ring them up and send your order straight to the bottle house. It was the first phone line that ran all the way to the southern city limits. The brewery’s phone number was 12.

Bottled beer soon became commonplace in Oshkosh. And the brewers here continued to use it as a means of getting their liquid into the hands of women. In 1894, the Union Brewery merged with two other local breweries to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company. Glatz and Elser’s innovation was exploited by OBC for years to come.

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