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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Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas... Oshkosh style, 1914 with Rahr's Special Brew!

Click to enlarge.

Miller's Famous Bock Beer

On this day in 1905...

The Miller bottling plant was near the SW corner of Market and Pearl Streets; about where City Center now is. J.C. Voss was elected mayor of Oshkosh in 1909.

Happy Thanksgiving, 1969 Syle

Peoples, Needles, and Women

In the spring of 1914, Peoples Brewing Company released a new beer named Aristo. To promote it, the brewery gave away a cardboard needle case. It was slathered with advertising. If you lived in Oshkosh, this may have landed in your mailbox (click on any of the pictures to enlarge them)...

The brewery hoped the recipient would tear off the postcard portion, fill out the order form on the reverse side, and mail it back to the brewery. Shortly after, beer would be delivered to their doorstep. Here’s a better look at the order form.

At 80 cents a case, Aristo was among the cheapest beers available in the city. Check out the beer listed below it. Standard, at 50 cents for a dozen pint bottles, was even cheaper. Not by much. By the ounce the difference was a fraction of a cent.

What is "un-steamed" beer? It's beer that hasn’t been pasteurized. That was unusual for a bottled beer of this period. The idea was to replicate the flavor of draft beer, which was also unpasteurized. Standard was the same beer Peoples sent out in wooden kegs to Oshkosh saloons. Here they refer to those saloons as “buffets.” They were putting a soft edge on things.

In 1914, there was a lot of trash talk being aimed at breweries. Much of it came from the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). The ASL was making huge strides in its push for a nationwide ban on alcoholic beverages. Breweries responded by trying to promote a more wholesome image. Aristo epitomized that. It was a “Family Beer.” What does that even mean?

This was also an appeal to women. By 1914 – a year after Peoples Brewing opened – sales of the brewery’s beer in saloons was booming. But there weren’t a lot of women hanging out in Oshkosh saloons. If Peoples was going to draw them in it would have to be done through bottled beer sales. The brewery increasingly directed its bottled-beer advertising towards women. Here’s an example from 1916.

“After a day's hard work, tending to the many household duties…”  What about the women who were out there working in Oshkosh’s mills? They’re never mentioned in these ads. Peoples issued all kinds of ads featuring working men doing manual labor. But the brewery never portrayed women in such a light. They’re always depicted in the home, exhausted by household chores.

Here’s a more accurate picture of the period. These are the workers at the Oshkosh Grass Matting Co.

I’ll bet a few of those women drank beer. They couldn’t vote, but they could buy beer. That’s the truly dark side of all this. On the whole, breweries were opposed to women's suffrage. Big mistake.

The suffrage movement found an ally in the ASL. The two groups joined forces. And in 1919 they rammed through the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution establishing national Prohibition. A year later, the 19th Amendment was passed granting women the right to vote.

Had breweries supported a woman’s right to vote, they may have diffused the power of the Anti-Saloon League. Perhaps the calamity of Prohibition would have been avoided. Ironically, women’s groups would be instrumental in the eventual derailing of Prohibition.

After beer became legal again in 1933, Peoples generally steered-clear of gender-based advertising. If women appeared in their ads at all, the depictions were usually idiotic. Get a load of this from 1971. A year after this came out, Peoples closed.

It would have been so much easier to do so much better. The picture below could have made a nice ad. It’s from 1957. The happy couple in Jerry’s Bar is enjoying what else? Peoples Beer!

Keep Cool and Happy!

This week it’s all bikes, beers, and brats for me. I’ll get back to blogging next week with more beery tales of Oshkosh. Until then, here’s how Oshkoshers were celebrating the Fourth of July in 1935. Nothing better than dancing with a giant goblet of beer. Prost!

Oshkosh Beer Versus Drugs

I’ll be tied up this week with a couple thing that are going to take me away from the blog. Life happens. I’ll be back on track next week. Until then, I’ll leave you to ponder this gem from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern of May 18, 1914...

Happy Memorial Day From the Oshkosh Brewing Company

Seeing as it’s a holiday, I thought I’d take a break from Oshkosh's burning breweries and post something a little more pleasant. Here’s a 100-year-old ad from the Oshkosh Brewing Company. This appeared in the Daily Northwestern in anticipation of the 1916 Memorial Day weekend.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, May 27, 1916

I don’t have a lot to add other than to ask you to notice that at this point OBC was offering just two beers: Special Lager and Oshkosh. Both were pale(ish) lagers. That’s a far cry from what the brewery was up to just 10 years earlier when it often had six or more beers in circulation, including a dark lager and a Berliner weisse. The blanding of American beer began well before Prohibition (1920). Drinkers in Oshkosh were experiencing that flavor recession first hand. Most appeared to be just fine with that. Those folks would go dizzy if they could see what we have to choose from today.

Let's Ask the Brewmaster

Beginning in 1957, The Oshkosh Brewing Company (OBC) presented a sequence of ads in the Daily Northwestern aimed at educating its customers about the basics of beer. The ads featured OBC brewmaster Wilbur Strottman answering simple questions about various aspects of beer and brewing. Perhaps most striking about the series is its rudimentary nature. It's clear that much of the tribal knowledge about beer that had once existed in Oshkosh had been lost.

The Brewmaster ads ran at the dawn of a dark age for beer in America. By 1957, the overwhelming majority of beers produced and consumed in the U.S. were of a single type - lightly hopped, pale lager brewed with a percentage of corn. The same held true In Oshkosh. Though the city's breweries were producing more beer than ever, there was little variety among the beers they made.

In 1957, Oshkosh's two breweries, OBC and Peoples, each produced just three types of beer. In Spring, the breweries would release a bock beer that remained on the market for no more than two or three months. With winter would come the strong, holiday seasonal beer that saw a similarly limited release. For the remainder of the year it was back to the pale, light lager that had come to dominate the palate of beer drinkers.

Of course, it hadn't always been this way. Prior to the 1900s, breweries in Oshkosh typically produced a range of beers throughout the year. For example, when the Oshkosh Brewing Company formed in 1894, its first ads, often in German, showed the brewery producing six types of beer. And there was no need to explain to the consumer that a Weiner beer was an easy drinking amber or that Culmbacher was a black, rich lager. In 1894 beer drinkers in Oshkosh new these things.

An 1894 ad for the Oshkosh Brewing Company. The brewery's six brands of beer are in highlight.

The narrowing of variety had been gradual. In the early 1900s breweries here began focusing ever-more intently on pale lager. The beer was a symbol of modernity, progress and purity. And beer drinkers flocked to it. With the arrival of Prohibition in 1920, the trajectory was fixed. A generation came of age with beer no longer a part of everyday life.

When beer became legal again in 1933, the connection to the past had been effectively severed. The appreciation for various styles of beer had been lost. Beer increasingly came to mean one thing: pale, light lager. In 1957, that meant the answers to questions such as "What is Bock Beer?" were no longer common knowledge.

Which brings us to these ads. Here's one from November 1957, answering the question just asked.

Here's Strottman explaining what makes a beer a Lager Beer.

Here's one made more interesting by what it doesn't say. Notice how there's no mention of corn being used in the production of Chief Oshkosh. Like Strottman, most brewers of the era preferred not to mention their use of corn as an ingredient.

I like this next one. Strottman clues us in on why draft beer is superior to bottled beer.

This one kills me. It's about beer freshness. Notice the complete disregard for the consumer. They don't need to know how damned old the beer is!

It's almost 60 years since these ads appeared and we're more confused than ever. The incredible variety of beer that's now available has left the majority of consumers utterly bewildered. I see it all the time at beer depots in Oshkosh. I tend to notice it at Festival more than at other places here. You see these people standing in front of that open cooler with a stunned look as they gaze up and down the rows of IPAs, stouts, wheat beers, etc... Then they go grab a sixer of Spotted  Cow.

Super-Selectable, Ever Delectable

Imagine for a moment that the year is 1953. You're tooling around Oshkosh in a Hudson Hornet. You see all these weird looking guys walking around with shaggy beards. Oshkosh is celebrating its centennial and to mark the event a lot of men in town are letting their face hair grow long. What a strange place this is, you think to yourself.

You snap on the radio. You tune in to WOSH and immediately get smacked in the ears with this fantastic piece of drivel (sung to the tune of the nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians).

One little, two little

Oshkosh Injuns

Three liitle, four little

Mi Gosh Injuns

Five little, Six little

B' Gosh Injuns

Big Chief Oshkosh's crew.

First little Injun

Famed for flavor

Next little Injun

Super Savor

Third little Injun

Mellow Goldness

Fourth little Injun

Sparkling Coldness

Five more, many more

Treats for you

In every glass of

Super-Selectable

Ever Delectable

Good Chief Oshkosh Brew

The jingle was written and produced for radio in January 1953 by the Chicago advertising firm C. Wendel Muench & Company. Just think, the Oshkosh Brewing Company had to go all the way to Illinois to find this crap. Sure, it's idiotic and offensive, but I still like the irony of it. The idea of promoting the flavor of something with a ditty that exhibits such poor taste, appeals to me in a bent sort of way. Now if I could only get it out of my head. One little, two little...

Happy Labor Day from the Breweries of Oshkosh

Every now and then, the breweries of Oshkosh would team up to publish an ad in collaboration. These typically occurred during times of stress. Here’s a good example. This ad was put out in advance of Labor Day 1946. World War II had been over for a year and Oshkosh was mired in the post-war recession that occurred as the country transitioned to a peacetime economy. In the face of the economic uncertainty that prevailed, Oshkosh’s three breweries teamed up to offer a message of encouragement... it can be done. Happy Labor Day!

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; August 31, 1946

The Subscribers Having Erected a Brewery in the Village of Oshkosh

Here’s the oldest newspaper ad that I’ve come across for an Oshkosh brewery. This appeared in the Oshkosh True Democrat on September 6, 1850. It’s for the Oshkosh Brewery of Joseph Schussler and John Freund, which was located on what is now Bay Shore Drive. If you click the image it will enlarge, making it an easier read. Note, the spelling of Schussler’s name in the ad differs from the spelling he typically used. I’ll stick with his standard spelling here.

The fact that Schussler and Freund are calling on local farmers to sell them barley indicates they were doing their own malting. That’s typical of the era. Malting was then largely considered part of the brewing process and not a separate endeavor independent of the brewery. Notice, also, that they’re only looking for barley. Corn wasn’t widely used in American brewing until the 1870s. Schussler, the brewmaster of this operation, was brewing an all-malt beer.

And what about hops? By 1850, there were already hop growers farming in Winnebago County. It would have made sense for Schussler to select his hops from the local stock. Rail lines had yet to reach Oshkosh in 1850. Bringing in bulky bales of hops from other parts of the state by horse and wagon would have been a more expensive, less reliable option. More than likely, the beer that came out of this brewery would have been a local beer in the truest sense.

It’s interesting that the Oshkosh Brewery was producing ale as well as beer, which in this case would have meant lager. Schussler came to be known as a lager brewer, but in 1850 the Oshkosh Brewery needed to compete with the ale from Detroit that had been coming into Oshkosh for more than a year. Schussler and Freund succeeded in taking over that part of the market. Detroit ale gradually receded from Oshkosh. The Milwaukee beer kept right on coming, though.

When this ad appeared there were fewer than 500 breweries in America. Oshkosh, with a population of 1,392, had two of them (the other being the Konrad brewery). That fact leads me to doubt that this is the first ad either of them placed in a newspaper. According to History, Winnebago County, Wisconsin Volume I (1908), Schussler and Freund began running ads in the True Democrat in 1849, the year the paper was launched. I’m not convinced that’s correct. I’ve dug through those papers and I’ve yet to find an earlier ad for this brewery. Maybe I need to look harder.

Here’s an odd, little side note: the Oshkosh True Democrat was an ardent supporter of the temperance movement. The paper’s co-owner and editor, James Densmore, was a unique guy. One account describes him this way: “Densmore had a huge muscular body, a bold red face and an aggressive, argumentative spirit.” Sounds like a fun guy. He was also instrumental in the creation of the first commercially successful typewriter, a vegetarian, and liked to rant about the evils of alcohol.

When it came to taking money from people selling alcohol, though, Densmore tended to look the other way. The True Democrat was larded with notices for saloons, liquor dealers and beer. Densmore may have been opposed to alcohol, but paying the bills came first. Those boozy ads helped to keep Densmore’s fledgling paper afloat.

Visit this page for more on the history of the Oshkosh Brewery.

From Near Beer to Nearer to Beer

Oshkosh in the 1920s was a city crowded with outlaws. Thanks to Prohibition, criminal pursuit was rampant. The do-gooders dreamed of creating a more sober, orderly society. But their overreach inspired utter contempt for the law among otherwise ordinary citizens. The crime du jour was the production and distribution of alcohol.

In Oshkosh, wildcat breweries and distilleries arrived hand-in-hand with Prohibition in 1920. Beer flats – private homes where homebrew and moonshine were sold – became common. Amidst the lawlessness, dispirited breweries like the Oshkosh Brewing Company worked within the law while abetting those who operated outside it. Here’s an ad from from October 1930 hinting at how convoluted the situation became.

Click Image to Enlarge

Tommy Thirst (“That’s Me!”) was an impish character introduced by OBC to push the brewery’s near beer in the waning years of Prohibition. There’s a line in this ad that’s perhaps more revealing than it first appears: “Our Near Beer doesn't start anything it can't finish.” That’s because the illegal “finish” was left to people outside of the brewery.

OBC’s near beer contained less than 1/2 of 1% alcohol by volume. For all practical purposes, it was alcohol free. It was usually produced by taking an already fermented beer and heating it to about 173º, the boiling point of alcohol. As the beer cooked, the alcohol would be drawn off.

The folks at OBC were certainly aware that their near beer would not necessarily remain an alcohol-free drink. After leaving the brewery, these brews were often spiked with alcohol to bring the beer back to its original strength or even stronger. The practice was referred to as “needling” or “spiking” and though it was illegal, it was so common in Oshkosh that the city sought to regulate it rather then try to eliminate it.

The City of Oshkosh required dealers in near beer to be licensed if the beverage was being consumed on premise. In 1929, Oshkosh Corporation Counsel Lloyd D. Mitchell explained why such an ordinance was needed.

"It has been shown that it is absolutely necessary that some local authority, state or municipal, have some regulatory power over places where drinks are dispensed. They are places where men congregate in large numbers and are idle and if the places are not operated by a proper person many things may take place that are detrimental to the community. Women complain to the authorities that their husbands are spending all of their money in a certain place or are coming home and abusing their families.”
  - Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; June 14, 1929

The “places” Mitchell was referring to had been saloons before Prohibition. When Prohibition arrived, nearly all of these Oshkosh saloons suddenly became “soda parlors.” But only those soda parlors selling near beer were required to apply for the special license. Places like Nigl’s, Steckbauer’s, Utecht’s and Witzke’s. All the same places that OBC had been selling real beer to before the dry law. In fact, a number of them were still owned by the brewery.

The licensing requirement was nearly as big a charade as the soda parlors it was invoked to regulate. An amendment to the ordinance strictly limited police enforcement of it. Only select members of the Oshkosh force were allowed to inspect soda parlors that sold near beer. The result was the continuance of local non-enforcement of the dry law here. In Oshkosh, near beer went on being “needled” beer. And Little Tommy Thirst went right on smiling.

An Old Friend Comes Back

One more look back to the Spring of 1933 when folks around here were getting their first taste of legally brewed Oshkosh beer in 14 years.

Last week, I posted an ad from Rahr Brewing of Oshkosh that ran on March 22, 1933. That was the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. The new law made it legal to produce and sell beer that was less than 3.2% alcohol by weight beginning April 7, 1933.

Roosevelt signed the bill at 1 p.m. At 1:03 p.m. the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern received a wire telling of the good news. Word spread quickly. Oshkosh breweries and factories began sounding their whistles in celebration. Mayor Taylor Brown declared that April 7 would be a half-holiday in Oshkosh beginning at noon, freeing people to get out and drink beer.

Rahr wasn’t the only brewery in town that rushed giddy ads into the evening paper on March 22. Peoples Brewing and the Oshkosh Brewing Company also had their say. Here’s the Peoples ad. As always, if you click the images, they’ll expand in size.

And here’s the ad from the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

“Our hand has never lost its skill, we are masters in the brewing art.” I really like that!

Each of these were large, 3/4 page ads that dominated the page. The Rahr ad ran on page 7, Peoples on page 9, and OBC’s on page 11. Interspersed were stories telling of how many people the breweries would hire, the tax revenue that would be generated, and how fine it would be to have legal beer again.

This played out while Oshkosh was being pummeled by the Great Depression. With unemployment here estimated to be over 30%, the city was in dire straits. Things had degenerated to the point that city workers maintained 20 fishing nets in Lake Winnebago. They were raised twice weekly with the catch being distributed among the needy. Amidst the despair, the return of legal beer was something to be happy for.

The response in Oshkosh nearly overwhelmed the local breweries. Orders for beer immediately poured in. On April 6, the Daily Northwestern reported that, “there has been such a heavy demand that it is doubtful whether it will be possible to make all the deliveries the first day that have been promised.”

Not to worry, they all received their beer. The “old friend” had come back to stay.

Ah! My Favorite Beer

Click to enlarge

Last Monday’s post about the return of legal beer on April 7, 1933 got me thinking... Imagine the sense of relief beer drinkers here must have experienced when beer was no longer contraband.

It wasn’t as though Oshkoshers had gone without beer during Prohibition. There’s plenty of evidence that the city was awash in bootleg beer all through the dry years. But the burden of illegality changed both the beer itself and the way people related to it.

When legal beer began its comeback in 1933, the sense of anticipation ran high in Oshkosh. It was noticeable weeks prior to the law being changed. In the run-up to April 7, the Daily Northwestern ran one story after another whetting the appetites of Oshkosh beer drinkers.

Three weeks before legal beer began flowing again, a representative of Rahr Brewing told the Daily Northwestern about the store of beer the brewery had stockpiled and ready to go. “We’re not saying how much we've got, but we've got all we can legally have stored, under our near-beer permit."

At this point, it was still illegal to produce beer. Brewers here skirted the law by stockpiling beer that was purportedly brewed for the purpose of converting it to near-beer later. Of course, they had no such intention of denaturing it. Meaning, that when the law did change, there would be several thousand barrels of properly aged beer ready to hit the market. The Oshkosh Brewing company alone had over 3,000 barrels of real beer in its lagering tanks. The Daily Northwestern assured Oshkoshers that when, “The sale of the foamy, amber fluid is made legal, everybody will be able to buy all they want, from a steinful to a barrelful or more.”

On March 22, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. This would legalize beer of less than 3.2% alcohol by weight on April 7, 1933. Immediately after the bill was signed, both Rahr Brewing and the Oshkosh Brewing Company blew their plant whistles alerting Oshkosh that legal beer was on its way. Peoples would have probably done the same, if they’d had a whistle.

I’ve gotten carried away here. I only meant to show you the ad, that’s up there near the top of the post. This one captures the goofy sort of glee that people here must have been experiencing. Look at the expression on the guy’s face in the drawing. He's made to appear half mad with happiness.

This ad was published on the same day Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. After the signing, someone at Rahr must have immediately phoned the Daily Northwestern and told them to run it in the evening paper. That night, the Rahr's began taking orders for their beer. At 12:00 a.m. on April 7, the brewery whistles blew again as the beer began going out the door.

One more thing I want to point out. The text of this ad has an interesting tidbit near the end. It reads, “Rahr’s will make 1933’s Elk's Head Beer as enjoyable and as refreshing as it was back in 1918 and the years before that.”

Why did they mention 1918 when the first phase of beer being outlawed didn't occur until 1919? I doubt it was a mistake. In 1919, grain rationing induced by America’s entrance into World War I meant that the recipe for Rahr’s beer had to be changed. The Rahr’s took their beer seriously. And they respected their customers enough to reference the year when their beer had last been at its best. I like that.

Imagine cracking open that first bottle of Rahr’s Elk’s Head beer in 1933. I would have probably looked as maniacally happy as the guy in the drawing. I’ll bet a beer never tasted so good.

The Herbst Bros. Lion Brewery

This one is going to take us off into the weeds. Let’s go...

The piece of breweriana you’ll see below recently went on sale at Folklore on Main St. It’s a cardboard hand fan imprinted with a beer advertisement. At first glance, you’d assume the piece was issued by a brewery located in Oshkosh. Click the images below to enlarge them and you’ll see what I mean.

I first saw this in October 2012. Dan Radig spotted it on Ebay and directed me towards it. The seller was the Ye Olde Breweriana Shoppe from Cincinnati, Ohio. Their description of the item began with, “Extremely rare is this hand fan for the Herbst Bros Lion Brewery out of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.”

Rare is right. But the part about the Herbst brothers having a brewery in Oshkosh isn’t. There was never a Lion Brewery in Oshkosh owned by any persons named Herbst. So what then is this? I have a theory, but let’s get the basics out of the way first.

The piece is from the early 1930s. The wording on the back side of the fan is a dead giveaway: “Lion Brew has returned and thousands are welcoming it back as an old dear friend.” That’s exactly the sort of thing breweries were saying in their ads immediately after Prohibition ended in 1933.

For example, take a look at the stunner below. It’s from the Daily Northwestern on March 22, 1933 for the Rahr Brewing Company of Oshkosh. This appeared just a couple weeks prior to the modification of the Volstead Act that went into effect on April 7 legalizing beer at or below 4% ABV.

Click image to enlarge it

The small type may be hard to read, but in there it says, “Yes, Rahr's Elk's Head will soon be here again... the same Rahr's Elk's Head Beer brewed in the same old fashioned way that made it the favorite of thousands.” Sounds familiar.

Back to the Lion Brewery. When I first saw the hand fan, I thought that perhaps the Herbst Bros. were working as beer distributors selling beer for the Lion Brewery. It wasn’t at all unusual for distributors to add the name of the city they were working in to the name of the brewery they were selling for. For example, here’s a portion of a 1912 Pabst ad that makes it look as though the Pabst Brewery was located in Oshkosh. Obviously it wasn’t, but the local distributor who placed the ad was.

When the hand fan was issued there were three breweries in America using the Lion Brewery moniker. They were in New York City, Wilkes-Barre, PA. and Cincinnati, Ohio. The Ohio brewery is probably the one being referenced here. That brewery specifically referred to its beer as “Lion Brew.” For example, here’s an ad from October 4, 1933 from the Mansfield News-Journal of Mansfield, Ohio.

So it looks like there were a couple of brothers named Herbst in Oshkosh who were distributing this Cincinnati beer. But I don’t think that’s the case, either. There were two men named Herbst living in Oshkosh at this time (Charles and George), but they weren’t brothers. They both worked as laborers and I can’t find any evidence of either of them holding a liquor license. They would have needed that license to distribute beer in Oshkosh. And after much digging, I haven’t been able to find a single mention of them being involved with beer in Oshkosh in any way. Furthermore, The Lion Brewery of Ohio closed in 1934. It doesn’t appear that their beer was ever distributed in Wisconsin. Dead end.

If I had to venture a guess, then, I’d say this is probably a prototype of some sort. Perhaps a merchandising company used this as a demonstration piece to show potential customer’s their wares. It’s a guess, but it’s the best one I have.

When I was at Folklore last Thursday, the fan was still there. There’s a $90 tag on it. The starting bid for it on Ebay a couple years ago was $39. Hard to say what it’s really worth. It may be a one-of-a-kind piece.

The Chief Oshkosh Red Lager Billboards

In the summer of 1991, a beer with a familiar name began appearing around Oshkosh. Chief Oshkosh Red Lager shared no direct connection to the Chief Oshkosh Beer that had been produced by the Oshkosh Brewing Company for nearly 40 years until 1971, but the well-known name made the new beer immediately recognizable to almost everyone in the Oshkosh area. For many of them, their first brush with the new Chief Oshkosh came via a series of billboards featuring a booming declaration of an “Indian Uprising.”

Click to enlarge

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was produced by Mid-Coast Brewing from 1991 to 1994. The company was based in Oshkosh and brewed its beer on contract at the Stevens Point Brewery. Jeff Fulbright was the president and brewmaster of Mid-Coast. His duties didn’t end there. He generally did everything that needed to be done. That included developing the brewery’s advertising campaigns.

“This was the introduction,” says Fulbright. “I was trying to do a full-blown roll out and have all the media happen at once. I couldn’t afford television advertising, so these billboards were the next best option. I had an advertising company I was working with at the time, but I knew what I wanted and they executed the idea I gave them.”

His concept was blunt. Just a couple of words set in bold type alongside imagery loaded with meaning. Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was the first American craft beer sold in cans and Fulbright knew he needed to dispel the stereotype that canned beer was inferior. The centerpiece of the billboard showed a can of Chief Oshkosh rising up phoenix-like from a pile of smashed beer bottles. The broken bottles bear the labels of what were at the time premium brands: Moosehead, Special Export, Michelob, Killian’s Red, Löwenbräu, and Heineken.

“The subliminal thing here is that we have something better than bottles,” says Fulbright. “I was selling a premium beer in a can.  I was trying to convince people that premium beer could be in a can.”

The imagery was impactful, but what caused a stir were the two words, Indian Uprising. Five billboards went up in the Oshkosh area, four of them along Highway 41 and the other near downtown at the corner of N. Main and Irving. Almost immediately, Fulbright began getting complaints. “Those words pissed some people off,” says Fulbright. “These people were all upset. I even got letters from a priest of some sort. But the only people who contacted me were white people. That's the sworn truth. No Native Americans complained about it.”

Fulbright concedes, though, that the words were more provocative than he intended them to be. “My idea was to suggest that this was the return of Chief Oshkosh,” says Fulbright. “It's the wording that made it edgy. Had I thought about it more I might not have gone along with it.”

After the initial response, Fulbright sought to make his intentions clear. “I contacted the representative body for the heirs to the original Chief Oshkosh,” he says. “I was extending an olive branch and a semi-apology just to say there was nothing offensive intended. If I remember correctly, they told me there wasn't an issue and that they didn't really want to go into it.”

The issue died down soon enough, but it wouldn’t be Fulbright’s last scrape with those who took offense to the use of Native American names and imagery associated with alcohol. In 1994, another flair up would occur. If all goes well, I’ll have more on that next Monday along with some interesting video from the period. Until then, there’s much more about Chief Oshkosh Red Lager here.

A Case of Peoples Beer for Thanksgiving

Click to enlarge image

I haven’t put up an Oshkosh beer ad in a while. Time to fix that.

This bit of hype appeared in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern on Tuesday, November 26, 1935. Thanksgiving was two days away. In a state of high anticipation, comes this well-fed fellow with beer in hand urging Oshkoshers to, “Let the Peoples Brewing Co. play a part in making the Thanksgiving celebration a success.” I like the line below that one encouraging imbibers to “find a new thrill in drinking beer.” What’s wrong, the old thrill wasn’t good enough? Maybe I’m simple, but it still works for me.

What’s slightly odd about this ad is that the name of the beer is never mentioned. In 1935, Peoples flagship beer was named Würtzer Brew. You wouldn’t know that from reading this ad. I wonder if the folks at Peoples were already starting to feel anxious about using such an explicitly German name for their beer. By the fall of 1935, the Nazis had adopted the swastika and introduced the Nuremberg Laws limiting the civil rights of German Jews. Not the kind of thing an American brewery would want to hitch its wagon to. Of course, it would only get worse. And by 1945, Peoples had abandoned the Würtzer name altogether. From that point onward, the brewery simply referred to it as Peoples Beer.

On a friendlier note, we see that Sitter’s Beverage Company is mentioned at the bottom of the ad. Sitter’s Beverage was located on the north side of Harney Ave. near the corner of Harney and Eveline streets. The Sitter family had been involved with the beer business in Oshkosh since the 1880s when John Sitter was the bottler of beer for Lorenz Kuenzl’s Gambrinus Brewery. Later, Sitter bottled beer for the Oshkosh Brewing Company. As the breweries gradually took all of their bottling business in-house, Sitter turned to distributing beer. Some day I’m going to have to dig deeper into the Sitter story. I’ll bet there’s some interesting stuff waiting there.

Happy Labor Day from the Oshkosh Brewing Company

Here’s an 80-year-old ad from the Oshkosh Brewing Company saluting all of us who work for a living. This appeared in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern on September 1, 1934.

This appeared in conjunction with the first Labor Day since the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933. After suffering nearly 14 years under the yoke of an asinine law, you can’t blame the folks at OBC for their melodramatic slant: “America has risen up, shaken off the dregs of a nightmare that seemed beyond control.”

For others, the nightmare hadn’t ended. In 1934, the Great Depression was battering the workers of Oshkosh. If you hadn’t already lost your job, chances were your wages had been substantially cut. It was a grim time for many and that undercurrent informs the text of this ad. To read it all, click the image and it will enlarge.

Here’s to Labor Day and hoping that yours is more festive than that of 1934.

An Army of Pot-Bellied Beer Nymphs

This blog will go quiet for a few (7-9) days while I dive into the deep end of the beer pool for a spot of summer fun. Until we meet again, here’s some high weirdness to chew on.

Down below is a full page ad from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern of July 2, 1914. It shows the Oshkosh Brewing Company waving its freak flag high in preparation for the Fourth of July.

They give us an army of bug-eyed, pot-bellied nymphs armed with enormous beer bottles – reminds me of a recent nightmare. The mutants are led by a bespectacled horseman who looks a hell of a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Guess they didn't know T.R. wasn’t a beer drinker. Best of all is the wonderful idiocy of the accompanying text:

Tramp—Tramp—Tramp—the boys are marching!
Only instead of cannon crackers it's going to be CRACKERS
and CHEESE —with a case of OSHKOSH "the
Beer with the Fine Flavor," on the side!

Eghhhh… what a shitty play on words. There’s plenty more nonsense the equal of that packed in there. Click the image, watch it grow large and see for yourself.

A few weeks after this appeared, WWI was up and raging with cannon crackers in full blast. The nymphs were the first to die. Gotta have your fun while you can, folks.

Have a great holiday. Prost!