100% Pure

Lee Beverage of Wisconsin is one of the largest beer distributors in the state, but the company got its start in the beer business by selling malt extract to homebrewers in Oshkosh. Here's an ad from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern of July 9, 1926, when Harry Lee and William Precour were owners of the company. They had launched their business in 1925 selling coffee they roasted.

More on the early years of what became Lee Beverage can be found here.

The Changing Flavor of Beer in Oshkosh

A slightly different version of this article appears in the July 15, 2020 edition of the Oshkosh Herald.

It might not look like beer. It certainly doesn't taste like beer. And the way it's made raises the question if it should be called beer at all. But none of this matters to those who relish the novel flavor combinations area brewers are creating as they redefine beer in an effort to attract customers who wouldn't otherwise consider themselves beer drinkers.

The idea is simple. A brewer makes a beer, usually a light or dark ale, and then flavors it with an array of ingredients more common to the grocery store or kitchen than the brewhouse. Most anything goes: candy bars, fruit puree, milk sugar, vanilla, peanut butter flavoring, coconut... The list of potential ingredients is endless. As are the permutations that result.

Tangerine Dream Frootenanny, a kettle-soured blonde ale made with
tangerine purée and Madagascar bourbon vanilla paste.

The darker beers in this vein are flavored with sweet, dessert-type ingredients and are generally referred to as pastry stouts. The beers that begin with a light-ale base primarily rely on pureed fruit for flavoring. And there's nothing discreet about the flavors these ingredients impart. These "adjuncts", as they're called, are not used to accentuate the flavor of the beer. They are the flavor of the beer. If you order a stout that has the words peanut butter in its name, you can rest assured that the flavor of peanut butter is going to be front and center.

The popularity of such beers has been building for the last couple of years. All the breweries in Oshkosh have dabbled with the trend, but at Fifth Ward Brewing, at 1009 S. Main St., such beers have become commonplace on the brewery's tap list. For Ian Wenger and Zach Clark, the brewers and co-founders of Fifth Ward, these beers are entirely consistent with their brewery's mission. 

"We always had this idea in our business plan to bridge the gaps to wine drinkers and cocktail drinkers that don't think about drinking beer," Clark says. "We constantly get people who say they don't like drinking beer, so part of the program of fruited beers and adjunct beers is to try and reach those people."

The most popular of these beers at Fifth Ward fall under the banner of the brewery's Frootenanny series. It's an ongoing cycle of beers that begin as light, tart ales and are then flavored with various combinations of processed fruit and other adjuncts. "What we're doing has changed the way we brew," Wenger says. "With our fruited sours, that base beer is brewed to be fruited." 

The flavors that result are familiar and easily identifiable. That's part of the appeal. "The customer has an easier time understanding these beers," Wenger says. "They know what they're getting. Like with our Tangerine Dream, people expect that it's going to taste like tangerine and vanilla. We get people in here who wouldn't normally drink beer, but they'll drink Tangerine Dream. Some of them aren't beer drinkers at all. These are beers that open doors for them."

"We'd hear that from people," Clark adds. "I remember this one guy telling me he couldn't bring his wife here because she won't drink beer. That doesn't really happen anymore." But it's not just a niche audience that's gravitating towards these beers. A casual scroll through Fifth Ward's social media pages makes it immediately clear that these are the beers that generate the most excitement among the brewery's customers. At the same time, Clark is quick to point out that he and Wenger haven't abandoned their commitment to the brewery's more traditional offerings.

"We put a lot of time and energy and passion into our traditional beers," Clark says. "I'd like it if they got more attention, but we have a lot of people who come in here that will only drink those fruited beers. We do run a business and those beers make money. People keep buying them. You can't ignore that. And we put a lot of work into them. The biggest thing is we try to be diverse in a lot of ways. We want to always have something for everybody. That's always the focus."

Slushees, Pastry Stouts, and Fruit Bombs. What's Become of Beer?

Why do some breweries make beer and then pump it full of fruit puree, candy, and sugar to create something that tastes nothing at all like beer? The answer becomes obvious if you scroll through the social media pages of breweries that do this type of thing. There's an enthused cohort of drinkers who are aroused by these beers and will pay dearly for them. 

Lion’s Tail Aloha Punch Slushee made with apple, apricot, guava, orange,
papaya, passion fruit, and pineapple. 4-packs were sold for $22.

Over the past year, beers like this have become increasingly common in Winnebago County. At one end of the spectrum are the fluorescent, juice-like beers that are made from light ales blended with fruit puree and other flavorings, such as milk sugar or vanilla. At the opposite end is the pastry stout: a black ale that gets aged upon or blended with dessert-like extracts or ingredients. Chocolate, cookies, brownies, coconut, peanut butter flavoring... Pretty much anything goes.

In either case, you start with something that begins as beer and then gets manipulated with post-fermentation flavoring additions to taste like something else entirely. This isn't altogether new. There's a long history of brewers adding flavoring agents to finished beer. What makes these beers different is their total reliance upon added flavorings. Perhaps more important is that the main flavors of these beers are not made at the brewery where the beer is made. 

The primary flavor of a heavily fruited beer or a pastry stout comes from a food processing plant. The brewer plays no role in the creation or composition of the flavoring agent. It gets delivered to the brewery in jugs, bags, or buckets and then gets added to a pre-existing beer. The point is not the flavor base the brewer made. The point is the flavor of the processed ingredients the brewer purchased from someone else. 

It's an approach that stands in contrast to what has traditionally been considered the brewer's art or craft; that being the ability to create a desirable range of flavors through the transformation of a common set of raw materials. The irony is that these beers, which have so little to do with the actual craft of brewing, are most often the product of so-called craft breweries.

That's not to say that making a palatable fruit-packed beer or pastry stout doesn't require skill. But it's a different, less exacting skill than that of a brewer. The skill is being able to combine those pre-processed flavors in a way that customers find desirable. It has more to do with blending or mixology than brewing. 

Equally important is the marketing. Since these are usually one-off beers there's no need for a brewer to create a product that will have enduring appeal. In fact, it's just the opposite. Novelty is crucial here. The important thing is to induce a sense of excitement that will bring people into the taproom. And to do that you need a name and an image that will arrest the attention of folks scrolling through their Facebook and Instagram feeds. Here's a laser-sharp example of just that.

All the breweries in Winnebago County engage in this to a greater or lesser degree. But three local breweries, in particular, have made these sorts of beers central to their identity: Barrel 41 in Neenah, which produces a steady stream of pastry stouts; Fifth Ward in Oshkosh, which makes both heavily fruited ales and pastry stouts; and Lion's Tail in Neenah, which has been successful with its densely fruited "Slushee" beers.

The first Lion's Tail Slushee was released just over a year ago. The style came to the attention of Alex Wenzel, owner and head brewer at Lion's Tail in early 2019.  It appeared to be a tailor-made solution to a problem Wenzel was then wrestling with.

"There's a lot of new local breweries, but it doesn't seem like the customer base has grown a ton," Wenzel said when I interviewed him in February of 2019. "When you go to a beer event, you see largely the same population at each of the different places." 

One way to expand that community is to lure people who don't much care for the taste of beer by making beer that doesn't taste like beer. This approach to broadening the audience for beer is also not new. It's been going on for decades and finds its ultimate expression in beer-like beverages such as Bud Select 55 and MGD 64. Fruit-thick beers and pastry stouts take a new approach to that project by standing it on its head. Instead of stripping away beer flavor, these beers bury it under a dense blanket of flavors that recall sweet fruit drinks and sugary junk foods.

At first glance, all of this may appear painfully contrived. But this trend didn't just come out of the blue. All of the head brewers in Winnebago County came to their profession from home brewing where the unbridled use of novel ingredients has long been part of the culture. If you've been to a beer festival where home brew was being poured then you know how idiosyncratic the beers can be. For a brewer who learned to make beer in that scene, it's not much of a leap to heavily fruited beers and pastry stouts.

Fifth Ward Brewing in Oshkosh is illustrative in this regard. Five years ago, when Ian Wenger and Zach Clark of Fifth Ward began talking of their plans to launch a brewery, they had already settled on the idea that they would make "culinary" beers that employed ingredients more commonly found in cooking. When Fifth Ward opened in 2017 they made good on that promise by using ingredients like saffron and cinnamon to accentuate the flavor of a particular beer. About a year later, Clark and Wenger began to move away from that approach. That shift has led to the flavored and fruited ales they make today as part of the brewery's Frootenanny series.

"With those initial beers we were using those ingredients more as an accent than as a primary flavor," Wenger says. "But trying to explain that to people was always difficult. And at the time, even that was considered kind of out there. What we're doing now changed the way we brew. Like with our fruited sours, that base beer is brewed to be fruited. The customer has an easier time understanding these beers. When they see these fruited sours they know what they're getting. Like with Tangerine Dream, people expect that it's going to taste like tangerine and vanilla."

That goes to the heart of this entire trend. It doesn't take much knowledge, experience, or effort to process the flavor your tasting in a beer loaded with fruit or chocolate. The taste is familiar, affirming, comforting even. These are beers that promise not to leave you guessing or struggling to identify what it is your tasting. There's no need to develop your palate to enjoy this stuff. The experience is simple and exciting and asks nothing of you. It's the sort of pleasure that would satisfy a child. With alcohol on top.

That level of simplicity permeates the craft beer scene. "When we go out into the market it's much more difficult to sell just a regular beer," Clark says. "It's not what beer buyers are looking for. The flashy beers, the fruited sours, the hazy IPAs, the flavored stouts; that's what they're asking for. Some accounts that's all they're looking for." 

 

For a brewery owner, the choice is stark. Because unless you have the patience, time, and ability to educate your customers about the complexities of beer flavor, you're going to have to give the market what it demands. Small breweries live day-to-day. And they need to sell as much beer as they can right now. Especially now.

That’s not to say the decision doesn't entail risk. Brewer’s who pursue this path grow dependent on the most fickle type of consumer. People who have no special love for beer, but are triggered by sensation and novelty. Holding their interest requires an endless stream of amusements. That’s a shaky foundation to build a business upon. The high attrition rate within the restaurant industry, where this sort of approach is even more common, illustrates how difficult it is to continually drum up that kind of interest.

I won’t try to guess how this will play out locally. But there's a signal amongst all the noise that's probably worth tracking. A number of small breweries in this area appear to be headed to a place somewhere beyond beer. The beers I've mentioned here really have more in common with flavored malt beverages than anything that people historically have considered beer. When a brewery goes in this direction, it's hard to see a path back to where they can maintain a business based on more traditional types of beer. 

None of this is welcome news if traditional beer styles are what ignited and sustain your interest as a beer drinker. If that's the case, you're likely to find that local brewery taprooms will increasingly not be where you go to find what you're after. You may not be the customer they are trying to reach. If you haven't already, you might want to consider home brewing.

Chief Oshkosh and Beer

It wouldn't happen today. A brewery wouldn't build its brand around a dead man with a reputation for abusing alcohol. Especially if alcohol had played a role in that man's violent death. And especially if that man was a Menominee Indian. But that's just what the Oshkosh Brewing Company did. At the time, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. 

Chief Oshkosh

Chief Oshkosh had been dead 36 years when the Oshkosh Brewing Company put its hooks into him. Born in 1795, Oshkosh died in 1858 at Keshena from injuries he'd taken in a drunken brawl with two of his sons. That part of his story wasn't getting much play anymore when the Oshkosh Brewing Company came around. By then, the Chief had entered the realm of myth.

Oshkosh's fascination with the deceased Chief began in earnest in the early 1880s. A grassroots movement was afoot to have his remains moved from the Menominee Reservation and reinterred in Oshkosh. Decades passed before that happened. In the meantime, the Chief was being re-made into a talisman for the city that bore his name. Chief Oshkosh was showing up everywhere.

A souvenir spoon issued by the Birely & Son jewelry of Oshkosh in 1891.

Oshkosh cigar makers Derksen & Peek brought out their Chief Oshkosh cigar in the fall of 1892.

When there came to be a brewery named Oshkosh, the symbol that would identify it seemed preordained. The Oshkosh Brewing Company (OBC) was created on March 21, 1894 from the merger of three existing breweries. The final arrangements were hastily made with a few of the finishing touches left undone. Among them was the brewery's trademark. The first letterhead employed by OBC looked like something a bread factory might use.

Within a matter of weeks, though, OBC had set in place the image that would be its symbol. On April 15, 1894, the brewery began using an already familiar rendering of Chief Oshkosh that was based upon an 1855 daguerreotype. When OBC went to register the trademark, it described the image as "The representation of a North American Indian grotesquely attired, associated with the words ‘Chief Oshkosh.’"

OBC plastered that image and variations of it on any surface that could take it. Over the coming years, the Chief's visage became inescapable in Oshkosh. It hung from signs on Main Street and appeared daily in the pages of newspapers. Behind it was always the promise of beer.

Chief Oshkosh signs at Leonard Michels saloon on North Main Street, circa 1909.

Chief Oshkosh had been co-opted by a beer company. Surely there were people who didn’t like it. But their voices were not made public in any significant way. Those with a legitimate claim to the Chief's heritage had been forced out of the Oshkosh area some 40 years earlier. They’d been deposited on a reservation 70 miles to the north. The way was clear for OBC to reimagine the Chief in any way it cared to. 

Most of OBC's early advertising and promotional materials employed the Chief Oshkosh image in some manner. Often it was the focal point. It was used as an overarching symbol and not representative of any specific product of the brewery. For the first 30 years, OBC’s Chief Oshkosh remained relatively true to its original form. 

But the reverence with which OBC treated its trademark began waning as the brewery came undone during Prohibition. After the dry law took hold in 1920, OBC lurched from one year to the next narrowly avoiding dissolution. The business came under new management. It was now run by a younger generation that had come of age in Oshkosh after the Menominee population had vacated the area. The degree of separation led to more fanciful representations of the Chief. The drift was clearly on display in the 1929 label applied to a malt syrup OBC produced for homebrewers. Chief Oshkosh had never attired himself like this.

It was also during Prohibition, that the brewery first applied the name Chief Oshkosh to a specific product. In 1928, OBC introduced Chief Oshkosh Special, a non-alcoholic cereal beverage. It wasn't quite beer and its label didn’t look like any that OBC had used in the past. The original Chief Oshkosh trademark was still there, but now it played a bit part.

It wasn't just OBC that appeared to have grown weary of authenticity. In 1911, the City of Oshkosh placed a statue of Chief Oshkosh in Menominee Park. Sculpted in Italy, it depicted a young, idealized Chief with European facial features. The remains of Chief Oshkosh were reinterred at the foot of that statue in 1926. The celebration that marked the event included members of the Menominee Tribe; some of whom came to play the part expected of them. Instead of wearing the ceremonial attire of their ancestors, they dressed as if they had come off the set of a Hollywood movie. 

Menominee Park, Oshkosh.

Chief Oshkosh Day Parade, May 25, 1926.

Prohibition ended in 1933. The non-alcoholic Chief Oshkosh Special was reformulated and made into a real beer. Chief Oshkosh became the most popular beer ever produced by an Oshkosh brewery. Within a decade, the brand had subsumed the brewery. People began referring to OBC as the Chief Oshkosh brewery. But the actual Chief Oshkosh was getting phased out. His implacable gaze was replaced with cartoons and clichés.

Early 1940s.

The Chief in cans. From left to right: 1949, 1950, 1958.

Along with that, the folks at OBC had succumbed to the delusion that the hard-drinking Chief was one of their early customers. Several of OBC's promotional pieces from the 1950s mentioned that Chief Oshkosh had often visited the brewery, and on one occasion "Was persuaded to let the boys at the brewery dress him up in a coat and "Beaver" hat, and take his picture. This picture is used in our trademark." There wasn't a drip of truth to any of it. Chief Oshkosh had died nearly a decade before any of the breweries that merged to form OBC had opened. 

The 1855 daguerreotype that was the basis for the OBC trademark.

The Oshkosh Brewing Company closed in 1971, but the Chief Oshkosh brand was picked up by Peoples Brewing and survived for another year. Peoples carried on with the same sort of balderdash OBC had resorted to. 

In 1972, Peoples Brewing closed and Chief Oshkosh Beer was left for dead. The end coincided with a rising chorus of protest against the "mascotting" of American Indians and the poaching of their culture to sell things like beer. That didn’t keep Jeff Fulbright from picking up the Chief Oshkosh name and running with it.

Fulbright launched the Mid-Coast Brewing of Oshkosh in 1991. He named his flagship beer Chief Oshkosh Red Lager. Like OBC and Peoples, Fulbright used American Indian imagery that bore no relation to the individual his beer had been named after. But at the same time, Fulbright was careful to point out that his re-imagining of the Chief was meant as a tribute. Sometimes that message got lost. As part of the launch of the brand, Fulbright placed five billboards in and around Oshkosh that brought precisely the sort of attention he was hoping to avoid.

“My idea was to suggest that this was the return of Chief Oshkosh,” Fulbright said. “It's the wording (Indian Uprising) that made it edgy. Those words pissed some people off. 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.”

It wasn't the last scrap Fulbright would get into over Chief Oshkosh. In 1993, Fulbright was pulled into the fray when a Minnesota-based group attempted to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages that used American Indian names or related images as part of their brand identity. The group's efforts were eventually rebuffed, but by then Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was no longer an issue. Mid-Coast Brewing ceased operations in 1995.

The Chief was reincarnated again in the summer of 2010 when then Oshkosh Mayor Paul Esslinger put a new name on the tavern he had acquired at 216 North Main Street. 

Esslinger, a longtime collector of breweriana with a focus on memorabilia related to Chief Oshkosh Beer, planned to feature his collection in what was to become the Chief Oshkosh Saloon. The new name would reflect the tavern's motif. That never happened. Shortly before opening, Esslinger dropped the Chief Oshkosh name after concerns were expressed by members of the Menominee Indian Tribe. Instead, Esslinger's tavern became the Old Oshkosh Saloon. Today, that bar is named Screwballs.

The most enduring connection between Chief Oshkosh and beer began in 1911 when the Oshkosh Brewing Company commissioned the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company of Chicago to create an emblem for the front of its new brewery. The completed piece weighed 800 pounds and was more than five feet in width. It was the brewery's original trademark, a faithfully rendered image of Chief Oshkosh. The Chief looked down over Doty Street for the next 75 years.

In 1986, the main facility of the Oshkosh Brewing Company was demolished. Fifteen years of neglect had transformed it into a towering eyesore. The massive Chief Oshkosh emblem was spared. It was taken down and sold at auction.

The dismantling of OBC’s emblem, 1986.

Breweriana collector Paul Winter, who had grown up near the brewery, placed the winning bid of $9,240. He later sold the emblem back to the City of Oshkosh. The city mounted the emblem on the river-facing side of the Oshkosh Convention Center. It remained there until 2008 when the Convention Center was expanded and remodeled.

The emblem then moved to the Oshkosh Public Museum. It resides there in an elevated case near the museum entrance. Below it is a granite plaque inscribed with a brief history of the brewery and its enduring symbol. It’s the last stand of Chief Oshkosh.

Notes and links to further reading.

Much of what's been written about Chief Oshkosh amounts to little more than hearsay. For an accurate portrayal of his life see Scott Cross' book Like a Deer Chased by Dogs: The Life of Chief Oshkosh. Cross is the archivist at the Oshkosh Public Museum.

The Oshkosh Times of June 6, 1888, provides a good example of the city’s 1880s fascination with Chief Oshkosh. 

The backstory on the creation of the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

I didn't address the various claims made that the body reinterred in Oshkosh was not actually that of Chief Oshkosh. I’m skeptical of those claims. This document raises doubts.

The story of Mid-Coast Brewing and Chief Oshkosh Red Lager is here. The fight over the use of American Indian names attached to beer is here.

The journey of the Oshkosh Brewing Company's Chief Oshkosh emblem.

The Start of a Long Road Back

A slightly different version of this story appears in today's Oshkosh Herald

The spring of 2020 will be remembered as among the worst of times for family-run businesses like Jerry's Bar and the Fox River Brewing Company. 

Scott Engel, whose family has operated Jerry's Bar at 1210 Ceape Ave. for more than a century, will never forget March 17. It was the day he learned that Wisconsin's Safer at Home order would force him to close his business. "It made me sick when I got the news," Engel said. "At the time Mike Koplitz, my partner in the business, was working. There were a few of our regulars already there. I came in to help Mike lock up the place. It was pretty upsetting. At one point, I had to leave. I walked out that back door. It had me so upset that I just had to leave."

MIke Koplitz (Left) and Scott Engel of Jerry's.

Engel took over Jerry's in 1988. He's the fourth generation of his family to operate the tavern that was purchased by his great-grandfather, Jerry "Gus" Wesenberg in 1911. The family has managed to keep the business alive through bad times before, including the 1918 Pandemic and the 13 years of Prohibition that began in 1922. "I heard all of those stories, but this gives me a whole new appreciation of what they went through," Engel says. "I never thought we'd see something like this. It makes you appreciate things that you sometimes took for granted."

The past couple of months have been similarly unsettling for Jay Supple. The Supple family has been in the restaurant business in Oshkosh since 1968. They launched Fox River Brewing in 1995. The Supples now operate three restaurants and two brewpubs in the Fox Valley. "To get that notice at quarter to two on March 17th that we'd be locking up in three hours was devastating," Supple says. "I literally got into my car and visited all five locations and explained to everyone that we were going to have to lock up. We had no idea how long it was going to be. We ended up having to lay off 239 of our 240 employees. The only guy that was still on the payroll was the brewmaster because we had all that beer to contend with."

As the shock wore off in the days that followed, both Engel and Supple began assessing their options. At Jerry's Bar, Engel and Koplitz began cleaning and remodeling in preparation for re-opening; whenever that would be. On weekends, they offered their homemade pizzas and beef jerky for curbside pickup. "The response to that was tremendous," Engel said. "We'd sell out every Saturday for those first few weekends. But then meat prices spiked and we had to cut back on that, too."

Fox River Brewing began offering curbside pick-up two weeks after the shut-down order was issued. In the interim, the Supples charted their next moves. "I said to my brother John, we can either turn off the lights and wait it out or we can put together a game plan and come back stronger than ever," Supple said. "So, we set out a plan for each location and brought back our management teams as well as some staff and went to work. Each location is coming back with a new strong vibe and new look, new menu, everything. In the last five weeks, there hasn't been a wall that hasn't been painted. Everything has been refinished, every location has been updated."

For both Engel and Supple, part of their work since March has been directed towards making people feel more at ease during a time of uncertainty. "We've tried to create more space and a fresh look with an emphasis on sanitation and cleanliness," Supple said. "We have a whole protocol that we've gone through with our management teams. We want our guests to feel comfortable and safe."

At Jerry's Bar, Engel worries that overcoming fear may be the biggest hurdle to any recovery. "I've thought about it a lot," he says. "There are things we're going to do, but there are people who are truly scared by this and some of those people are going to stay put for a while. There's no easy way to say this, and I don't want to sound selfish or irresponsible, but life has to go on. I know things can't go on much longer this way if small businesses like ours are going to survive. Our family has worked 109 years to make this place possible and I don't want to be the guy to screw it up. We're going to be good, but this is really becoming a stressor.”

A History of Bass Ale in Oshkosh

Oshkosh was a lager town. Beginning in the 1850s and flowing straight through to the 1980s, lager beer was almost synonymous with beer here. Almost. Every now and then an ale would find its way into the mix. And the ale that had the longest lifespan here was England’s Bass Pale Ale.

The first mention of Bass’s Ale in Oshkosh comes in September 1885. This is already some 60 years after Bass & Co’s Pale Ale was first brewed in Burton-on-Trent. It was brought to Oshkosh by English ex-pat William H. Englebright, keeper of the Star and Crescent Sample Room at the southwest corner of North Main and Algoma. Englebright advertised his saloon as the Oshkosh "Headquarters for Bass' English Ale on draught." A giant sundial now resides where Englebright's saloon once stood.

From the 1886 Oshkosh City Directory.

Near the corner of Main and Algoma in the late 1880s.
The red arrow points to the entrance of Englebright’s Star and Crescent Sample Room.

The sundial now at Main and Algoma. Notice the crescent. How’s that for a coincidence?

The 1885 draft version of Bass Ale that Englebright was pouring was unlike any Bass any of us are familiar with. Like most long-lived beers, Bass has changed considerably over the years. In 1885, it was an aged beer, dry and bitter as a classic IPA, with a Brettanomyces character. It also had an odor about it. Bass of this period was known to carry what was called the "Burton Snatch", a sulfury, eggy aroma peculiar to beers made from the sulfate-rich waters of Burton. It wasn't just the water. Bass' fermentation and conditioning practices must have played a major role in the creation of that odor.

The brewery yard at Bass where the beer was aged in casks for months
while exposed to the elements, from bitter cold to scorching heat.

The Bass on draft at the Star and Crescent in 1885 was about 7% ABV and unlike any other beer then available in Oshkosh. Bass would probably have not been here at all if not for Englebright. I've been searching for examples of Bass pouring in other Wisconsin cities during this time. There was very little of it outside of Oshkosh. The Burton beer appears to have been something of a pet project for the Anglophile Englebright. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm wasn't contagious. The Star and Crescent closed in 1890. Bass Ale went with it.

A 1908 sketch of Bass Ale. The color is about the only remnant of the earlier Bass

Bass returned to Oshkosh at the turn of the century. In 1905, you could get it at the Little Cozy Sample Room at what is now 216 N. Main Street. The Little Cozy was sort of like the Ruby Owl of its day; a downtown restaurant with a bar and a healthy list of specialty beers. Bass was among them. But not on draft. It was now a bottled beer packaged by Thomas McMullen & Co. of New York. It was known as Bass White Label. The beer appears to have held steady in the intervening years. It was still around 7% ABV and there are a number of reports from this period indicating that the Burton Snatch was still in play.

Bass White Label, McMullen's bottling.

Bottled Bass was, at that time, the most expensive beer available in Oshkosh. A seven-ounce "nip" sold for 15 cents; or about $4.50 in today's money. A pint of Bass went for 25 cents. The next most expensive beer was Budweiser selling for 15 cents a pint.

And you no longer had to head to Oshkosh if you wanted a Bass. The beer had grown considerably more common in Wisconsin. Bottles of Bass could be found across the state, especially in cities where breweries were prominent. Places like Eau Claire, La Crosse, Rhinelander, and of course, Milwaukee. But, once again, folks in Oshkosh were not seduced by the charms of the Burton Snatch. By 1910 Bass was gone again.

Prohibition came and went and what little interest there had been in outré beers was washed away in a flood of Oshkosh-brewed pale lager. It wasn't until the 1960s that Bass Pale Ale made its way back to town. Englebright would not have recognized it as the same beer he'd championed 80 years earlier. While it was away, Bass had been stripped of much of what had once made it so unique. The 1960s Bass was just over 5% ABV, far less bitter, and lacking the infamous odor prized by connoisseurs. The ad below from the Old Town tavern suggests Oshkosh was getting the Bass Pale Ale that was bottled in London.

March 20, 1969 Oshkosh Advance-Titan.

By the time that ad appeared Bass and Co.'s Pale Ale was well into its decline. It's the typical story. In the 1960s, Bass Brewers Limited went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. The beer took a back seat to branding and the bottom line. Bass Pale Ale ended up being picked up by Coors in 2002, but in America, it's now made by AB/InBev which now produces Bass at its Merrimack, New Hampshire brewery. You can get a sixer of that in Oshkosh for less than $7, making it one of the cheapest pale ales on the market here. It’s a dull beer hardly worth bothering with. Unless that is, you're feeling the pull of history. I wouldn't be surprised if Bass goes missing again in Oshkosh before too long.

The label lies. Definitely not the world's first pale ale.

Notes & Sources

I've touched on William H. Englebright and his saloons before. Those posts are here and here.

There's excellent information concerning the permutations of Bass Ale over the year's at Ron Pattinson's blog, Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.

Gary Gillman at his blog Beer Et Seq has delved into the Burton Snatch.

Here's Ron Pattinson again getting into the notorious brewing water of Burton.

Here's more on Oshkosh's Little Cozy Sample Room.

Here's more on the Old Town Tavern.

Beer writer Pete Brown gets into the sad decline of Bass Ale.

Canning

Bare Bones Brewery brought in its new canning line on Friday and began canning with it yesterday morning. It’s the first time since 1972 that an Oshkosh brewery has had its own canning line.

And the Horse Ran Away with the Beer

A story from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; March 3, 1890. The barrel below came from the Horn and Schwalm Brewery during this same period.

A Butte des Morts Book

A book about the history of Butte des Morts has just been released and it includes a chapter that I wrote. My part is about the history of the Butte des Morts Brewery and the surprising saloon culture that thrived there in the late 1800s and early 1900s. That little hamlet has a rambunctious past thanks in no small part to all the beer that flowed through it. Butte des Morts, WI Its History and Its People is available for online purchase HERE.

Bill Steiger and the Bathtub Beer Bill

Considering the history of this place, it’s not too surprising that someone from Oshkosh would have played a central role in the legalization of homebrewing in America.

William A. Steiger.

On January 4, 1977, Congressman William A. Steiger of Oshkosh introduced House Resolution 1337. It was a sausage-like bill that, among other disparate parts, included a provision that would legalize the making of beer at home "for personal and family use." Just over two years later, the federal prohibition on homebrewing came to an end.

For his part, Steiger never professed any special love for the home craft of making beer. He was born in 1938, five years after Oshkosh's once-vibrant homebrewing scene had been made redundant by the repeal of Prohibition. The city was home to three breweries during Steiger's time, but young Bill was brought up about as far removed from all of that as was possible for any person living in Oshkosh.

Bill Steiger was born into a wealthy family. His father, Carl, was president of Oshkosh's Deltox Rug Company and heavily involved in politics on both the local and state levels. Bill grew up in a posh neighborhood on Algoma Boulevard in a mansion that had been built for lumber baron Edward Paine in 1860. Steiger probably never heard that there had once been a brewery run by a German named Kaehler just a few doors down from the family home. That part of the story was forgotten by the time the Steigers arrived.

The Steiger family home.

Bill Steiger quickly made a name for himself. Upon graduation from the University of Wisconsin in 1960, he ran for and won a seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly. In 1966, he was elected to Congress and at 28 became its youngest member. By 1977, Steiger was a rising star within the Republican Party and being groomed as a potential Senate or Vice‐Presidential candidate.

William Steiger and Richard Nixon, 1966.

William Steiger, 1968. At the far left is Steiger's intern, future Vice-President Dick Cheney.

So why would a guy like Bill Steiger bother to insert an unrelated clause legalizing homebrewing into a larger bill concerned with excise taxes on trucks and buses? The thanks goes to one of Steiger's colleagues on the House Ways and Means Committee. A Congressman from Rochester named Barber B. Conable.

Barber B. Conable

Conable had been trying to get homebrewing legalized since 1975. On September 27 that year, he introduced House Resolution 8643, a bill to authorize the home production of beer. Homebrewing was a federal crime punishable by a $5,000 fine and/or five years in jail. Conable’s bill would eliminate that penalty for a two-adult household making less than 200 gallons of beer a year. He later told a reporter from Copley News Service that the idea for legalization had come to him via a constituent who made kits for homemade beer and wine.

The man who had Conable’s ear was probably Jack Leonard, president of Rochester’s Vynox Industries. Vynox was then selling wine and beer making kits and equipment from the back pages of Popular Science magazine. Leonard was one of the early voices campaigning for legalization and had testified before Congress in December 1975 on behalf of Conable's bill. That bill never came to a vote.

Popular Science, October 1976. 

The legislation Steiger introduced in 1977 was a repackaging of the Conable bill. And as the new bill took shape, Conable became its chief advocate.

It took a year for the Steiger bill to come out of committee. The process left it significantly deformed. Officials from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), had gotten into the mix. They managed to insert a provision requiring homebrewers to register with the federal government. It was a matter of bureaucratic quid pro quo.

At the time, home winemakers were required by law to register with the federal government before producing any wine. Many home winemakers simply didn’t bother. But some 21,000 others sent in Form 1541 each year to remain on the right side of the law. Steiger’s bill would eliminate that prerequisite. The BATF wanted something in return.

The grasping nature of the agency's argument was evident. “Unregulated homebrewing might facilitate evasion of taxes on distilled spirits,” a BATF official said. "The mash that is left after beer is brewed can be distilled into hard liquor." Of course, you could accomplish much the same by distilling wine. But at this point, the bill had garnered little attention. Perhaps the BATF was banking on others not noticing what it was up to.

The bastardized bill sailed through the House with little fanfare and no opposition. It passed on a voice vote on Monday, March 13, 1978. It then went to the Senate where it was named the Homebrew Beer Equality Act of 1978. Newspapers called it the Bath Tub Beer Bill. Homebrewers weren’t amused. Their annoyance turned to outrage when they learned of the onerous addendums the bill had been saddled with.

It wasn’t just the federal registration requirement. The bill allowed for 100 gallons of beer production per year for a single adult household, and 200 gallons for households that had two or more adults. But those limits came with the stipulation that no homebrewer could have more than 30 gallons of beer – either finished or under fermentation – on hand at any one time.

Homebrewers pushed back. California homebrewing clubs the Maltose Falcons and San Andreas Malts appealed to Senator Alan Cranston of their home state. They found a powerful ally in the Senate's second-ranking member. Cranston jeered the BATF's meddling, saying it was "beer-ocracy at its worst." He called it "white-collar leaf raking."

The Maltose Falcons, 1974.

Alan Cranston

When the bill hit the Senate floor, Cranston was waiting with an amendment of his own that stripped the extraneous provisions and restored the bill to something very much like those Conable and Steiger had proposed in 1975 and 1977. No federal registration. No 30-gallon limit. Cranston had already lined up all the support he needed. His revisions passed through both the House and the Senate and October 4, 1978, the finalized bill was sent to President Jimmy Carter.

On October 14, 1978, Carter signed H.R. 1337 into law. Public Law 95-458 ended the federal prohibition on homebrewing effective February 1, 1979. By then, Bill Steiger was gone.

On December 4, 1978, the 40-year-old congressman from Oshkosh died unexpectedly of a heart attack. The New York Times, in its obituary of Steiger, noted that "He was widely regarded as one of the most promising political figures in his party... known for his wit, sunny disposition and informal appearance."

Steiger had grown up in a small, "informal" city with three breweries. He saw each of those breweries fail during the consolidation of the industry that occurred during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Today, Bill Steiger's hometown has four breweries. And each of the brewhouses here is run by a former homebrewer who directly benefited from the legislation Steiger introduced in 1977. It was the trigger that set into motion the unanticipated transformation of America's beer culture.