Courtesy of Don Roussin
Brew is in our blood. Even before Anheuser-Busch’s omnipresent pale lager made our city synonymous with German-style beer, the western banks of the Mississippi River were awash in the brewing traditions of the Deutsch immigrants who settled here in the mid-1800s.
“Back then, there was a brewery in every neighborhood,” says Don Roussin, local beer historian and co-author of St. Louis Brews: The History of Brewing in the Gateway City. “The production was as far as a delivery wagon could go in a day.”
The limestone caves that snaked beneath the city were perfect places for the lagering (cold storage) of barrels. Meanwhile, aboveground, each community revolved around the local Bierhäuser, Bierhallen, and elaborate Biergärten. Beer was an integral part of everyday life.
After the Civil War, advances in technology and transportation turned beermaking into big business. Smaller brewers fell behind, closed their doors, or were bought up by emerging titans. Famous surnames such as Griesedieck, Busch, and Lemp soaked the globe with German lagers. Then came the 1920s and Prohibition, which dealt a death blow to many beermakers, including the Lemp Brewery. Many of those that survived to see the 18th Amendment repealed, 13 years later, were never the same.
With the thinning of the herd, all that remained of the German lager was its Americanized cousin, which was far less bitter and, some would argue, less flavorful. Those yellow brews that we’ve come to refer to as “lawnmower beers” (because they’re so easily guzzled on hot summer days) dominated the U.S. until the early 1990s, when relaxed brewing laws provided microbrewers with the means to fight back in the name of drinking diversity—the beginning of the craft beer revolution.
With the resurgence of craft beer came the rekindling of the Eastern European traditions of buying and drinking local. As many American drinkers began seeking hoppy beers, some microbreweries specialized in IPAs. Others began making fruitier Belgian Witbiers and saisons or turned to heartier English-style porters and stouts. German weiss and wheat beers also remained popular because of their versatility, their openness to fruit flavors.
Rare, though, was a new take on the traditional lager. George Reisch, a fifth-generation brewer and former A-B brewmaster, says that’s partially because the process of lagering takes time and tank storage that many upstart microbreweries can’t afford. Another reason: There are fewer ways to improvise in a lager, and lighter, simpler beers are harder to balance and consistently reproduce.
One champion of German beer-crafting: Urban Chestnut Brewing Company. Co-founder Florian Kuplent grew up in Bavaria, where he apprenticed at a local brewery. After stints in Germany, England, New England, and A-B, Kuplent helped launch UCBC in 2010. There was never any question in Kuplent’s mind as to the style of beer. “It was a given,” he says. “I didn’t want to just focus on German style, but I knew I wanted to make that part of our story.”
The call to our region’s roots can be seen not only in the names on UCBC’s tap handles—Stammtisch, Dorfbier, and the unpronounceable Oachkatzlschwoaf—but also in the brewery’s Bierhalle, where conversations echo from strangers sitting elbow to elbow at communal tables, just as our ancestors might have done. (Belleville’s Hofbräuhaus is similarly inspired.)
And now that microbrews have had time to set their feet, Reisch adds, more brewers (such as Kräftig and Stubborn German Brewing Company) are “rising to the challenge” of making a quality lager.
“It’s not the German-style beers as much as it’s the German culture,” says Roussin. “It’s the proliferation of beer gardens and beer halls through the city. The buying and drinking of beer made around the corner, by people you know. The drinking with family and friends.
“German heritage,” says Roussin, “is just beer.”
