The brewery plant, with details shown for the brewhouse addition.
One of my favorite books in the collection of the Missouri History Museum Archives is Edmund Jungenfeld & Co’s 1892 Portfolio of Breweries and Other Kindred Plants. This little book is a treasure trove of photographs of some of the most iconic breweries in the United States, including the Anheuser-Busch Brewery, which takes up a half-dozen pages. But as I flipped through the small book, eventually getting to photos of some insignificant little breweries out in American’s heartland, I began to wonder, “Where is the Lemp?”
Conventional wisdom in St. Louis has always held that the successors of the great Edmund Jungenfeld—Widman, Walsh and Boisselier, known as Jungenfeld & Co.—played a significant role in the design of most of the buildings on Lemp Brewery property. But if that is so, why wouldn’t their book feature what was then such a prominent brewery? The logical explanation: Jungenfeld & Co. did not design anything for the Lemp Brewery. Over the next weeks, I will show that most likely, it was another prominent engineer and pioneer of early refrigeration, Theodore Krausch, who designed many of those new buildings during the Lemp Brewery’s business boom during the 1880s and 90s. Jungenfeld & Co. was the local architect of record, as we say, in St. Louis, but primary source material indicates that Krausch was designing the Renaissance Revival red brick monuments on the Lemp Brewery grounds. And Krausch, ladies and gentlemen, was the brains behind the revolution in how Americans consume beer and food to the present day.
Photo by Jason Gray
The fermenting house
As we learned from Louis Lemp’s notes on brewing and Frederick Widmann’s treatise on brewery architecture, German academic culture at the end of the 19th century was seeking to create a scientific approach to artisanal processes. Krausch was born in Dresden, in what was then the Kingdom of Saxony, and studied at the Polytechnic University, which focused on engineering and other applied sciences. He came to America in 1848, perhaps a refugee from the turmoil of the revolutions that wracked Europe in that year. First landing in New York, he eventually settled in Chicago, where he quickly established himself a reputation for effective refrigeration and ice house cooling.
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From a Lemp souvenir book, courtesy of Stephen Walker
Condenser floors of the refrigerating machinery
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From a Lemp souvenir book, courtesy of Stephen Walker
Refrigerating machine rooms
William Lemp Sr., now fully in charge of the brewery after the mysterious disappearance of his step-nephew Charles Brauneck from part ownership, pressed on with expansion. As early as 1878, Krausch was installing his patented steam powered systems at the Lemp Brewery. A September 1887 article in Western Brewer explains:
First putting in two of Krausch’s 15-ton machines in 1878, he soon added four 25-ton machines, and is now erecting four 35-ton machines. From this it will be seen that both Mr. Lemp and Mr. Krausch are in favor of moderate size compressors, and it is their experience that large machines do not have the degree of effectiveness in proportion to smaller ones, and besides they require less room, less expensive foundations and less attention in operation. They are also considerably cheaper and more economical of fuel.
Photo by Jason Gray
The Second Carondelet Avenue facade of the fermenting house
Lemp also commissioned Krausch to design a grand new edifice, now usually referred to as the Old Fermenting House, to anchor the then-public eastern façade of the brewery along Second Carondelet Avenue south of the brewhouse. Described as “magnificent” in a Western Brewer article at the time, the dimensions were listed as 150 by 75 feet, three stories high and 36 feet deep for fermenting and storage rooms. While the building’s appearance was marred slightly when the International Shoe Company added two floors and fenestration, the beauty of the original composition is still evident, bearing the influence of Italian Renaissance architect Donato Bramante’s Belvedere Palace in the Vatican. Lemp clearly asked for and received a powerful visual statement, fulfilling his desire for what we’d call architectural “branding.” The cellars reach down to bedrock, which can be observed in the elevator pit in the lowest subbasement.
Photo by Jason Gray
Supposedly the largest of its kind in the world at the time, the building cost $200,000. (For comparison, William Lemp was worth $100,000 a year, according to a gossipy 1883 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
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Photo by Jason Gray
The interior can be best described as a hypostyle hall, which is a building held up by regularly spaced columns. Today, due to the wide open spaces that allow for easy subdividing, the building now houses artists’ studios and the occasional art exhibition. But as a Western Brewer article from 1881 notes, those open spaces were initially filled, on the first two levels, with 72 lagering tanks, each 16 feet tall. On the third floor was the fermenting room, fully equipped with the “Krausch System” of refrigeration.
Photo by Jason Gray
A fermenting vat access hole in the sub-basement of the fermenting house
If you peer closely at the underside of the building’s floors, you’ll see a circular opening that was filled with concrete. Evidently, the huge tanks were constructed outside of the building and then lowered into place, not built in situ. One might also be surprised to see windows in what was supposed to be a giant refrigerator (the small rounded top windows are original), but a closer look reveals they were triple-paned and probably quite airtight. I was able to examine the building on multiple occasions; amazingly, even today the 3-foot thick walls maintain temperatures and humidity completely independent of outside conditions.
But of course, the introduction of artificial refrigeration brought its own dangers. An 1882 Post article recounts a fatal accident when a group of Lemp employees attempted to fix a broken ammonia pipe. Reinhard Dietsche, who’d climbed a ladder to fix the pipe, was suddenly hit with a burst of ammonia gas and was knocked backward off the ladder. He later died from his injuries. Two other workers, William Goersch and Rudolph Scherer, were also injured in the incident. Judging from the title of the article, “A Queer Death,” such a fatal accident involving the mysterious gas was new to St. Louis. But even with its dangers, this new mechanical refrigeration’s monetary savings must have been immense compared to ice.
Finally, there’s a common misconception about St. Louis brewing: the role of caves in the growth of the Gateway City’s beer industry. Adam Lemp first used his cave in 1843, and his son first used Krausch’s artificial refrigeration in 1878, building the aforementioned huge new fermenting house, completely reliant on the new technology, by 1880. Doing the math, the Lemps only relied on their humble cave for at most 35 years. While it surely played a role, by no means should we consider our underground caves critical to the development of brewing in St. Louis.
