A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Many times while walking home from downtown New Albany, where Doug and Carl started all those restaurants, I swing down 10th Street from Market back over to Spring.
The corner of 10th and Market is adjacent to the city’s attractive war memorial traffic divider. Mansion Row is only a block away to the south. After 10th crosses Spring northward, the neighborhood becomes more transitional – near where Doug and Carl saved all those houses.
Standing there on the side of 10th, between market and Spring, is a nondescript yet dignified 19th-century red brick commercial building, two stories tall, with a sloping roof and a “fermentational” story to tell.
This building probably is the last tangible remnant of New Albany’s brewing past, having once housed the brewery owned by the Buchheit family. In its prime, there was a whole corner compound of sorts, with two companion structures and outbuildings. A tavern and dance hall were located just yards away.
I’ll leave the inevitability of the brothel to the fevered imaginations of the Daughters of the American Revolution, although the DAR likely insists that old-timers were without houses of ill repute. Color me skeptical; somewhere, there’s an antique little black book waiting to be audited.
The Buchheit brewing heyday was 125 years ago, give or take a decade. In more recent years the place where the beer used to be brewed suffered the supreme indignity of being home to a fundamentalist church of the sort that would lobby for a return to Prohibition, and as a result, should be viciously suppressed, or at least prevented from joining One Southern Indiana.
I suppose it’s like the Ohio Valley weather: If you don’t appreciate today’s zoning usage, just wait a century or two and surely it will change. Happily, the church isn’t there any longer, which is a victory for beer-drinking heretics like yours truly.
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Although the study of history is important to me, I’ve never been much for breweriana, with all its signs, labels and steins, and it isn’t my habit to pore over microfilm at the public library in search of obscure factoids. History is about telling good stories -- mostly factually true, but with an undercurrent of creativity allowed if it advances the narrative.
Consequently, it was quite interesting a few years back when a good friend from my neighborhood received permission from the owner of the adjacent house, itself erected atop Buchheit brewery building foundations, to explore the former lagering cellars. They still reach far into the earth beneath the brewery site, and my pal’s descriptions of them were beer for thought, indeed.
Perhaps stemming from my career paradigm shift, from brewpub operator to production brewery owner, it has become compelling for me to idly speculate about the daily routines and business strategies of such a brewery as Buchheit’s, in a town like New Albany, at some indeterminate time between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century.
We know that these smaller breweries often operated as extensions of the owning family, which tended to reside on or near the business site, with bunkhouse rooms for their workers and seats at a communal dining table.
Ice would be cut and packed into the cellars in wintertime to keep them cooler during warm weather. Just about everyone involved was German, and the beer was brewed according to the Old World stylebook with modifications as necessitated by available ingredients and prevailing conditions. The beer was kegged in wooden barrels, and also sometimes bottled – either by the brewer, or by free-standing “contract” bottling firms.
Apart from added elbow grease and equine deliveries, the actual work performed at a New Albany brewery of old wouldn’t have been substantively different from the schedule of ours in 2013, but in terms of selling the finished product, it’s a good guess that a brewery in New Albanian times of yore functioned more like a purveyor of foodstuffs, as with a bakery, rather than in the manner of today’s brewpub or production brewery.
I believe this for no other legible reason than the likelihood of recently arrived Germans regarding their beer as a daily source of nourishment, in addition to its more obvious value as an intoxicant. This is the way the Old World worked, and a morning soup using leftover stale beer as stock was still a rural custom in parts of Germany until the mid-1900s. It took Prohibition, rising standards of living and the passing of time to gradually breed the perception of “beer as food” out of the American gene pool.
I find much to admire in this simplicity of approach, even though certain stressful constants span the decades: Good and bad business cycles, employees juggling personal lives and work hours, raw material costs and outages, and the time-honored annoyance of trying to convince a reluctant banker to help out when the cash flow is tight.
These days, we’re in the entertainment business just as much as anything, and probably more, as we are involved with both beer-making and cooking meals. Prior to the advent of saturation connectivity and hyper-consumerism, seemingly there could exist a sufficient local or even regional market for a product like beer, absent the imperative to juggle multiple on-line social media portals, satisfy the jaded and shortened attention span of the typical visitor, and decide whether one’s brew team should read Beer Advocate’s reviews or not, lest they learn of their beers being deemed scandalously over-rated.
To me, the absence of modern medicine, e-mail and civil rights guarantees usually suffices to discourage time travel to the age of the Robber Barons. However, I’ve been known to second-guess myself.
I wonder how Buchheit’s beer tasted? Depending on the mayoral administration, hopefully the beer was good enough to walk another couple blocks and share a pail with Jouett Meekin, retired baseball star.
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