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Historic Beer Birthday: Philip Zorn

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Today is the birthday of Philip Lewis Zorn (February 21, 1837-January 4, 1912). Zorn was born in Wűrzburg, Bavaria, and learned brewing from his father, how was a brewer in Germany. In 1855, when he was eighteen, he emigrated to the U.S., and initially settled in Illinois, where he worked in breweries in Blue Island, Illinois. In 1871, he moved to Michigan City, Indiana and opened the Philip Zorn Brewery. Twenty years later, he incorporated it as the Ph. Zorn Brewing Co. After prohibition, his sons Robert and Charles, who had worked for the brewery beginning as young men, reopened the brewery as the Zorn Brewing Co. Inc., but it in 1935 it became known as the Dunes Brewery, before closing for good in 1938. He was also a city councilman and a co-founder of Citizens Bank of Michigan City.

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This account is from the Indiana Bicentennial:

Philip Zorn Jr. was the son of a brewer in Wűrzburg, Bavaria who immigrated at the age of 18. He worked at a brewery in Illinois from 1855 until he started his own in Michigan City. By 1880 he was making 3,000 bbls annually. He became a prosperous man, a city councilman and the founder of the Citizens Bank of Michigan City.

The company passed to Philip’s sons Robert and Charles who built a new brewhouse in 1903 and reached almost 15,000 bbls by the time of Prohibition. During the dry years they made the Zoro brand of soda pop. After Prohibition they changed the name to Dunes Brewing, possibly because of a court action against Zorn in 1935 for selling beer to unlicensed companies. They made Grain State, Golden Grain and Pilsenzorn brands.

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Zorn beers.

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And this excerpt is from “Hoosier Beer: Tapping into Indiana Brewing History,” by Bob Ostrander and Derrick Morris:

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Historic Beer Birthday: John Frederick Wiessner Sr. 

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Today is the birthday of John Frederick Wiessner (December 14, 1831-January 1, 1871). He was born in Bavaria, but emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Baltimore, Maryland. He founded the John F. Wiessner Brewery in 1863, renaming it the John F. Wiessner & Sons Brewing Co. after his sons joined he business in 1888. It remained that name until closed by prohibition in 1920. It reopened after repeal in 1933 as the American Brewery, and went through a variety of name changes until closing for good in 1973.

Here’s a newspaper story about his will after he passed away.

Baltimore History Bits has a short history of the brewery, and cartoonist from California, Chendi Xu, created a short comic about the history of Wiessner’s brewery, although she claims he went to Bavaria to learn brewing and came back from there rather than New York. There’s also a pdf online with a history of the brewery from a breweriana perspective by David Hagberg.

The brewery building is still standing, though it’s been through a lot, according to Wikipedia:

The American Brewery, located in the Broadway East, Baltimore community, is an historic former brewery located at 1701 North Gay Street in northeast Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Formerly abandoned and left to decay for four decades, it has been recently repaired, renovated / restored and beautified. It is currently the headquarters of Humanim Inc., a regional social services agency.

Historic Beer Birthday: Johannes Karl Fix

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Today is the birthday of Johannes Karl Fix (February 24, 1832-1895). Johannes Karl Fix, which was probably Fuchs (for “Fox”) in his native Germany, was born in Freistadt, which at that time was part of Bavaria (but today is part of Austria). He founded the Fix Brewery in 1864 in Athens and was the first major brewery in Greece. “About 30 years earlier, his father had started brewing beer in Greece. As purveyor to the court of the Greek king, the company was able to maintain a monopoly position in the Greek market for about 100 years. After the bankruptcy of the company in 1983 and several failed attempts to revive it, Fix beer has been brewed again in its own brewery since 2009. The reason for this is the relatively high popularity of beer in Mediterranean countries.”

Here’s a history of the brewery, from Wikipedia:

The brewery founder’s father, Johann Adam Fix, a miner from Edelbach in Spessart, had followed the call of King Otto to Greece and had – like other Bavarians – settled in Iraklion near Athens.[2] He was responsible in the management of the mines in Kymi, Euboea. Earlier, he had left his son Johann Georg behind with his mother. When Johann Georg traveled to his father at the age of twenty, he was to be picked up in Piraeus; but his father was murdered on the way by robbers. After the event, Johann Georg Fix was rescued in Iraklion, he stayed there and started to import barrels of beer from Bavaria. Later, he decided to produce beer himself and launched a small enterprise selling his home-made beer in Kolonaki (today a expensive and celebrated shopping area in the heart of Athens), which was a good place for socialising for the Athenian Bavarian community. Joseph von Ow, who was in the service of the Athenian royal court in 1837–39, wrote in his memoirs:

“The Bavarian compatriots have company among themselves. – A brewery has been in operation in Athens for two years and is being used heavily. Professor G. Everus from Oldenburg rightly notes how excellent it must be for a Bavarian soul to have his patriotic drink here – on the border of the Orient! A society – To the Green Tree – (with garden, bowling alley, stone beer steins, singing and loud conversations) reminds of the far bank of the Isar! “

Around 1840, the beer is said to have prevailed throughout Greece. Johann Ludwig’s son Karl Johann Fix (Karolos Ioannou Fix) in 1864 founded the Fix brewery in Athens,[6] coinciding with the appointment of the next king of Greece, George I, from beer-loving Denmark. The new royal court encouraged Charles’s efforts, and Fix Company soon became the official purveyor to the Greek Royal Court, and has been the only major in the country till the middle of the 20th century. It was located at the foot of Lycabettus also in Kolonaki and competed with small breweries such as Gulielmos (Wilhelm) and imported beer from Trieste and Vienna (Schwechat). The German brewers (including Fix) are said to have barely met the demand for beer and “became wealthy in a short time.” Beer was therefore more expensive than wine. Around 1905, 89,000 hectoliters were produced in eleven breweries.

This is an account of the history of Greek brewing beginning with Fix’s brewery, from Food & Dining.

Modern brewing in Greece dates to the period just after Greece became independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1832 following a decade-long war of liberation. The new Mediterranean nation acquiesced to the persuasiveness of Europe’s empires, which paraphrased Frank Zappa by insisting that all real countries need a king in addition to beer and a football team.

So it was that a member of the Bavarian royal family set up court in Athens, soon to be followed by brewers and sausage makers. After all, all kings were not Bavarian, but all Bavarians (including their kings) needed beer and brats. Some things never change.

A Bavarian miner named Fix was among the early arrivals in Athens, intent on serving royalty by making money. He began dabbling in brewing, but it was his son Johann Karl Fix who founded the eponymous brewery in Athens in 1864.

By this point the Greek Royal Court had become Danish on grounds of Bavarian kingly ineptitude, but as we know Danes are beery to the core, and Fix the younger, being a well-read capitalist, began his pursuit of the new monarch’s favor. This quest resulted in the Fix brand becoming “official” purveyor to the royals, and subsequently a quasi-monopoly in Greek brewing for decades to come.

By the time of my 1985 visit to Greece, Fix was acknowledged as the must-drink Greek beer by all those who had preceded me on the backpacker’s circuit. But as I soon discovered, Fix no longer existed, having passed from the scene two years earlier following a multitude of setbacks.

The reasons for the decline of Fix in Greece were quite similar to those afflicting post-Prohibition family breweries in America. For one, bigger breweries (in Greece’s case, European multinationals) wanted a piece of the action and expended their resources to achieve it by hook or crook.

Also, the Fix family’s younger generations proved far less adept at brewery management than their elders had been. The Fix brewery also came to be seen as aligned with the right-wing military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974, and when the junta fell, paybacks were hell.

And this account is from The First Cemetery of Athens:

Tragically, Georg [Johannes Karl’s father] was shot and killed by robbers in 1862 while awaiting the arrival of his son Johannes from Bavaria. His grave can be found in Iraklio’s Roman Catholic cemetery. In spite of that terrible event, Johannes decided to remain in Greece. Informed sources have him working at the palace briefly, gaining the concession for the importation of ice from Mount Parnitha to Athens and/or apprenticing at the brewery of Melcher and then taking it over around 1864 when Mr. Melcher died.  However much of that beginning is solid fact, it is true that he had begun his own small brewery and moved it from Paleo Iraklio to Kolonaki in the late 1860s.  His business grew, partly because of hard work and partly because his beer had a reputation for consistent quality.

Bavarian Beer Riots

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Beginning May 1, 1844, and lasting until May 5, the Beer Riots in Bavaria took place after King Ludwig I of Bavaria decreed a tax on beer. It was due to the rising cost of ingredients and raised the price of a beer by the equivalent of a penny.

Several thousand angry citizens stormed the breweries on the evening of May 1st. The authorities replied with repression, the decree of the Munich police director of May 4, 1844 states:

“The mines in the inns are not tolerated at all from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. and in the afternoons only as long as no excesses are committed. In the event of excesses, the inns are cleared by the armed forces and the guests are exposed to the danger of being arrested. ”

The police director had not, however, counted on the local Army soldiers’ thirst for beer. These refused to act against the insurgents, and King Ludwig I had to reduce the beer price back to the old price. Order was only restored after the King decreed a 10% reduction in the price of beer. Ludwig I only remained King for 4 more years, when he abdicated following the Revolutions of 1848, and his son, Maximilian II, took his place.

Friedrich Engels, who is most famous for having developed Marxist theory along with Karl Marx, wrote a short article for The Northern Star newspaper a few weeks after the incident.

The Bavarian Beer is the most celebrated of all kinds of this drink brewed in Germany, and, of course, the Bavarians are much addicted to its consumption in rather large quantities. The government laid a new duty of about 100s. ad valorem on beer, and in consequence of this an outbreak occurred, which lasted for more than four days. The working men assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, assailed the public houses, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying everything in their reach, in order to take revenge for the enhanced price of their favourite drink. The military was called in, but a regiment of horse-guards, when commanded to mount on horseback, refused to do so. The police, being, as everywhere, obnoxious to the people, were severely beaten and ill-treated by the rioters, and every station formerly occupied by police-officers had to be occupied by soldiers, who, being upon good terms with the people, were considered less hostile and showed an evident reluctance to interfere. They only did interfere when the palace of the King was attacked, and then merely took up such a position as was sufficient to keep the rioters back. On the second evening (the 2nd of May) the King, in whose family a marriage had just been celebrated, and who for this reason had many illustrious visitors at his court, visited the theatre; but when, after the first act, a crowd assembled before the theatre and threatened to attack it, every one left the house to see what the matter was, and His Majesty, with his illustrious visitors, was obliged to follow them, or else he would have been left alone in his place. The French papers assert that the King on this occasion ordered the military stationed before the theatre to fire upon the people, and that the soldiers refused. The German papers do not mention this, as may be expected from their being published under censorship; but as the French papers are sometimes rather ill-informed about foreign matters, we cannot vouch for the truth of their assertion. From all this, however, it appears that the Poet King (Ludwig, King of Bavaria, is the author of three volumes of unreadable Poems, of a Traveller’s Guide to one of his public buildings &c. &c.) has been in a very awkward position during these outbreaks. In Munich, a town full of soldiers and police, the seat of a royal court, a riot lasts four days, notwithstanding all the array of the military, – and at last the rioters force their object. The King restored tranquillity by an ordinance, reducing the price of the quart of beer from ten kreutzers (3¼ denarius) to nine kreutzers (3d). If the people once know they can frighten the government out of their taxing system, they will soon learn that it will be as easy to frighten them as far as regards more serious matters.

Beer In Ads #3099: Beer Brewery To The Ship

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Wednesday’s ad is for the J. Peter Wahl Brauerei, from 1925. From the late 1800s until the 1970s, poster art really came into its own, and in Europe a lot of really cool posters, many of them for breweries, were produced. This poster was made for the J. Peter Wahl Brauerei, which was also referred to as the Schiffbrauerei, the J. Peter Wahl Brauerei zum Schiff, or as in this ad, “Bierbrauerei zum schiff,” which means “brewery to the ship.” The brewery was located in Kaufbeuren, an independent town in the Regierungsbezirk of Swabia, Bavaria. The town is completely enclaved within the district of Ostallgäu. A brewery was known to be located there since 1540, but in 1868 it was founded as Brauerei zum schiff Th. Schmied, and the Wahl family acquired it in 1870. In 1969 it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Stern-Brauerei Cark Funke. The poster is a beautiful illustration of a group of finely dressed men on a red boat with two swans on it, flying a Bavarian banner, with the ones not rowing drinking mugs of beer. It created by Swiss painter and poster artist Emil Cardinaux.

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500th Anniversary Of The Reinheitsgebot

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It’s hard to believe it’s been 500 years since Bavaria signed what’s considered the first food purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, also known as the Bavarian Beer Purity Law, and later the German Beer Purity Law. That’s because in 1516, when the law was decreed, Germany did not yet exist, and wouldn’t for nearly 300 years, with the formation of the German Confederation in 1815, longer if you go by the German Empire, founded in 1871. Modern Germany consists of sixteen federal states, called Bundesländers, of which Bavaria is one.
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And it was in Bavarian town of Ingolstadt on April 23, 1516, that William IV, Duke of Bavaria wrote and signed the law, along with his younger brother Louis X, Duke of Bavaria. That 1516 law was itself a variation of earlier laws, at least as early as 1447 and another in independent Munich in 1487. When Bavaria reunited, the new Reinheitsgebot applied to the entirety of the Bavarian duchy. It didn’t apply to all of Germany until 1906, and it wasn’t referred to as the Reinheitsgebot until 1918, when it was coined by a member of the Bavarian parliament. But while today most people think of it as all about food purity, that was in reality only a small part of it, and probably not even the most important.

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Here’s a translation of the Reinheitsgebot, from a 1993 issue of Zymurgy:

We hereby proclaim and decree, by Authority of our Province, that henceforth in the Duchy of Bavaria, in the country as well as in the cities and marketplaces, the following rules apply to the sale of beer:

From Michaelmas to Georgi [St. George’s Day], the price for one Mass [Bavarian Liter 1,069] or one Kopf [bowl-shaped container for fluids, not quite one Mass], is not to exceed one Pfennig Munich value, and

From Georgi to Michaelmas, the Mass shall not be sold for more than two Pfennig of the same value, the Kopf not more than three Heller [Heller usually one-half Pfennig].

If this not be adhered to, the punishment stated below shall be administered.

Should any person brew, or otherwise have, other beer than March beer, it is not to be sold any higher than one Pfennig per Mass.

Furthermore, we wish to emphasize that in future in all cities, markets and in the country, the only ingredients used for the brewing of beer must be Barley, Hops and Water. Whosoever knowingly disregards or transgresses upon this ordinance, shall be punished by the Court authorities’ confiscating such barrels of beer, without fail.

Should, however, an innkeeper in the country, city or markets buy two or three pails of beer (containing 60 Mass) and sell it again to the common peasantry, he alone shall be permitted to charge one Heller more for the Mass or the Kopf, than mentioned above. Furthermore, should there arise a scarcity and subsequent price increase of the barley (also considering that the times of harvest differ, due to location), WE, the Bavarian Duchy, shall have the right to order curtailments for the good of all concerned.

Notice that the first two decrees have to do with pricing and when beer can be sold. It isn’t until paragraph six, the second last one, that the issue of what ingredients will be allowed comes up. If it had been the most important part, is seems more likely they would have led with it. Even then, it wasn’t about purity, but again commerce. Barley was designated as the only grain so that others, notably wheat and rye, were set aside to be used for baking bread.

Also, a lot of hay has been made about it not mentioning yeast, with the idea that it was because yeast wasn’t discovered until Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. But early brewers did know something about yeast, even if they didn’t have the full scientific understanding that came later. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to make consistent batches of beer. At the end of your brew, you’ll find a layer of billowing foam and other indeterminate matter at the bottom of the fermenter, which the Germans called “Zeug,” which means “stuff.” And early German brewers had a person, called a “hefener,” whose job it was to scoop out the Zeug, which was in effect the leftover yeast, and pitch it in the next batch of beer. So it’s hard to say they didn’t have some understanding of yeast.

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A German postage stamp celebrating the 450th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot in 1983.

The Germans, of course, have set up a website for the 500th anniversary, and so does the Bayerischer Brauerbund, which is a a Bavarian brewers trade group along with the German Brewers Group. They also created a 50-second film marking the anniversary.

And the media is covering the Reinheitsgebot’s Quincentenary. A few examples include the BBC, Food and Wine, NPR, Spiegel, and Wired. But by far the most thorough examination of the Reinheitsgebot was by Jeff Alworth in All About Beer magazine, Attempting to Understand the Reinheitsgebot.

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It’s great that it’s been 500 years, and that German brewers are justly proud of the Reinheitsgebot. It’s clearly helped create the unique German beer scene and their many native styles. But it’s also been used as a shameless marketing tool, been used as an exclusionary tactic, and has even had little-known exceptions to its rules for years, ones that most people are not even aware of, not to mention the use of other items in the brewing process that are also not mentioned by the law, but which because they’re not strictly “ingredients” more modern brewers have interpreted as not being prohibited.

Many people have voiced criticisms against it over the years. One that’s particularly thorough is The German Reinheitsgebot — Why it’s a Load of Old Bollocks. The German magazine Spiegel’s recent coverage is entitled Attacking Beer Purity: The Twilight of Germany’s Reinheitsgebot.

Back in 2001, Fred Eckhardt wrote an entertaining tale for All About Beer entitled The Spy who Saved the Reinheitsgebot, about how a brewer was able to prove Beck’s was using adjuncts and was not in adherence with the German law.

In another recent article in First We Feast, Sam Calagione, of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, is quoted with an opinion I suspect many American brewers hold. “I hate the concept of the Reinheitsgebot, but I am essentially happy it exists.”

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Deutsche Post’s 2016 commemorative stamp.