Tag Archives: Over-the-Rhine

Neighborhoods

Overlooked Neighborhoods

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Recently, I came across an interesting article on the website ozy.com. It was titled Overlooked Neighborhoods: Little-known Gems in Well-Known Cities. The premise of the article was pretty straightforward. When we visit a city, we tend to keep to well-trodden paths. These can be restaurants we have read about in guidebooks, museums that are on everyone’s must-visit list, or a green space such as a famous park.

But dare to look beyond the tourist traps and our own comfort zone, and we will see that every city has lesser-known neighborhoods that are worth spending time in. This particular article identifies seven such neighborhoods:

It is is an interesting list, albeit a little U.S.-centric. What I found particularly intriguing about the descriptions of these seven neighborhoods is that beer is mentioned as a key part of the urban fabric in four of them (Abasto, Bridgeport, Brevnov, and Over-the-Rhine). In the cases of Abasto, Bridgeport, and Over-the-Rhine, craft beer bars and breweries, in particular, are mentioned, while in the Břevnov neighborhood of Prague, the monks at the monastery there first brewed beer in the year 993. This makes it the earliest record of beer being brewed in the Czech Republic. In a completely separate piece on Pittsburgh’s overlooked neighborhoods, Kelly Abrogast, shines the spotlight on the city’s Troy Hill neighborhood. According to Abrogast, Troy Hill is Home to “some of the best beer you’ve ever had”. Troy Hill is home to Penn Brewery.

Rhinegeist Brewery in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood

The fact that craft beer (whether in the form of craft beer bars or craft breweries) are considered a key contributor to interesting and vibrant neighborhoods does not surprise me in the slightest. In a 2016 piece in The Atlantic, James Fallows identified eleven signs that a city will succeed – one of those signs was the existence of at least one craft brewery. As noted by Fallows, “a town that has craft breweries also has a certain kind of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of mainly young (except for me) customers.” As Fallows correctly notes, craft breweries are a magnet for young people. As market research has demonstrated, it is the Millennial cohort who are driving the growth of the craft beer sector. A craft brewery or craft beer bar in a neighborhood attracts young people, not just from the immediate neighborhood, but from other parts of the city, and even farther afield. Beer tourism is increasingly popular, and craft beer drinkers visiting cities search out those neighborhoods with craft breweries and craft beer bars. A craft brewery opening up in a neighborhood is akin to putting up a welcome sign. It is saying to people, come check us out. This neighborhood is ok; good things are happening. In some cases, such as the Ohio City neighborhood in Cleveland, OH or the Lower Downtown (LoDo) neighborhood in Denver, CO, craft breweries (Great Lakes Brewing Company and Wynkoop Brewing Company respectively) were pioneer investors who kick-started the redevelopment of these respective neighborhoods. In other cases, such as the Pearl District in Portland, OR or the North Davidson (NoDa) neighborhood in Charlotte, NC the craft breweries and craft beer bars have followed other investment into the neighborhood. Whatever the sequencing of investments, many of these neighborhoods have had new life breathed into them.

Great Lakes Brewing Company was the catalyst for the redevelopment of Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood

According to Denver Public Library, “back in the 1980s, Lower Downtown Denver was what we called “a little sketchy” – a lot of places were boarded up, and ones that were open were populated by the underground crowd, drifters, punk rockers and late nighters. Today, the bustling restaurant – sports bar – brew pub district looks like the Seattle or Portland we all longed for, with a huge variety of food choices both native and exotic, all kinds of great beer, espresso, chocolate, and other delicacies, and a wide array of clothing and accessory stores, art galleries, and high-end lofts.”

Back in 2016, I spent a few days in Stockholm, Sweden. While there I visited the Nya Carnegie Bryggeret (New Carnegie Brewery). The brewery is in an old lightbulb factory in the Hammarby Sjöstad neighborhood. In the early 1990s, Hammarby Sjöstad was a run-down, polluted industrial and residential neighborhood that was considered unsafe by outsiders. By the time I visited it in 2016, it had underwent a remarkable transformation. As a result of significant investment, it was an attractive neighborhood with apartments, shops, offices and, yes, a brewery.

The Nya Carnegie Bryggeret (New Carnegie Brewery) in Stockholm’s HammarbySjöstad neighborhood is in an old lightbulbg factory

The example of Nya Carnegie Bryggeret shows that craft breweries often thrive in overlooked neighborhoods, but they can also succeed in overlooked buildings. Through the process of adaptive reuse, craft brewery entrepreneurs will take an old abandoned church, fire station, automobile dealership etc. and turn it into a vibrant craft brewery. Craft brewery entrepreneurs are attracted to distressed neighborhoods because real estate is often relatively inexpensive.

Some people living in an overlooked neighborhood, may like it that way. So they may not necessarily welcome a new brewery and other investment and the visitors that they attract. Rising property values may force long-standing residents out of the neighborhood. Along with my colleagues, Jay Gatrell and Matthew Lehnert, I write about this in an upcoming book chapter. The chapter looks at the historical evolution of Cincinnati’s Over-the- Rhine neighborhood. Despite once being dubbed the most dangerous neighborhood in the United States, residents of Over-the-Rhine had for decades been suspicious of outsiders and the change they sought to bring to the neighborhood. This suspicion manifest itself in the Over-the-Rhine Peoples’ Movement who fought against gentrification of their neighborhood. In the end, their cause was a lost one and millions of investment dollars later Over-the-Rhine is very much a changed and more vibrant neighborhood.

Further Reading:

Reid, Neil. Craft breweries, Adaptive reuse, and neighborhood revitalization, Urban Development Issues, Volume 57, Issue 1, pp. 5–14.

Reid, Neil, Jay D. Gatrell, and Matthew Lehnert. Leveraging brewing history: The case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood”. In Thakur, Rajiv, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur, and George Pomeroy (Eds). Urban and Regional Planning and Development: 20th Century Forms and 21st Century Transformations, Springer: Dordrecht (forthcoming).

Reid, Neil and Isabelle Nilsson. From mill district to brewery district: Craft beer and the revitalization of Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood. Invited chapter for inclusion in Beer Places: The Micro-Geographies of Craft Beer, by Daina Cheyenne Harvey, Ellis Jones, and Nate Chapman (Eds).

History, Ohio

Carillon: Honoring the Past

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A few weeks ago, my wife and I were planning an overnight trip to just north of Cincinnati, OH. We were going there to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The drive would be approximately three hours. And given that we’re planning to leave mid-morning we decided to look for a possible lunch venue along our route. Anytime we are on the road and have a lunch stop, I always try to see if there is a brewery where we can eat and have a beer. We figured we would be near Dayton, OH around lunchtime, and so I looked for breweries there. In my search I came across Carillon Brewing Co. I had read about Carillon a few years ago and had always had an interest in visiting it.

Carillon Brewing Co. is a little different than most craft breweries. It is located inside Carillon Historical Park. The park is a sixty-five acre open-air history museum that depicts the history of Dayton from the late-1700s to the present.

Carillon Brewing Co.

Carillon Brewing Co. was established in 2014. One of the brewery’s claim to fame is that it is the nation’s only production brewery that is located inside a museum. Inside the brewery itself, there are displays highlighting Dayton’s brewing history. Like many other city’s across the United States, British-inspired ales were the dominant type of beer produced. When German immigrants started arriving in significant numbers in the 1840s, they introduced Lager to the city. By the 1880s there were as many as fourteen breweries operating in the city, and by 1900 Dayton’s breweries were producing three million gallons of beer annually.

This map inside Carillon Brewery provides information on Dayton’s brewing history in the 1850-1856 period

According to the brewery’s website, all of the beer brewed at Carillon is a “historical recreation of the earliest brews made in Ohio’s breweries.” Many of the processes used to brew the beer replicate those of the nineteenth century. Beer is brewed in open kettles, fermented in oak barrels, and is unfiltered. And when available , Ohio-grown hops are used. Beers on the menu include Coriander Ale, Irish Red Ale, and Pale Rye Ale (no IPAs!). The staff at the brewery are dressed in period costume. With my lunch, I opted for their Ginger Pale Ale. In addition to brewing beer, bread using spent grain from the brewing process is made daily onsite. My wife and I enjoyed some with the soup we had for lunch, and purchased a loaf to take back home with us.

For $150, Carillon offers you the opportunity to be a brewer for the day. It is quite a long day, which starts at 11:00 am and runs until 7:30 pm. While we can read about the process of brewing beer, and even look at diagrams that identify the various steps, it is my belief that there is nothing like a little bit of hands-on experience to enhance one’s understanding.

Carillon offers you the opportunity to be a brewer for the day

While craft beer has bought us a unprecedented diversity of wonderful beers (The Brewers Association recognizes over 150 different styles of beer), it has, I believe, also contributed to a growing appreciation of brewing history. This is manifest in any number of ways. In my town of Toledo, OH, for example, the Toledo Historical Museum organize a History and Hops Brewery Tour, in which participants learn about the city’s brewing history. The tour starts at one of the city’s craft breweries – Maumee Bay Brewing Company. In a similar fashion, the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (BDCURC) in CincinnatI, OH offer a number of walking tours that recount that neighborhood’s historical connection with beer. In St. Louis, MO, the Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum offer the Beer Barons Tour. The cemetery contains around forty burial sites that have a connection with St. Louis’s rich brewing history. The tour provides people with an opportunity to learn about the city’s beer entrepreneurs.

Individual breweries are discovering and recreating old beer styles that have not been brewed in decades. For example, breweries in Louisville, KY are brewing their version of pre-Prohibition Kentucky Common beer. The city’s Apocalypse Brew Works produce a Kentucky Common beer using a 1912 recipe from the Oertel Brewing Company; a recipe that calls for corn grits.

Kentucky Common – a beer style that was popular in the Louiseville, KY region in the pre-Prohibition era is now being produced by a number of Louisville breweries. The one pictured here was brewed by Louisville’s Bluegrass Brewing Company.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, DE have an Ancient Ales series, whose recipes are based on residue discovered on chemical analysis of drinking vessels from various sites around the world. They do this in partnership with University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, Dr. Patrick McGovern. The result has been beers with evocative names such as Midas Touch, Chateau Jiahu, and Birra Etrusca Bronze.

History is important. It grounds us in our roots, helps us understand change, and can inspire us to learn more. And thanks, in part to craft beer, there seems to be a growing interest in the history of both beer and brewing. This is a good thing.

History, Ohio, Toledo

Toledo History and Hops

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The tour started at Maumee Bay Brewing Company

Last month, I went on a tour organized by the the Toledo History Museum. The tour was titled “History & Hops Brewery Tour”, and combined some general Toledo urban history with the history of the brewing industry in the city. The two-hour tour started at Toledo’s oldest and largest modern-day craft brewery, Maumee Bay Brewing Company (established 1995; white star on map below). Gathered outside of the brewery as we waited on the bus to start our tour, I counted about twenty fellow tour participants.

Our tour guide was Tedd Long, Vice President of the Toledo History Museum. Tedd provided commentary for the tour, which he supplemented with short video clips. Tedd started off by noting the historical importance of the brewing industry in Toledo. Indeed, from the early to mid-1800s up until the early twentieth century it was one of the leading industries in the city. If I heard Tedd correctly, there were fourteen breweries in the city of Toledo in 1900.

Map of Toledo Breweries That Existed at Some Point Between 1838 and 1972. Source: Maumee Bay Brewing Company

We made a number of stops along the tour.  I won’t cover them all in this blog entry, but will rather hit on a few highlights. Our first stop was in east Toledo, at the corner of Oak and Front Streets (number 7 on map). This was the site of the Home Brewing Company, which existed between 1904 and 1919. The brewery was a five-story structure. Interestingly, the brewery was owned by a syndicate of saloon owners. The syndicate ownership structure gave the saloon owners control over the price of the beer. At its peak, the Home Brewing Company produced 40,000 barrels of beer per year.

Our second stop was at the intersection of Front and Main Streets, also in east Toledo. Toledoeans will recognize this intersection, as the iconic Tony Packo’s Restaurant is located there. This intersection was the location of the original Buckeye Brewery (number 9 on map). The brewery was established in 1838, and was owned by a German Brewmaster, Julius Kohler. In 1854, Kohler purchased a brewery  at the corner of Bush and Champlain Streets (number 1 on map) and shifted his brewing operations to this location. The brewery, which was a small, white, wooden frame building, was purchased by Kohler for $2,400. Our tour also included a stop at the Bush and Champlain Streets location. Over the years the Buckeye Brewery underwent numerous ownership changes, while also gaining capacity as a result of building additions. By the 1870s, the brewery was producing between fourteen thousand and nineteen thousand barrels of lager. In 1880, it was the fourth largest brewery in the city.

Another stop was at the intersection of Summit and Elm Streets, the site of the Finlay Brewing Company (number 4 on map). The brewery opened in 1853. It started off brewing Ales and Porter, but in 1869 switched to producing Lager. In 1874, Finlay Brewing Company produced 12,000 barrels of beer. By 1881, production had increased to 54,000 barrels. Finlay Brewing Company was the first Toledo brewery to sell its beer outside of the city, when it expanded its market reach to include Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York. It was also the first Toledo brewery to bottle its beer.  The bottling of beer, of course, was made possible by the invention of the automated bottling machine by Michael J. Owens, who worked for the Toledo Glass Factory (owned by Edward Drummond Libby). Prior to bottles, beer was sold in kegs. Today , Toledo remains a center of beer bottle design and innovation – a topic I covered in a previous blog entry.

 

Maumee Bay’s Brewery Manager, Craig Kerr, leads us through the beer tasting portion of the tour

Another stop that we made on the tour was the building that currently houses the Spaghetti Warehouuse restaurant, at the intersection of Lafayette and Superior Streets. Constructed towards the end of the nineteenth century, this building was the Hoppe and Strube Bottling Company. Hoppe and Strube bottled beer for a number of breweries including the Pabst Brewing Company from Milwaukee, WI and the Maumee Brewing Company, whose brewery was located right next door.

These are just a few of the stops we made on our tour. As I reflected on my afternoon, visiting the sites of old Toledo breweries, it struck me that most American cities have a brewing history. It is a history that should be preserved and told. Thankfully, the Toledo History Museum have taken on that task in Toledo. Back in March 2017, I took a guided tour of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, OH and learned about that neighborhood’s rich brewing history.  The tour was organized by the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation,  a not-for-profit group, part of whose mission it is to preserve and tell the story of the neighborhood’s brewing heritage. Just the other day, I came across this piece, in the St. Louis Dispatch about the Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum Beer Baron Tour. Around forty burial sites in the cemetery have a connection with St. Louis’s brewing history. The annual Beer Barons Tour gives people an opportunity to learn about some of the city’s beer entrepreneurs. These are important histories. We should preserve them and share them.

Following the bus segment of the tour, we returned to the Maumee Bay Brewing Company for beer tasting in the brewery’s cafe. The beer tasting was led by Brewery Manager, Craig Kerr. We sampled six Maumee Bay brews – Cherry Vanilla Porter, Coffee Cream Ale, Dreamin Demon (Belgian Strong Dark Ale), Glass Hopper IPA, Oktoberfest, and Mango Jerry (Gose). The background to each beer, including information on the ingredients was provided by Craig Kerr. I have sat through a lot of craft beer samplings over the years and this was perhaps the best. Craig did a fantastic job of describing each beer, as well as providing information on the general brewing process, and the function of the different ingredients.

FurtherReading:

Musson, Robert A. 2011. Brewing Beer in the Glass City, Volume I. The Buckeye Story. Medina, OH: Zepp Publications.

Musson, Robert A. 2018. Brewing Beer in the Glass City, Volume II: Huebner, Koerber, Maumee Bay and the Rest, 2nd edition. Medina, OH: Zepp Publications.

History, Ohio

Over-the-Rhine

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A few weeks ago I spent the weekend in Cincinnati, OH. My oldest daughter moved there back in February.  She recently graduated from Nursing School at the University of Toledo and is now working as a Registered Nurse at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. I like Continue reading Over-the-Rhine →