Graupner’s Brewery. Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Dauphin County, Harrisburg

“Why can this woman be allowed to continue this iniquitous system that has grounded down all the poor men that she has got within her grasp?”

Let’s hear it for Harrisburg’s historic breweries. It wasn’t all oompah music and saloons decorated in trays depicting winsome women. Here, you’ll find cutthroat competition, caves and tunnels, and a savvy businesswoman thriving in a man’s world.

Beer Begins

Colonial Americans drank British-style unfiltered ales, so let’s presume that’s what ferryman John Harris and a neighbor, John Heis, had cooking in their breweries along the Susquehanna River, across from today’s Simon Cameron mansion.

In early America, brewers “tend to have a tavern of their own, or they sell their beer in kegs to hotels and saloons,” said Rick Hartman of Harrisburg, author of an upcoming book on the city’s bottling heritage.

Around 1840, Philadelphia brewer John Wagner’s refreshing German-style lager became all the rage among thirsty factory workers. Soon, Germans fleeing their roiling continent brought their lager-brewing skills. Local brewers proliferated because the preservative-free concoctions couldn’t be transported far. About 2,000 breweries popped up in American cities.

In 1843, Harrisburg’s breweries produced 465,000 gallons of beer and ale a year, in a town of 7,800 citizens. Historian Michael Barton breaks down the drinking population to about 975 adult males sauntering into saloons to put two-thirds a gallon of beer a day into their bellies.

In Harrisburg, three 19th-century breweries lasted into the 20th. They went by various names over the years but are recalled as Fink’s, Doehne’s (pronounced “Dean’s”) and Graupner’s.

Henry Fink hailed from Hesse-Cassel, Germany. As a young man in 1854, he went to work for Harrisburg’s Barnitz Brewery. By 1875, he was sole owner. In 1881, he built a plant at 312-320 Forster St. (remember that address). The small-ish plant would produce 3,000 barrels a year and grow to producing 18,000 barrels by 1902.

George Doehne, also from Hesse-Cassel, founded a 300-barrel-a-year brewery downtown at 322 Chestnut St. in 1865. By the 1890s, Doehne was brewing 12,000 barrels and investing in a 20-ton refrigeration machine and a “handsome” brick cold-storage building.

Graupner’s originated in 1876 as the appropriately named Centennial Brewery. Robert H. Graupner, immigrant from Saxony, practiced his craft in Philadelphia and Lancaster (a brewing hub nicknamed the “Munich of America”) before joining Centennial and eventually co-owning it.

After the 1894 death of his partner, Graupner “decides to go big,” said Hartman.

So, Graupner built a marvel of a modern brick brewery at 10th and Market streets—up to seven stories of three-foot-thick walls and a 130-foot smokestack twice the size of Fink’s.

“Graupner was marking his territory,” Hartman said. “He’s going to be the big-dog brewery.”

Graupner also built the Allison Bar across the street and a substantial home nearby. Brewery, bar and mansion, it’s said, were connected by tunnels. Maybe they came in handy during Prohibition?

Breweries of the day were self-sufficient complexes—“mind-blowing,” said Chad Campbell of Reading, keeper of the Breweriana Aficionado website (www.brewaf.com).

“They were the size of small colleges,” he said. “There were loading areas with trains, a cooperage shop that made the kegs, washhouses for the bottles, hops storage, boiler room, lagering brewery, ale brewery, malthouse. There would usually be a house on the property for the brewmaster and his family.”

Times were good. In 1911, Dauphin County brewers produced 82,949 barrels of beer—enough for about 149 bottles of beer for each of the county’s 120,000 residents. Break that down by Barton’s math, and it’s more like 15,000 men each downing 1,858 bottles a year.

The Underbelly

Depending on whom you ask, Graupner’s, Fink’s and Doehne’s engaged in “friendly competition”—or Graupner’s steamrolled its rivals.

Well, heck. Let’s explore the cutthroat legends.

“Every brewery in any of your towns was always clamoring to be at the top,” said Campbell. “Graupner had bars they owned in order to sell strictly their product. That was one way to get ahead of the advertising funnel.”

In 1905, the suicide of the hard-charging Robert Graupner sent shock waves through the city. His widow, Marie L. Graupner, took over, and business took off. She built a bakery across the street. Like other brewers of the day, she oversaw a network of taverns.

“I think she was a very successful businesswoman, one of the top businesswomen this town ever saw,” Robert R. Long of Susquehanna Township once said of his hard-working grandmother.

Hartman agreed that her 20 years of ownership saw growth.

“She really ran with it,” he said. “She was believed to be the one who oversaw the finances even when her husband was around.”

She would also face accusations of running that “iniquitous system” of tied saloons—bars pressured into carrying one brewery’s beer, usually at inflated prices. The charges came out in 1912, when aggrieved saloonkeeper John Wall claimed in court that Graupner charged him $7.50 a barrel, compared to the $6.75 paid by independent saloonkeepers. The pair also disagreed over terms of the rent.

Other tenants among her 18 saloonkeepers said they “felt compelled” to buy her beer, but Graupner testified that they “have the liberty of buying whatever beer they want.” In Wall’s case, she conceded, “I wanted him to sell my beer because I was losing money on the investment.”

She would have a partial victory. Wall withdrew a liquor license transfer application that he claimed Graupner was stonewalling, but the judge wagged a finger, ordering her to write leases—not a part of her repertoire—so her tenants could renew their liquor licenses.

Were Graupner’s the only tied saloons? Maybe not. In those same court proceedings, Mrs. Frederick L. Heist received a license for her Race Street saloon. Heist was, according to a news report, “a tenant of Mrs. George Doehne of the Doehne Brewery.”

What did the brews taste like? Among Doehne’s menu was a flat, dry-hopped, alcohol-rich stock ale. A few sips, wrote Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist Paul Beers, “and a railroader forgot all about the Pennsy.”

Most old-timey brews were bubbly and “sudsy to the bottom of the glass,” Beers added. An unwashed glass left to sit overnight would leave “a scum of sticky suds with a sour odor.”

Graupner’s, renowned for its quality, drew mixed feelings. Tipplers either loved it or hated it. And then there’s this.

“Our Elfenweiss Beer is clear, pure and wholesome,” boasted a 1912 Graupner’s ad. “It’s more nutritious than a health food, and as palatable as honey, and as low priced as common beer. Pure ingredients and brewing know how, then the fermenting and aging have much to do with the healthfulness of our beer. We have ample room for storing it. We keep it until it is well aged. It positively will not cause biliousness.”

Thick, sticky, sudsy, healthy beer, with no biliousness? Prost!

The Last Batch

After decades of prosperity, Harrisburg’s homegrown breweries succumbed to Prohibition and then to the national mega-brewers. Fink’s converted to ice-making during Prohibition and reopened after repeal in 1933, only to close permanently in 1934. Doehne’s closed in 1939, its site destined to be a parking lot.

“When legal drinking returned in 1934 (sic), the Harrisburg breweries were obsolete, too small for regional trade, too poor to do much advertising, and not solvent enough to make a great batch of beer,” wrote Beers.

But remember Fink’s Forster Street address? Fink’s shared a block with Central High School, the still-standing Messiah Lutheran Church and a fashionable brothel. In 1936, the state bought and demolished the shuttered property, making way for the new Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.

The art deco LCB building remains. Teetotaler Gov. Gifford Pinchot, the father of Pennsylvania’s state-store system, must have wanted to dance on the grave of the brewery that once bellied up to the Capitol.

Graupner’s limped through Prohibition by making low-alcohol “near beer,” although it seems that its production required making the real thing, “so some of the regular stuff that the liquor agents didn’t catch did slip out,” Beers wrote. Fink’s also “ran into trouble when a truckload with 10 half-kegs of full-strength beer was caught,” said Hartman.

Graupner’s resumed operations in 1933. In 1951, the last batch was brewed. In 1961, the brewery came down, but not without a fight from the behemoth smokestack, which baffled demolition crews for days.

The exit of Harrisburg’s breweries tolled the bells on a way of life, Beers noted.

“Before refrigeration, they stored their beer in cave vaults off S. Cameron St. or in the Bellevue Park cave,” he wrote.

Um, caves?

Little remains of Harrisburg’s historic breweries. Collectors seek out the bottles and ubiquitous advertising items. Appalachian Brewing Co., which, in 1997, revived Harrisburg’s beer-making tradition, named its Jolly Scot Ale after Graupner’s Jolly Scot. Marie Graupner certainly made her mark, outmaneuvering competitors in an age when women rarely engaged in any business, let alone brewing.

And perhaps the memory of sticky beers is fading as the last of the Graupner’s drinkers head off to that smelly saloon in the sky. But I gotta find those caves.

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