Beer part of local history

Recalling breweries, bootleggers

In 2017, some craft beer drinkers of northern Ohio are too young to remember the area’s rich history brewing beer.

A number of researchers have documented the history of Cleveland brewing, which may be unknown to the newest generations of those who imbibe fermented grains.

For centuries beer has been part of human history as a necessity, not just a luxury, said Chris Kambouris, co-founder with Fred Lozano Jr. of the Bascule Brewery and Public House LLC.

Their company is in its early stages, but the owners appreciate the long history of beer as liquid food for northern Ohio settlers who engaged in manual labor.

“You had a lot of work to do back then,” Kambouris said.

“Think of what we are able to do with just a push of a button, would have taken you half a day’s work back then.”

Although drunkenness affected some people, many workers could not afford to drink so much that it would slow them down at work, Kambouris said.

“You needed something with a little sustenance to it, you needed something hearty and that’s what beer was,” he said.

In 2013, Amherst city workers unearthed evidence of what was likely one of Lorain County’s earliest breweries.

They dug and found an underground chamber that was part of a brewery run by brewmaster William Braun, who lived in Amherst in the 1800s.

Local historian Matt Nahorn explained the find at the time and recalled it this year as part of Lorain County’s beer history.

The chamber was a basement section of a brewery that closed in 1894.

The cellars were sealed during the Great Depression, according to a 1954 newspaper article that Nahorn cited.

Lorain County also has its own “ghost town” that grew out of alcoholic beverages, Nahorn said.

“Whiskeyville” was the nickname of the crossroads of what are now Routes 58 and 113, Nahorn said.

The name still showed up on maps as late as 2013, Nahorn said, but “it does not seem like the little bustling place it used to be more than 80 years ago.”

Nahorn researched the history there, including the 6 Mile House. It was a tavern and inn six miles equidistant from the Beebe Tavern in Elyria to the east, the Henrietta House to the west and Lake Erie to the north.

Nearby springs made the crossroads an ideal place to stop for water for people and horses — and to distill whisky, said local historian Jim Wilhelm, who also is assistant fire chief for Amherst.

“Whiskeyville Corners, they said there was a still on every corner,” Wilhelm said. “I don’t know how many there were out there, but I’m sure there were a few out there.”

Wilhelm also found historic records of a 1907 visit to Amherst by Carrie Nation, also known as Carry A. Nation.

With the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Nation became best known for her militant stance against alcohol, at times smashing bottles and attacking saloons with a hatchet.

“Every time she’d go into a bar and break it up, she would get arrested,” Wilhelm said.

Her supporters promptly bailed her out, Wilhelm said, and the arrests would draw public attention to the cause.

For decades, Lorain was the geographic middle of the Cleveland and Sandusky Brewing Co., a “combine” incorporated in 1898 and made up of nine breweries in Cleveland and two in Sandusky. Author Carl H. Miller has an extensive history of the company in “Breweries of Cleveland,” a definitive reference on the subject.

The region west of Cleveland was of “critical importance” to the company, which maintained a distribution depot in Lorain for years, Miller wrote.

The company in 1904 built a new brewery in Lorain, the only new brewery it ever built, because its other plants were inherited from other brewers, Miller wrote.

The Lorain brewery remained active until 1918, due to Ohio’s statewide prohibition passed that year to go into effect in 1919, according to Miller.

Lorain’s history in the 1920s is dominated by the Great Tornado of 1924, a killer storm that devastated the city and Sandusky.

Less well known is local history during Prohibition. Nahorn noted those involved in illegal activities back then did not keep extensive documentation, for fear of getting caught.

“It is an interesting gap in the historical record,” Nahorn said.

Even so, some bootlegging happened.

Lorain native E.G. Leo Koury grew up to become a Democratic power broker who in the 1970s helped Jimmy Carter get elected to the White House.

Koury, 88, an attorney, titled his memoir “Bootlegger’s Son,” after a childhood nickname.

“All I know is that everybody was drinking bootleg whisky,” Koury said. But he was too young to remember exactly what happened during those days.

Koury subtitled his book “One Man’s Journey from His Earthly Father to His Heavenly Father,” and he said he wanted to explain his own religious conversion and bring honor to the memory of his father, Fred, the owner of Mill Tavern in Lorain.

“I, as a lawyer, had to wear that badge of shame,” he said about the nickname. “It became a badge of honor because I made that name sterling.”

After Prohibition, several Cleveland-based breweries resumed production but “slowly buckled under the pressure from national competition through the 1960s and ‘70s,” according to “Cleveland Breweries Remembered” of the Cleveland Memory Project of Cleveland State University.

The Carline Brewing Co. was the last of the local breweries, ending operations in 1984. Some local beer drinkers found a new favorite when the Great Lakes Brewing Co. incorporated in 1986.

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