The first time I ever saw anybody who walked in.

A friend of mine's house.

And he had a pot boiling on his stove.

Like what you making a beer?

You can make beer?

Yeah.

Why?

It's cheaper.

Oh, and all about that.

Looking at it and even more is like, oh, well, instead of buying these extract kits, which costs money, we can even do it cheaper by using grain.

Started making beer that way in college.

The internet was really young at that time.

Early 90s really had to just trial and error.

Learn that way.

There's only five major ingredients in making beer.

It's just a matter of how you adjust those five.

What do you want out of them?

It's where you get your taste for.

That's like baking a cake, I guess.

You need water, you need hops, you need yeast and you need grain.

Those four things make beer.

You have to have all four of those things to make beer.

And then from there on, then you get the additive flavors that you're adding to it and do different stuff to it as well.

So like our first blond was just a real traditional blond.

The second one had honey in it, and this one's actually going to have some caro syrup and endless possibilities.

You can think about it.

You can do it.

I just made a hibiscus saison, so I used dried hibiscus leaves in a boil.

So I mean, it's just whatever you can think of and try.

I think a couple of years ago, squid ink certified by the federal government to be used as an ingredient.

Not everything's good.

Some things are just drinkable.

Some things just aren't drinkable at all.

Nobody's perfect.

I mean, we make mistakes here.

Stuff doesn't work out.

Some beauty of a failure is always an option to me.

You learn from it.

My heart's still wanting to make smaller batch beers.

Just keep playing, having fun with it.

Experimenting is like an artist painting a picture.

I know, I just want to keep painting the same tree and rock over and over again.

Or do I want to create, you know, a mountain scene or a pond or something?

So.

Same thing with beer.

Getting to have more fun.

Making different beer styles, doing different beer flavors, getting more beer flavors out there.

The history of beer in Evansville is really interesting.

Evansville history in general is interesting.

But, when you look at the German background in the city, brewing, it becomes a major part.

You don't see anything in the early Evansville papers about beer.

That just was not the original English settler groups drink.

As a lot of people immigrated from Germany in the 1840s, 1850s.

They were spreading out throughout the United States, and many of them congregated along the rivers and towns like Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, Germans drank beer.

And when Germans came to Evansville, it's not a surprise that they brought beer with them.

Everybody likes beer who came from Germany.

And so they brought along their traditions.

And then it kind of grew from there.

I think the early beer was probably, small scale, more like a home brew.

I reckon it to something like what you see with a microbrewery.

They were literally a guy that knew how to make beer and sold it.

And then by the 1830s, 1840s, we start seeing breweries and lots of breweries.

The first breweries in Evansville, tradition says 1836 or 1837.

The, Kroner and Rice Brewery.

Most of the time it was known as the Old Brewery.

Both Cook and Sterling have their ties back to that brewery.

Jacob Rice and Frederick Kroner, established it on Fulton Avenue near Illinois.

They operated for quite a while.

And then in the 1850s, rice split off.

In 1853, Jacob Rice left and went and started his own brewery with F.W.

cook.

They began what was originally called the City Brewery and then later became F.W.

Cook Brewery.

When Mr. Rice passed away, it became Mr. Cook's Brewery, and then that grew and expanded.

After the second brewery opens to cook and rice, you get more of the small family.

breweries start opening.

Several of the smaller breweries started open up and then different neighborhoods still to the size of Evansville.

In 1870, you might have 10 or 12 breweries, and many of them wouldn't even cross lines or competition.

I would assume you serve that part of town that you were in.

What you end up with is on Ingle Street, on Franklin Street, on the different avenues on the West Side.

You've got the series of the Washington Brewery, the Franklin Brewery, the Olive Branch Brewery, the Union Brewery, and these are smaller breweries.

They're not trying to, sell out of town or export beer.

This was all going local.

They would make the beer, put it in a wooden keg and take it to the local tavern.

The tavern in the late 1800s was the social club for the working class German immigrant.

It was pretty common to have a corner bar on every corner, and I saw some statistics.

So there was a tavern on just about every corner in every city in America.

At one point with, you know, like a tavern for every 200 people.

That was where they would meet after work and have a beer, have some discussion.

And if it wasn't going to drink beer, it was going to socialize.

And beer was just a very integral part of that.

It's more common to what you see in England, like a pub on every corner.

It was more as a social gathering as well as a place to go get dinner and not have to share a beer with your neighbor.

You had these scattered around and you know, you had, you know, a certain neighborhood loyalty to to your brand.

You're in this area of Lamasco.

You buy your beer from the tavern up the street, and then people, of course, would develop a taste for it.

Like, even though I'm from the southeast side of downtown, I prefer the beer that's from the North Side Brewery, so they might have a reason to go down and rush the growler.

As they say, go bring home a pail of their favorite beer for the home.

People would go to the brewery or to these taverns with a with their beer bucket, and take beer home at that time, you could send your kid down to get a bucket of beer, like for dad to take to work or for at home.

He'd send your eight year old down the street to the tavern, give him a nickel to go fill up the beer for the evening.

My family lived in Baby Town, and my great aunt, who was born in the in the early 1900s, said when she was a little girl that her dad would have her go down to either Hartmetz Brewery or maybe the tavern at the hilltop and get his beer bucket filled.

That was the common way you did it.

I mean, the smallest thing you could get was a keg.

Because they sold by the barrel, half barrel, by the keg.

So anything under that there.

If you're not drinking in a bar or there with your glass, you took a pail or a bucket there and got your beer.

You.

In those early years of brewing.

Evansville was the brewing capital of the US.

You get by a little bit after the middle of the 1800s.

There.

Brewing is the third largest industry in Evansville.

In the late 1800s, after the Civil War, there was another big influx of German immigrants.

Many of them were settling in Lamasco, Independence, Baby Town.

And with that, there was a greater demand.

When you look at the city directory in 1866, 1867, there's 11 or 12 different breweries in Evansville or in the immediate vicinity.

In the 1880s, you come into the time period where, companies are incorporating companies were were incorporating and consolidating and becoming bigger productions.

These breweries went from being, you know, little, small 1 or 2 story buildings with a few employees to being factories, beer factories.

In the 1880s, the Cook Brewing Company incorporates, becomes a stock company.

So that company continues to grow and it became probably the largest brewery in Evansville.

Several of the smaller breweries started to open up in the different neighborhoods, and then that grew.

And then as I got a little bit bigger, they couldn't compete with some of the ones that had gotten bigger, like the cooks, in order to survive.

Several of the breweries formed a new brewing association, and around 1894, try to compete against the one that had become the biggest, which was Cook's Brewery.

So it was a Hartmetz brewery up near hilltop on in West Heights area.

There was a Stirling brewery that was at that time the Fulton Avenue Brewery, and then the Evansville Brewery that was relatively newer, but it had a really nice building.

But of course, once they all joined, the kind of ended up merging operations down into the Fulton Avenue Brewery, which is what became Sterling that were used to there at that location.

I think the Evansville Brewing Association was a was a move out of necessity to compete with with cook, which was located on eighth Street or Martin Luther King, where the Civic Center is today.

Because Cook's Brew was becoming so large.

These were the major brewing concerns in Evansville and those small breweries kind of went away.

You end up with just two breweries in town, and they're the two big ones.

You're talking about thousands of barrels a year of beer that they're producing by that time, you know, some basic refrigeration.

They have ice houses.

They're now starting to bottle beer.

And those small companies just couldn't compete with that.

The days of, supplying, you know, barrels of beer to the local taverns kind of had passed by when they started bottling beer.

It made beer more portable.

It made it something that was easier to take home.

And I wonder if it didn't undermine the communal aspect of consuming beer in a tavern after work.

In Germany, even today, when you go in and eat somewhere and you eat and then you just sit and talk and they don't rush you out, you have to ask for your check when you're ready to leave.

And, and there's, you know, you sit and you drink a few beers and you and you might spend a couple hours just talking.

And I think that the taverns were probably had that feel a lot more in the late 1800s.

This is just documented that the history of brewing in this area.

They've been doing this since 1837.

So how would you imagine that process has changed over almost 200 years now?

the pro- the basic process has not changed at all in that time.

It's just advancements in equipment, you know?

Just start from the beginning.

The grain is brought into the mill room and milled into the mill.

And it's put into the box.

Once it's all ground in there, it is altered over to the mash tun, where we add hot water and grain together.

And then we let it stay for about an hour, converting all the starches in the grains into sugar.

And then we'll start pumping it over to the, brew kettle.

And once that water level gets down so far, we'll start adding additional water on to top of the grain bed so that it washes off the remainder of the sugar.

Once the brew kettle’s filled, we, get it up to boil.

Boil it for an hour, add or hops in their specific times, be it, at the beginning of the boil, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, and at the end of the boil.

Once it's done boiling, we'll whirlpool it to get all the hops and stuff to settle out to the center.

Then we'll let it sit, rest to settle out.

Then we'll transfer it over, through the heat exchanger, which cools it down and into the fermenter.

Where we add the yeast.

Then it will sit there for a week to two weeks, fermenting.

And then we'll transfer it to the bright tanks, and then we'll either package it into, kegs, bottles or cans.

As you get into the later part of the 1800s.

Transportation railroad expands.

So by the late 1800s, everybody's regional beer is now starting to spread out.

With Evansville's location on the river, Evansville's really a distribution hub for many products.

And I think it's just natural that beer was also one of those products, as the two major brewers began to bottle and were able to transport their product, and they could send Evansville beer, along with Evansville furniture, to distant markets.

All through the south, there weren't as many brewers as there were in the North or in the Midwest.

So there was a need.

And, you know, Evansville made really good beer that was very well renowned.

Evansville's beers mostly was the Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and then Tennessee and Arkansas areas.

They were expanding into Georgia and farther south into, you know, northern Alabama and places like that.

Up until they closed for prohibition.

Prohibition was something that came out in around 1918.

Some states went a little sooner.

Indiana was 1918, but officially went nationwide in 1920.

Prohibition was sold as something that was morally right, but there was also, a forced assimilation component to it.

And as we approached World War I and got into World War I, if we could get these Germans to be more American and get out of their beer gardens, in their in their saloons and quit drinking so much beer, they would be better Americans if we could get these Italians to quit drinking wine and having alcohol as an integral part of their daily life, they'd be better.

American prohibition wanted to kill the brewing industry and Americanize these newly arrived immigrants, and I think it did a fair job of killing it for a time.

When prohibition comes in, all of a sudden, everything that they're doing halts.

The two breweries, they try to do substitutes.

So you've got these these big factories that are that are set up to, to make a product and put it in a bottle.

So they shifted.

Sterling did all entire series of soft drinks, ketchup, all kinds of sauces.

They're still in the beer bottles.

They're just putting new labels on them.

Cooks made, a near beer.

They I think they most of them made some sort of nonalcoholic cereal beverage.

They usually called it.

They tried kind of the near beer.

they did the Cooks Goldblume.

The market wasn't there for that eventually.

Mostly what Cooks ends up doing is they use the refrigeration at their plant.

Cooks, becomes like the major supplier of ice for Evansville.

Then during the depression, some of the other companies around America made things like malted milk.

A lot of people made, malt syrup, which could be conveniently used to make homebrew in your house.

I would suspect if you were buying malt extract, you might be using that to brew your own beer at home.

So while you weren't drinking Cooke's beer during prohibition, if you were making homebrew and using cooked malt extract, you would have something that would be pretty similar to what you remembered from before prohibition.

They produced a lot of other kinds of products to try to fill the void, but, you know, people don't get as excited about ginger ale or ketchup as they do beer.

So I always think that it was probably not near as profitable and really a hard time for those industries.

And not just the two breweries, but all the companies that fit into that.

Some people have said that as many as one out of five people in America were employed somehow related to the brewing industry, whether they were the people who brewed the beer, the owners of the place, the people that took care of the horses that pulled the wagons, people that made the wagons.

You're talking the bottling companies.

Bernardin did bottle caps for the breweries for years.

That was one of their major businesses, people that that grew the, the hops or the malt or helped them obtain the water or the ice.

All that demand, all dropped.

Suddenly it just spreads out backwards.

Then from the breweries down the economic chain there.

Because what happens there as you get ten years into prohibition, the depression hits.

And there are people who would argue that the Great Depression was caused by prohibition.

And also organized crime came out of prohibition.

I mean, organized crime wasn't born out of prohibition, but it was made much, much more profitable because of prohibition.

When you take something that people do on a daily basis and criminalize it overnight, you're going to open up massive opportunities for illegal profits to be made.

When Indiana became dry, Kentucky was still wet for another year.

The stuff was flying back and forth across the river.

The interurban railroad that went from Evansville, down through there crossed over to Henderson, they said early on there, the, sat Friday, Saturday night, the last train trip, back from Kentucky was the booze run back to Evansville that, everybody had gone over and it had gotten there still legal.

Booze brought it over.

You could bring alcohol into Evansville for personal consumption.

How much did you need for personal consumption?

Was the question.

Now, former Mayor Charles Heilman was arrested with ten gallons of whiskey in the trunk of his car, and he claimed that it was for personal consumption.

After World War I, the Coast Guard, had a boat, actually in Evansville, and it was supposed to be partly for navigation and flood relief and stuff.

But actually one of the main reasons that was docked down on the river here at Evansville, it was supposed to be to intercept booze coming across the river.

The booze boat that was bought to patrol the river, was was used to actually smuggle alcohol.

Edgar Schmitt, the chief of police was arrested.

It was running booze and selling confiscated liquor out of the basement of the city hall.

And then, of course, then locally.

Here.

Then you had stills and stuff.

Speakeasies popped up.

The same thing was everywhere else in the country.

Evansville was was not dry during prohibition.

And then, obviously, in 1933, they came back.

When prohibition did end, America was ready for a beer.

One of the coolest pictures is FDR getting a delivery from the Clydesdales, formally saying prohibition over like so.

You know that they made that beer when it was technically illegal.

The two main breweries in Evansville then have to first get all their equipment back in operating order.

It's set to some degree empty for at least ten years.

They have to get their federal permits, their excise tax stamps to become official.

And then you have to get your workers back.

In 1933, the depression, you know, is actually hitting Evansville hard.

So getting workers is not the hard problem.

Cooks is able to open first by, let's see, I guess it was summer of 1933.

Cooks came out in a pretty good spot because they had kept their brewery ready to go.

So they were almost a turnkey operation.

Sterling, who had been doing more, non beer production there.

It took them a little bit longer there.

It wasn't until the end of 1933 that Sterling really got back into the beer business.

Those two were big enough that they managed to survive through the dark years of prohibition.

Most of the other breweries did not survive at that point.

Obviously, 13 years of not selling beer would kill any business.

Some of them adapted, some just stayed closed and reopened, some close and never opened again.

Before prohibition, there were 1200 breweries in the United States after prohibition, and there were only 300.

So by 1934, both of the Evansville breweries are back really into production, and probably they're even larger, even with the depression than what they were when prohibition kicked in.

You're talking people now, 15 plus years without beer trying to make up.

When they came out, they had immense marketing and immense production going on because of this huge demand, Sterling expanded into southern Illinois and purchased a brewery over in Freeport.

They also purchased one in Pennsylvania, and Cooks was doing extremely well.

They reestablished all of their distribution centers in the South and really hit the market hard.

And then in the 1930s, the Kent brewery came in and was a new brewery that started.

Mr. Vic Kent was a Cooper who made beer kegs.

They decided that they would brew their own beer themselves because, they said they were tired of drinking the swill that the larger brewers were making.

I can do better than that.

And they lasted for a couple of years, about 15 years or so.

I think it went out in the 40s.

When ask when they when he why they closed it was there was a quote in a newspaper that says, well, we didn't sell enough beer like so after prohibition, it was really the two major brewers in Evansville, and then a third brewer that was around for a little while, but Cooks and Sterling were the ones left standing.

There was still a lot of competition at one time, just after prohibition, there was a beer war in Evansville, and they were actually selling beer just for the tax, $0.50 a half barrel.

and they weren't charging for the ingredients.

Of.

So there was a lot of competition between the two breweries, between the Cooks brewery and what became the Sterling Brewery.

Sterling.

That became their their primary name.

The main beer that Cooks was famous for is you come in to the late was Cooks Goldblume.

Both companies as you come into the 1950s are doing fine.

Their markets you know were still strong.

You look at the newspapers through that time period every years kind of, you know, another record year of business.

And in 1915 Anton Hulman from Terre Haute, notably known for the ownership of the Indianapolis 500, he buys out the Cook company.

He becomes the major stockholder.

He owned a lot of different, different entities.

He was talked into buying this brewery because they had some distilling industries.

They had some other things as well.

When he buys the company out, the company’s in the progress of a major expansion, they spent more than $1 million on a new building.

Their sales continue to increase and things are looking really bright.

And what happens there is, in 1955, the, the Brewers went on strike.

They were wanting equal pay with Sterling Brewers.

Over the years, Sterling made a nickel an hour more for their workers.

They were paid a nickel an hour or more.

When the Cooks people wanted to go on strike and make the wages match their their competition across the street.

Tony Hulman, he was like, don't go on strike because I'll close the brewery and they're like, no, we're going to go on strike.

They make a nickel an hour more than we do.

We want equal pay.

They all went on strike and then he closed the brewery.

And that was 1955.

The strike is really not that long.

And at the end, the brewing people there were actually, you know, okay, you can bring this in over a number of years.

I mean, they kind of, you know, or more conciliatory.

So you wonder if it's there's another reason besides the strike and, you know, a demand for more wages.

Basically, they bottled up the rest of the stuff over the next year or so.

And then the brewery, went out of business officially in 57, and the building just sits empty for several years.

Number of groups come in, try to revive the company.

They try to form new companies.

When you get to the early 1960s, the city of Evansville, Vanderburgh County are now looking at that area for a new city county government center.

And eventually Tony Hulman sells the property to the city in the county.

So they end up closing and selling to the city.

I think once they kind of earmarked that property for the Civic Center, they almost strong armed all about.

They tore down that.

They tore down the amazing assumption Catholic Church that was there as well.

But in the 1960s, you know, in the name of urban renewal, there were a lot of great old buildings torn down in downtown Evansville at that time.

They tore down the Cook's Brewery, they tore down an old Assumption Cathedral, and they built the Denton Federal Building, named for Winfield K Denton.

Our longtime congressman.

And they built the Civic Center across the street, where the Cook's Brewery had been located.

And they also tore down the old CNEI train depot that was the USO during World War Two.

The columns from that building are the columns of the Four Freedoms Monument.

Where that was basically they built the Evansville Vandenburgh School Corporation downtown office.

That whole government complex was built in the late 60s and occupies the area where the whole Cook's brewing empire once stood.

It had been vacant for eight years at that point when they, when they tore it down, was one of the largest, largest, breweries built in this part of the country at its time.

And that was its end.

Like I said, look in there now, you would hardly recognize what the building used to look like.

I did hear where when they tore it down, they had to salvage out the fermentation tanks that they had.

And they were these huge copper ones.

In fact, if you go by where the Sterling Brewery is, there's still one on top of one of the buildings, and they're quite large.

They actually had a bust out the concrete brick walls to get them out.

And they I think they scrapped them and sent them overseas.

Somewhere.

All the brewing equipment is shipped to Columbia, South America, to a brewery there.

And so it could still be in existence.

We're here at the corner of Main Street and seventh Street, Martin Luther King Boulevard, right here on the corner.

There would have been, the Cook Brewing Company.

It pretty much spanned this entire block.

there was an iconic, tower, some offices that build a limestone.

They did have a few offices fronting Main Street.

The original incantation of, the brewing company occupied just a half block touching Sycamore.

But over the years, it expanded to be most of this block.

If you can imagine this block.

We had the Cook Brewing Company here occupying pretty much the whole half of this block.

just one more block up where the post offices, there was a, Assumption Catholic Church.

It was a gorgeous cathedral, and there was a school tied to it.

But anyway, along this block, you had the limestone offices.

It was a really neat building.

and then the remainder of the block was a really tall, 4 or 5 story brick section that most people would identify with the Cook Brewing Company.

and again, all this stuff was just demolished and razed when they built the Civic Center.

So, a quick stop between the old Cook's Brewery and the old Sterling Brewery to take a look at this building.

the Brucken’s building, which is the corner of Ingle and fourth Street.

tell us what was here originally, this building served as the Evansville Brewing Company.

It was a middle sized brewing company.

it actually joined forces with the Fulton Avenue and the Hartmetz brewery on West Heights to compete with cook.

Cook was such a big player in the game that they joined forces in 1894 to form the Evansville Brewing Association.

this then became the Evansville branch of the Evansville Brewing Association.

it was probably the newest and smaller of the operations, so they ended up closing it by about 1920.

In about 1920s, it was already a car dealership.

Dixie Motors.

Brucken’s had actually been here for probably almost 40, 50 years.

They just recently closed, but, I've not been able to confirm it 100%.

But the tan building at the end, I'm almost certain, is old Icehouse for the brewing company.

So noisy.

Corner of Fulton and the Lloyd Expressway here, right?

Yep.

this was Sterling.

Yeah, the Fulton Avenue Brewing Company originally it was called.

Established roots here in the 1880s.

they built the newer office, on this block here, really long, narrow, with a passageway for the horses.

about 1890, there was an incident, and they ended up rebuilding the stock house.

Everyone recalls it was on the corner here.

they had a it was an iconic brick building, with a lot of limestone details on it.

but everyone remembers that.

And, most people remember there was actually a, they had a railroad spur that came in again for distribution and, that was right there along the highway.

I think they end up using it for semis by the end, but that was where they would distribute the beer, on this block as well.

We had a five story building when it merged with the Evansville Brewing Company.

We talked about and the, one on on Hartmetz Brewery up in West Heights.

They became the Evansville Brewing Association, 1907.

They built a really amazing offices right on the other side there about where that Lloyd Expressway sign is.

There's a really neat building that was there, when they built the Pennsylvania Expressway.

That was the forerunner for the, Lloyd Expressway.

they widen the road, tore it down, it was at that time that they built the offices over here, the One Life Church.

It's a green brick building.

that was the Sterling offices for a short while, and it's still standing.

behind us here in the 1910s, they ended up building the, bottling company.

Obviously.

Further expansion.

this is a big bottling house.

it sat vacant for quite a while.

SSNC is in there right now, a, banking operation.

company.

The, insurance firm over there.

It was actually a garage at one point.

they tore down a couple other dry grain, grain storage and dry drying grain buildings.

a lot of it had limestone details.

You can see the arched windows on there, and it looks pretty new and modern, but it is kind of neat that they saved it.

and then it will go over there a little bit farther.

You can see one of the fermentation tanks.

They kept.

it was sitting on a corner for a long time, a damaged building on top of copper.

And, just as a kind of homage to the Sterling they looks, I think it put on top of buildings so people can see it's kind of any kind of neat throwback.

Now, what's back there is also significant, isn't it?

Back, straight in the opposite direction from across the street from us here.

Sure.

catty corner from the Fulton Avenue, Brewing Company, the original.

The grandfather of them all.

The old brewing company was here.

And actually, Cook Brewing had its ties to it as well, but, Oh.

Brewery.

The old brewery, this, as it was nicknamed Back when I was in college, there was a program in the city of Evansville for Welcome Wagon and local producers.

whatever they made.

Welcome wagon.

People would put this stuff in a basket delivered to their house.

So they had a list of everybody that moved to town.

Sterling would pay some kind of fee and get a copy of this list.

They would give it to me weekly, and then I would go to their brew house and pull out as many cases as I needed to match the list, and I'd go to their houses and knock on the door, introduce myself as a representative of Sterling Brewery, and give him a free case of returnable bottles.

Of course, people think like the program Welcome Wagon number one, because they got products that were made locally.

But man, when you gave them a case of beer, they were pretty ecstatic.

I don't think they'd ever had anybody give them a case of beer at their house.

A few months ago, I was somewhere and met some people at an event and got introduced to them, told my name, and they said, oh my gosh, did you ever work for Sterling Beer?

I said, oh, sure I did back in the late 60s, early 70s.

And they said, well, you came to my house back in 1969 and gave me a case of beer.

And I still have your card at home in a in a scrapbook.

And that was the most, rewarding thing that ever happened to me.

A guy knocked on my door and gave me a case of beer.

So when cook leaves or goes out of business, Sterling's the last one standing.

What started as the Fulton Avenue Brewery that really started over in the old brewery is the last one left.

Sterling was still doing pretty well.

They had lost their local competition, they had taken over that market share.

And of course they were losing a little bit to the national groups, but they were doing well on their own.

They were in the top 35 breweries in far as production.

It was a modern company.

They actually had $1 million, multimillion dollar a year advertising budget.

During the 50s, J. Walter Thompson, the foremost advertising agency in New York City, handled their account.

So they had a very modern regionally focused, professionally done advertising campaign.

Sterling was a regional beer, and they had 15,000 retailers, 130 distributors and over 12 million consumers.

That sterling was their prime beer.

There were five states, Indiana and then down through the south to Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama, I believe we sent beer down as far as Florida, but mainly mainly our biggest market was within 3 or 400 miles of Evansville, roughly in a radius.

At some points I've been, I've heard they were the number one beer in Louisville.

They were definitely the number one beer in Nashville, Tennessee.

The biggest single city market was Louisville.

That's kinda funny cause Fall City was made in Louisville.

That was big here, and Sterling was made here, and it was big in Louisville.

We can understand that.

We shipped stuff in by rail.

We shipped stuff out by rail.

We had trucking departments that transported, over-the-road trucks loaded with with beer product.

It was a big industry.

Sterling paid $40,000 a day in taxes.

That sort of tells you the quantity of beer that they were, moving out the back door.

The most we ever made when I was there was a little over a million barrels one year.

Normally, a good year would be 600,000 a year.

Somewhere.

It was, very large employer, and the city at that time were fairly good in size.

We had four main building, the office building.

Then we had a bottle shop, engineering and maintenance, and then the two, brewhouse.

It was mainly from Portland, ore. To First Avenue Expressway back to, I think, of Indiana Street and that that square.

And it pretty much stayed within those confines.

When you went into the brew house, you smelled this this aroma of the barley and the hops, and it was just a great smell.

If you like the smell of beer, I guess.

So it was a, pretty enjoyable place to work.

One of sterling business philosophies was who, work with your employees, and it was a happy place to work generally.

People enjoyed working there.

They had 300 over 300 employees at one point in the early 50s.

I remember the average time that employees had been working.

There was 15 years.

It wasn't, oh, I got to go into work today.

It was.

They didn't feel that way.

Nice people worked there, and at one time the employees could get beer on their break time.

One of the interesting facts about working in a brewery is that workers have a morning break, a lunch break and an afternoon break.

Well, guess what you could partake of working in a brewery.

You could drink beer at your breaks, provided you could continue doing your job.

You couldn't drink all you wanted.

there was there was, you know, you had to use a little common sense to go along with it, but I worked there for all those years that I don't ever recall seeing anybody that was that could not function.

I don't really recall any problems.

I don't remember fights or anything like that.

Think when the fellas ended their days production, they were allowed to go get a beer after work, just like they were during their 15 minute break during the day, and once in a while, you'd see a wife pull up and go in there and, and get her husband by the shirt or the ear and, tell him it was time for him to come home.

I would say that, it was an accepted practice to drink beer during the day, with people drinking beer at lunch.

it's really surprising compared to the atmosphere today where, you would not drink on your job or you wouldn't, come back to work after maybe you had, a beer at lunch.

it was just an acceptable thing back at that time.

I think the federal controls, worker safety issues, somewhat curtailed that.

I do remember you could still drink a beer after work in the Raskeller which was the, tavern bar type arrangement in the basement of the new executive building.

Now, the Raskeller was really only open to the people that worked on the distribution of the product that drove trucks throughout the city and delivered the product and office employees.

So they were able to go to the Raskeller after work.

My first job there, I ran the Raskellers.

I made sure there was fresh beer every day, and that the place was plain and, acceptable to the staff and distributors that would come into town.

They were welcome to the, to the Raskeller.

Every day after work, the workers would be lined up at the bar partaking of what they had made a month or two earlier.

But it was a nice place to work.

Nice people work there, have good relations with with everybody.

It was just a close knit group of people.

A lot of, teachers and people worked in the summertime there.

It was a great place for summer employment.

They had to increase their staff.

because in the summer, your volume of, beer drinking increases.

A lot of people flowed through that place that were people like coaches, and schoolteachers.

And it was a great summer job.

So I met gobs of people, through the brewery process.

And I still run into those people today, and I run into people today that worked in the bottle shop.

a lot of those guys are old and gone by now, but I still run in the people that worked at the brewery.

Sterling stays around.

They come into that time period, the 60s, where.

Okay, you're bought by an out of town company.

Local brewers were fighting national competition.

Consolidation was a big thing.

The national brewers were becoming bigger, and the small, regional breweries were declining.

So to keep up cost wise and be able to compete, they were having to consolidate their brewing processes to one location and brew multiple labels out of one house.

They tied in with a group called Associated Brewing Company.

Probably 5 or 8 of the top 20 breweries grouped together to form associates out of Detroit.

And then that grew in 68.

Then that group was purchased by Heileman and out of Wisconsin, who got who had another 8 or 10 breweries, and then they took over Sterling.

You continue production, you continued producing your brands.

I think at that time they had become like the eighth largest brewery in the country, and they brewed all kinds of stuff there.

They brewed Sterling, but they also brewed cooks.

They brewed Dreweries they brewed Pfeifers.

They brewed a lot of these labels that G. Heileman had bought up from small breweries, some of them around Indiana.

I think at one time we had some 80 labels of beer that were distributed out here.

They ran that to about 1988 when they realized they didn't need this much brewery capacity.

So they closed the Evansville brewery and kept open the Bellville, Illinois brewery.

At that point, some local investors opened Evansville Brewing Company.

They provided a lot of beer for a lot of different areas.

Kind of reinstitute some local favorites Cook, Sterling, Falls City, Drummond Brothers, Drewery, Bullfrog, and, they've got, old gringo.

There's this whole series of, smaller beers that they're coming up with that they're selling a beer with a chili pepper inside of it.

They had a beer that was organic.

One of the first organic beers in America was made through the contract with Evansville.

They contract brewed for some small breweries that were gaining in popularity and didn't have enough capacity to fill their orders, and they were exporting a number of of brands to different countries, including England and Brazil and Mexico and Argentina and Japan.

As I remember, Drummond's Brothers was really popular in Japan, and my understanding is that there was a large shipment of beer that was going to Japan of Drummond Brothers.

They had become the number two beer over in Japan.

They were doing extremely well, but a large shipment had defective seals and the beer had leaked and destroyed an entire batch, as far as I know.

And I and I say, this is all hearsay on my part, is that when they put it in the in the cargo hold of that ship, it got so hot down there, the, came, started exploding.

And this is what caused the whole thing, because when you do that in the beer, the beer sours in tends to affect other ones.

And the more it explodes, the more of the sour gets, the more it's just a ball.

Just a ball effect.

So there was a very large shipment that was lost.

And around that time they, were having financial troubles.

It's pretty difficult to compete against Miller and Anheuser-Busch and some of the large companies that have an unlimited amount of money to to invest in distribution and advertising.

And that was sort of, I think the tipping point.

and the brewery closed.

Interestingly, they won a gold medal award for their Drummond Brothers beer at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver right after they closed the brewery.

Sterling, to the very end, invested heavily in their equipment.

They had all types of modern warehouse equipment.

So Sterling, it just was this time, I guess breweries closed down everywhere like that.

the end of the 20th century, Sterling closes and then the last of the major breweries is gone.

It wasn't just Evansville, I think when Sterling closed.

I think that was the last, major brewery in the state of Indiana.

Of course we had we all had our own opinion and nobody liked it, of course.

and it was kind of a sad time, but but we we kind of saw the handwriting on the wall that, you know, you start making a little bit less here and a little bit less there and a little bit less here.

And you knew fairly well what was going to happen, but you didn't want to face the fact that it was when they did closed the rights to the all those labels went to the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, which was one of the final family owned small breweries left.

So they started brewing Sterling in Pittsburgh.

They started brewing Drury's and Cook's in Pittsburgh.

And then when Pittsburgh got sold out to the to a Russian entity then they end up closing the brewery, several people have, reestablished some of those old brands now.

So sterling is being made again, and now you can buy that Schnucks.

So you've got this huge factory on the corner of one of the busiest intersections in Evansville that sits right next to the road.

Because it was built long before it was a busy intersection.

And the question is, what do you do with it?

As somebody who loved that building, I still have a hard time, thinking that it's not there because it was so massive and so dominant.

And when you'd sit at the stoplight on the Lloyd Expressway, I'd.

I'd go look at the architecture and study the, the, the architecture of the building.

But like so many things, there wasn't a use for it anymore.

And, and it ended up being torn down and we lost the last operating brewery building in Evansville.

The building that held the bottling plant is still there and has been repurposed.

You know, one of the brewing kettles is up on top of the building with that great old brick massive building that sat on the corner was unfortunately torn down, gosh, almost 20 years ago now.

It was the last of the big breweries in Indiana.

I moved to Evansville in late 2003.

Like craft beer, drink, craft beer.

So that was one of the first things that I sought out.

And one of the great things that was a draw for me to even move to Evansville was that there was a microbrewery here in town.

Tuoni’s.

But I around the time when Evansville Brewing shut down, it was just kind of the beginning of the real resurgence in microbrew.

Over the last several decades, microbreweries have come back into play.

All over the state.

I know there are a lot of up and coming breweries that have regional, regional plus, reach in their products.

Just here in Evansville, I think we have 4 or 5 breweries right now.

I know we have a Tin Man, Carsons, and there's a new one.

maidens.

Turoni’s has been brewing craft beer longer than anybody in Evansville.

It got started in 1996, and the owner, Jerry Turner, had shown interest in being the first microbrewery in Evansville.

Jerry and his son, Tom went to Colorado and they went to a brew festival, and they were testing craft beers and stuff.

And he was just amazed at, you know, the quality of beers that were out there.

And he wanted to bring that to Turoni’s.

He was always on a leading edge, trying to be on the leading edge, trying to do things first, better.

You know, the art of making microbrews has just exploded in the last few decades.

You know, people have been making small batches of beer like that for years, but they found out that, you know, there were people that were still looking for specific kinds of, you know, whether it was a flavor, whether it was a certain taste.

They craft beer has a different taste.

And I think the millennials or whoever are wanting to taste something different than a mellow, almost watered down beer.

I think consumers want options.

and to be honest, the mass producers of beer, didn't produce a lot of different options.

So you started seeing things like Sam Adams, and there's a lot of these small time local breweries that have started up.

Many of those brews have done really good work and make some really great beers that are letting people expand their taste.

And people are not willing to settle for an average, bland national beer.

They want something that's got a lot more interest in it.

People that like beer, like good beer, people that want to drink just 1 or 2 beers while they have a nice discussion.

Kind of like the old days at At the Corner Tavern.

often want something that's that's good that that has more flavor.

And I think the Brewers too.

They want to try new things.

It's just over the top.

Amazing to see and what people are trying and what people are marketing and being successful doing.

I remember the first time I even heard of of having pumpkin flavor in beer.

We were at Turoni’s and Jack fry was the brewmaster there, and he had just I tried something and we put pumpkin rinds in when we were brewing it, and we've got this pumpkin ale.

And I thought, who would want pumpkin in their beer?

But now every October, the you can go and see a whole selection of of different ales that have a pumpkin flavor.

People want to drink these different, more robust beers.

And, and they like the IPAs and that I think people just want options and they want something that's got a little more flavor than a Bud Light.

We have certain nights where, you know, we have a Bud Light night or a miller Lite night, but, with the clientele.

But most of the time it's, our beer reigns.

I think it's going to continue to grow.

I don't really see it peaking for quite a few years yet.

I don't think the market is saturated by any means.

Craft beer is still maybe only 13% of the whole beer market in the US.

So as much as you think that there is out there, it's such a small part of it.

Definitely not out of the question.

We can have more breweries, I'd like to have more breweries.

And I've heard there are a couple more in the works that are wanting to open up.

So that's great.

There's people out there that this is what they want and people are going to try to accommodate them.

You know, even if it's a national brewery, we're making very small batches.

That's what people are going to go to flock to see what I think really fuels that is perceived better value.

You sure craft beer costs more because honestly, it's a more expensive beer to produce.

but you get more flavor.

Some of it has more alcohol, some of it promotes more responsible drinking.

Yeah.

Know you're not going to go out and smash a 30 pack to get drunk.

Now you can go out with friends, have a couple of beers.

And in that time frame, you know, two beers, you've metabolized, you know that you've had a good time.