The Midwestern brewery before Prohibition: Development of an American industrial building type

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the architectural development of the pre-Prohibition American brewery as represented especially in the midwestern cities of Cincinnati and St. Louis. It investigates the brewery as a distinctive type of post-Civil War industrial building, analyzing its characteristic features and considering the circumstances under which it became a common architectural feature in America until national Prohibition. By focusing on Cincinnati and St. Louis, the thesis stresses the importance of those cities and the Midwest to the brewery's development. It also uses those cities' breweries as a representative group of buildings that effectively demonstrate the type's evolution in the United States at large, from its vernacular phase before the Civil War through its professionalization after. Among the factors identified as fundamental to the changing architectural form of the brewery is the adoption in America of German, in place of English, methods of brewing. Interrelationships between German and American brewery designs are discussed, along with their possible meanings, as are the overlapping influences of technological and scientific developments and sheer economic success that helped produce the special forms characteristic of the post-Civil-War American brewery. In exploring the emergence of brewery design as a professional specialization, the study brings to light a neglected group of architects and engineers, often German-born midwesterners, whose works strongly influenced the direction in which breweries developed nationwide. A brief consideration of post-Prohibition brewing developments explains the legitimacy of limiting the study to pre-Prohibition breweries and underscores the special blend of practicality and beauty that made the brewery an important element of the American industrial scene between the 1860s and the 1910s.