Dayton Beer

Carl Schnell's brewery in Piqua, circa 1900. Source: Piqua Public Library. © 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney The 18th Amendment poised America for Prohibition 100 years ago. But prohibition was old news for Ohio by then. The drive to ban beer and booze swept the state a decade earlier. On Feb. 26, 1908, The Ohio legislature passed the Rose Law , introduced by Ohio Sen. Isaiah Rose (1843-1916.) The Republican from Marietta was a farmer, a Civil War veteran and the great-great-great grandfather of singer Kelly Clarkson . More to the point, he was a champion of the temperance movement, and his namesake bill allowed voters to petition their counties for special elections to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages. In the ensuing months a majority of Ohio counties voted to go “dry.” Dayton Daily News , April 29, 1909, page 3 Tabulations showed rural voters tended to favor going dry while city-dwellers tended to want to stay “wet.” For example, a large urban core in Dayton kept ...

Notre Dame burning on April 15. Photo: LeLaisserPasserA38 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) The flames that erupted through the roof of the majestic Notre Dame de Paris last week gave us a shocking reminder of the fragile nature of history. Architecture is a part of the record of our existence on earth. Old buildings tell us what times were like in our communities and around the world before we came. They're like postcards from the past. When it comes to breweries, a lot of those postcards are missing. When I researched Dayton Beer: A History of Brewing in the Miami Valley , I wanted to locate as many original breweries as I could. Dayton itself had so many I had to make a map to help me keep track of them. Map of old Dayton breweries. Composite graphic by Timothy R. Gaffney, with 1875 and 1869 maps. But when I went looking for them, I found very few still standing. In most cases, newer buildings, parks or parking lots had replace...

A black hole. Event Horizon Telescope image, courtesy National Science Foundation. © 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney Astronomers made headlines last week when they released the first-ever picture of a black hole —an unimaginably weird place with a gravitational field so strong nothing that falls into it can escape—not even light. What does that have to do with beer? Um, well, nothing. But, strangely enough, it has a lot to do with my book. One way to think of a black hole and its gravitational field is as a hole in the bottom of a funnel-shaped well—a gravity well . “Gravity well” was a term I learned as a teen when I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Promise of Space —a non-fiction book the great science fiction writer published in 1968 as a kind of companion to his novel (and the film) 2001: A Space Odyssey . Every planet, moon and chunk of rock has its own “gravity well,” where its gravitational field can influence other objects. The concept popped back into my mind in 2017 ...

Infographic: "The Illusion of Choice," by Jeff Desjardins, visualcapitalist.com. © Copyright 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney A 2016 infographic titled “ The Illusion of Choice ,” by Jeff Desjardins at the Visual Capitalist , shows how a handful of megabrewers own most of the myriad brands you find on supermarket shelves. In my research for Dayton Beer , I learned this trend was much older and deeper than I’d ever considered, and I saw how it transformed the brewing scene in the Miami Valley. Well before Prohibition smashed the brewing industry a century ago, the trend in the beer business was one of mergers and takeovers. For example, by the late 19th century, English investment groups were on the hunt for hometown American breweries they could buy up and consolidate for greater profits. That’s how Springfield’s two local breweries became one company, the Springfield Breweries, in 1890. The turn of the 20th Century found local brewers in cities natio...

An 1878 Puck cartoon pokes fun at prohibition politics in Ohio. Source: Library of Congress © Copyright 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney Annie Wittenmeyer had high hopes for Dayton in the first week of April, 1874. After a month of activism, temperance crusaders here had a chance of seeing a pro-temperance candidate become the Gem City’s next mayor. What she didn't want to see was the ascent of a type of person she loathed—a former beer brewer and a saloonist—and one of German heritage, no less. The “whiskey candidate,” she called him. I touch on Dayton's mayoral election of 1874 in my upcoming book  Dayton Beer . But here are a few details and graphics I just couldn't squeeze into my history of brewing in the Miami Valley. Annie Wittenmeyer. Source: History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade . Wittenmeyer was a native Ohioan who became a national leader of the temperance movement. Born Sarah Ann (“Annie”) Turner (1827-1900) on the Ohi...