The Union Brewery and Iowa City Beer

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.

Workers inside an oldtime brewery

The beer itself had a reputation. The Iowa City Press wrote in 1899 that the brewery’s Pilsener and Export beers were “distinguished for richness of flavor and exceptional purity,” produced with “absolute genuineness of the ingredients.” That wasn’t advertising copy. That was admiration from people who actually drank the stuff.

 

In 1874, Conrad Graf took over brewing, and eventually the entire operation. He had the vision, and the nerve, and maybe the necessary mild insanity. Because when Iowa passed statewide prohibition in 1884, most breweries rolled over.

 

Not Union.

 

The Des Moines Register saw it coming. “The German element of Iowa City have resolved that the saloon shall not be closed quietly.” That was an understatement. When officers showed up to enforce the law, 150 brewery men marched to the judge’s house. According to the same Register report, “The crowd was not disorderly until confronted, whereupon several officers received blows which sent them reeling.”

 

This was no polite civic disagreement. This was a lager-fueled civil war in microcosm.

 

Cutaway view, showing workers in the malthouse

The Iowa Temperance Herald screamed from the opposite camp: “The breweries are dens of the foreign liquor trade, a menace to the sober governance of this state.” To them, Union Brewery was not a business — it was enemy territory.

 

The legal fallout landed like a brick. Court records show the jury awarded “damages in the sum of $7,000 against Conrad Graf,” which was enough to drown a lesser brewery in debt. But somehow Graf kept going. He paid the mulct tax when the law briefly allowed it, prompting the Iowa City Republican to sigh in print, “Graf has paid the mulct and resumes the manufacture of beer. Whether this is triumph or tragedy depends entirely on the reader.”

 

Triumph, if you asked the neighborhood.

 

Tragedy, if you asked the crusaders.

 

Meanwhile, the beer caves kept everything cold. Those long stone tunnels beneath the streets, the Press-Citizen would later say, “run beneath our streets like the catacombs, still cool long after the beer has stopped flowing.” They were carved by men who intended their lager to sleep in darkness, insulated from whatever moral storms brewed overhead.

 

The 1890s were the high-water mark. Production soared. Ten thousand barrels a year. A hundred cases a day from the bottling line. They bottled ginger ale, soda water, and even liquid gas for fountains. Adaptation was the weapon that kept them alive longer than anyone expected.

 

In 1903, William and Otto Graf took over and rebranded the place as Graf Bros. Brewery. They expanded the bottling works, added storage, opened a Sternewirth room, and even created “Golden Brew,” their bright, clean lager for the new century.

 

For a few years, it seemed like the place might outrun prohibition forever. But Iowa went dry again in 1916–17, years before the federal ban. No loopholes. No mulct. No mercy. Brewing stopped. The kettles were smashed. The building changed hands, and the beer caves became folklore instead of refrigeration.

 

But the building remained. It was listed on the National Register in 1986. A reminder of who built Iowa City and what they drank.

 

Union Brewery didn’t just make beer. It made politics take sides and left behind a story too wild to forget — even when the barrels ran dry.