Early Iowa Breweries

 

An early Iowa brewery, circa 1850-1860

Here’s a snapshot of Iowa’s early brewing days, pulled from One Hundred Years of Brewing (1901).

Davenport got in early. Mathias Frahm opened the first brewery around 1848 or 1849. After that, things picked up fast. The Pacific Brewery went up in 1853. The Severance Ale Brewery followed. The Eagle Brewery showed up in 1858. Around the same time, the Arsenal Brewery opened its doors. For a while, it felt like everybody in town was brewing something.

After the Civil War, it kept growing. Julius Lehrkind built the Blackhawk Brewery, lost it to a fire, then turned around and built another one.

By the 1890s, things shifted. Bigger operations took over. Smaller breweries faded out. The Zoller Brothers built a new Black Hawk Brewery in 1892, and a lot of the earlier names quietly disappeared.

Brewing wasn’t just about beer. Malting became big business, too. W. H. Decker set up one of the first standalone malt houses in the early 1850s. Fires hit those plants just as often, but they kept rebuilding. By the late 1800s, some of these operations were turning out hundreds of thousands of bushels a year.

Other towns followed the same pattern. Burlington had a brewery going as early as 1849. It shut down during Prohibition, then came back. Same story in a lot of places. Open, close, reopen, repeat.

Dubuque turned into a major player. Mathias Tschirgi got things going there in 1846. Over time, several breweries merged into one big operation—the Dubuque Malting Company. By the 1890s, it was massive. Ten acres. Half a million dollars to build. Hundreds of thousands of barrels in capacity. All lager.

Smaller breweries were scattered all over the state. Iowa City. Keokuk. Sioux City. Some lasted. Some didn’t. A lot of them got knocked out by prohibition laws for years at a time.

That’s really the pattern across Iowa. Fast growth. Fires. Shutdowns. Comebacks. The names changed, the buildings changed, but the cycle stayed the same.