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.”
Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s
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.
