George T. Maginnis - Seattle
The history of the Bellingham Bay Brewery (3-B) began when Leopold F. Schmidt, president and owner of the Capital Brewing Company of Tumwater, (soon to become the Olympia Brewing Company), chose the site for the company's newest brewery. He selected the city of Whatcom as the site for his new plant as it was ideally located on the northern end of Puget Sound, in the northwest corner of Washington State. In 1902 Whatcom, the quality of brewing water was still as much an issue for Schmidt's 3-B as it was in 1885 as the town used Lake Whatcom for its primary water source. This lake water was rejected as lacking in purity. Instead the 3-B drilled private wells and established a waterworks on its property "at an expenditure of $8,000" according to a newspaper account. The brewery was located on North Elk street. The Bellingham Bay Brewery served a largely local market but 3-B also shipped its "Pale Export" to markets on the Pacific coast, Alaska and Canada. The Alaska market even had its own brand called "Alaska Special Brew". On January 7, 1910, Schmidt announced that he had leased the brewery and ice plant to Pierre J. Andrae and Edward L. Stowe. Shortly before the Statewide Prohibition vote, Leopold Schmidt passed away; he spent his last days at his Leopold Hotel in Bellingham, dying on September 24, 1914, without having to witness the destruction of his brewery business.
History developed in association with Gary Flynn - Website: www.brewerygems.com
Seattle Brewing & Malting - Seattle
Andrew Hemrich & John Kopp began their Seattle brewery in early 1883. From steam beer to lager, the plant saw improvements in brewing, and plant expansion, that eventually became the Bay View Brewing Co. Then in late 1892, plans were made for the Bay View plant to merge with two others to form the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company. This "syndicate" was a consolidation (1892) of three plants - the Bay View, founded in 1883; Claussen-Sweeny, established that same year; and Albert Braun Brewing Company, established in 1890. A brand of beer was then needed to identify the new company's product, and the name of the mountain that dominated the southern view was chosen. On January 10, 1893, "Rainier" was adopted as one of the brands for the new firm, and soon became their flagship mark. In 1904, Georgetown incorporated a “company town” safeguarding the business interests of its brewery. The number of taverns and roadhouses doubled, and by 1905 it required 25 horse teams to daily fill the Seattle appetite for "Rainier Beer". Production by then had reached 300,000 barrels per annum. The company now employed more than 300 men and there was room to build worker homes beside the Duwamish River that then still curved through Georgetown. Before Washington State introduced prohibition in 1916, the Georgetown brewery was the largest industrial establishment in the state of Washington.
History developed in association with Gary Flynn - Website: www.brewerygems.com
Port Townsend Brewing Co. - Port Townsend
Local investors George Watkins, Michael Hartman, and Newton W. O'Rear established the company in Sept. 1905, after raising $25,000 in capital stock for the venture. One of the brewery's brand was called "Key City Beer" was built on site of the old Washington Brewery whose location was on the west side of Monroe St. between Water and Washington Sts. In January of 1916 the brewery was closed due to the Prohibition initiative which allowed brewers one year to sell their stock and shut down their plants. The Port Townsend Brewing Co. continued with a line of non-alcoholic beverages and soda waters, but closed in 1918.
History developed in association with Gary Flynn - Website: www.brewerygems.com
Schade Brewing Co. - Spokane
In 1903, Bernhardt Schade was brewmaster at the locally owned and operated New York Brewing Company. Schade left the New York Brewery in 1902 to start his own brewing legacy, the B. Schade Brewing Co. who's plan was to brew a fine lager and out-produce Spokane Brewing and Malting Co. The Schade Brewery building was built in 1903 at a reported cost of $265,000. The brewery was rock-solid, built of reinforced concrete and brick, with walls three and a half feet thick. The B. Schade Brewery produced beer until Prohibition in 1915.
Colfax Brewing Co. - Seattle
The Colfax Brewery began in 1893 by Alvin Schmidt and cost over $5,000 to construct the brewery. The company usually employed around 10 men until the most of the building was destroyed in a fire 3 years later. Alvin Schmidt rebuilt and expanded the Colfax Brewery, reopening in late 1897. In 1902 he sold the company to Henry Schultz who operated the brewery as the Schultz Brewery Company until he sold it to brewmaster Max Hoefle (from Buffalo, NY) in 1911 for $65,000. Hoefle operated it as the Colfax Brewing and Malting Company and the company ran the only ice plant in Colfax which supplied the brewery, all the towns residents as well as shipping ice to other towns in the area. The brewery was forced to close with the start of Prohibition in January 1916 and dumped their last 14,000 gallons of beer into the Palouse River where a large crowd had gathered and observed that fish downstream began jumping in strange patterns.
Star Brewery - Vancouver
The Star Brewery was a successor to one of the earliest brewing enterprises in the Washington Territory. It was originally John Muench's Vancouver Brewery, established in 1856, near Fort Vancouver. A young, immigrant brewer from Germany, Henry Weinhard, joined Muench for about six months and then went across the river to the city of Portland where he started his own brewery, but the settlement was growing too slowly, and he shut down his brewery and returned to Fort Vancouver. In 1894, the company was sold to Louis Gerlinger, who formally changed its name to the Star Brewery, and then three years later to the Star Brewery Company. Gerlinger may have been the one who introduced the "Hop Gold" brand, since its use hasn't been documented before the late 1890s. The brand was in use in Sept. 1898, when 330 cases of "Hop Gold" beer were shipped to their agent in the Philippines, on news that Commodore Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Bay of Manila. In 1904, the Star Brewery Co. was purchased by the Northern Brewery Company, but they continued to refer to the plant as the Star Brewery, and carried on with the popular "Hop Gold Export" beer".
History developed in association with Gary Flynn - Website: www.brewerygems.com