![]() ![]() “It’s pure, that’s sure,” was its motto.įrom Market and San Carlos streets, where the St. Its longest-lasting competitor was the Eagle Brewing Co., which produced “Old Joe’s Steam Beer,” named for its 1853 founder, Joseph Hartmann. ![]() The flames may have conferred a benefit: Rebuilt along more modern lines, the brewery survived the 1906 quake nearly intact.įredericksburg was hardly the only beer in San Jose. The second unexpected event was the fire of 1902, which destroyed much of the brewery and its biggest tower. No arrests were made, though police believed that a woman was involved and that Planz may have been poisoned before he was lynched. Out on the town one evening, the gregarious Planz was met by several men who strung him up from a pepper tree near Julian Street and the Guadalupe River, his hands bound behind him. The first, in November 1892, was the lynching of a Fredericksburg brewery manager named Henry Planz, 25, who took rooms on Stockton Street, not far from the brewery. While the company stood at the vanguard of San Jose’s German immigration, two incidents marred Fredericksburg’s rise to brewing glory. Fredericksburg beer became well-enough known that customers could order it on draft at the Beer Palace on Clark Street in Chicago. In 1883, Fredericksburg followed, having discovered a way of mechanical refrigeration similar to what we have now. near Truckee, which took advantage of the railroad and the frozen ponds in winter to produce a successful lager in 1876. The first California brewery to do this successfully, the Hertz of the competition, was the Boca Brewing Co. “It was the Avis of lager beer breweries.” “Fredericksburg was the biggest, probably the most important, certainly the one to do the most exporting of its beer,” said Dave Burkhart, the historian for Anchor Brewing Co. The most significant was the Fredericksburg Brewery on the Alameda at Cinnabar Street, where the Avalon apartments stand now. The history of brewing in San Jose is a tale of fire and ice, marked by the evasions of Prohibition, one strange lynching and the eventual loss of a distinctive local taste.Īt the height of the local brewing boom in the 1870s and 1880s, there were seven or eight breweries in San Jose. The quick version? We had one nationally known beer and a variety of other suds that met a sturdy local thirst. has reached a height - more than 3,000 - that hasn’t been seen since the 1870s.īecause I treasure local history, that tally launched me on a quest to learn more about the old breweries in San Jose and Santa Clara. Of all the facts to emerge from Silicon Valley Beer Week (July 25-Aug 2), the most intriguing is this: The number of breweries in the U.S. ![]()
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