Author taps local tales in frothy talk

MARIA STEIN - The original Wooden Shoe Brewing company in the mid-1930s was a booming outfit, cranking out tens of thousands of barrels of beer and generating enough taxes to run the entire town of Minster, according to author Timothy Gaffney.

The brewery also has a link to the modern Samuel Adams beer, he said.

Gaffney, the man behind "Dayton Beer: A History of Brewing in the Miami Valley," cracked open a gripping overview of the area's first breweries during his "History in a Pint" tour stop at Maria Stein's Moeller Brew Barn, which is spotlighted in the new book.

"If you're going to be talking about brewing history, shouldn't you do it someplace where you can have a beer while we're talking?" Gaffney said about his decision to speak at brewpubs and taphouses.

The former Dayton Daily News reporter sifted through countless records held by libraries, historical societies, county offices and other databases to piece together a chronicle of breweries stretching from Middletown to Maria Stein.

After agriculture, brewing was one of the first major industries in the Miami Valley, Gaffney said.

"Right after (agriculture) came the gristmills because they were essential for any kind of way for farmers to sell their (products)," he said. "With the gristmills came distilleries because that's what you did if you had an excess grain - you turned it into whiskey so you could ship it and sell it."

Right along with distilleries came breweries.

Zeroing in on Auglaize and Mercer counties, Gaffney said the creation of the Miami-Erie Canal drove the settlements of Minster and New Bremen. Grand Lake was dug out between 1837-1845 to in essence serve as a giant water tower for the canal, Gaffney noted.

"This was the high ground for the canal and all the water flowed south from here down the canal to Cincinnati or north downhill to Toledo," Gaffney said. "That canal was really what brought a lot of the settlement and drove, I think, the pattern of development up in this region."

Carved out of primeval forrest, Stallostown - named after German immigrant Francis Joseph Stallo - was founded in 1833 by a group of about 100 German settlers, Gaffney said.

The town a few years later was renamed Minster and built up around St. Augustine Catholic Church.

Breweries in the 18th century in Ohio came and went, but the Star Brewery in Minster proved to be a consistent, solid operation.

Franz Lange in 1869 built the brewery for $40,000, the equivalent of $1 million today. By 1880 he had made $15,000 in improvements. He was the first in the area to produce lager, a lighter, crisper beer brewed to strict standards. It was a considerable upgrade to the common beer or ale that tended to vary in quality and taste, Gaffney said.

Instead of taking over the brewery, Lange's sons moved to Piqua to brew by themselves. That's when the Steineman brothers stepped in and purchased the brewery from Lange, Gaffney continued.

The business continued to thrive underneath the brothers, so much so that they were able to immediately rebuild the brewery after it burned to the ground in 1880, he said.

The brewery was incorporated in 1890 and saw many upgrades, including the introduction of a refrigeration system, bottling line and ice-making plant, Gaffney pointed out. Running more efficiently, the brewery was pumping out up to 7,000 barrels of beer each year.

Star Brewery continued to prosper through the years, enduring both Prohibition and the Great Depression.

"Prohibition just killed most of the local breweries," Gaffney said.

Amazingly, Star Brewery survived Prohibition and was modernized to the tune of $200,000 once Prohibition was lifted, according to Gaffney. Among the upgrades was a rathskeller.

"This is really the best example I found in my research in the Dayton area of this traditional German-style beerhall where it wasn't just a place to go drink beer, it was a place to … socialize," Gaffney enthused.

Star Brewery, Gaffney said, was flourishing, shipping its flagship Wooden Shoe beer as far east as New York and as far south as Florida and hitting a record of 135,000 barrels of beer in 1935.

Reading from a Minster Post article, Gaffney said, "The village clerk that year said Wooden Shoe's beer taxes and liquor permit fees covered all of Minster's operation expenses from 1935 through 1937."

The brewery changed its name to Wooden Shoe Brewing in 1939, Gaffney said.

However, the tide would soon turn for the brewery.

Some breweries left debilitated from Prohibition were gobbled up by national brands, such as Budweiser, which began to dominate the re-emerging beer market, Gaffney said.

After World War II, breweries faced stiff competition from national brands, and in 1946 Wooden Shoe was bought up by a syndicate and later folded, Gaffney said.

Once Wooden Shoe went bust, its last brewmaster, Charles Koch, returned to his hometown of Cincinnati to work as a chemist.

His son, Jim Koch, took an interest in brewing and set out to launch a craft brewery. While rooting through his father's attic, Jim Koch found an old brew recipe in a trunk, Gaffney said.

The first time Jim Koch followed the recipe, the concoction reportedly took the wallpaper off his wall, Gaffney said.

After a number of modifications, Koch came up with a beer that is now known as Sam Adams, Gaffney said.

Gaffney, though, said he cannot definitely determine that the recipe Koch found in his father's attic - and later used to fashion Sam Adams beer - was for Wooden Shoe beer.

"But … the Boston Beer Co. does have some roots in the Wooden Shoe," he said.

Gaffney's book is available at Amazon.com. The author also will return to the region to give similar talks at 7 p.m. Nov. 7 at St. Joseph Parish Life Center, Wapakoneta; 6:30 p.m. Nov. 14 at Troy-Miami County Public Library, Troy; and 6:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at Tipp City Public Library, Tipp City.