The Michels Brewery Cave - Part One, History

The Michels brothers, Charles and John, ended up running one of the biggest breweries in LaCrosse Wisconsin a city they ended up in by accident.

Originally from Germantown Pennsylvania the adventurous brothers headed for the California gold fields in 1849.  Their route there went across the isthmus of Panama where John nearly died of fever.

They eventually made it to San Francisco but instead of the hit and miss of gold mining they decided to make their money...and a lot of it...by working as mechanics and builders.

After a few years they returned to the East to help their aging parents, but eventually headed off again, this time with a mind to set themselves up in business in the new city of St. Paul, Minnesota Territory.

They got as far as Lacrosse in the spring of 1857.  But passage up the Mississippi was delayed due to late ice out, and they decided they liked what they saw in LaCrosse.

It is not exactly clear how they went from being builders to being brewers, but it happened.  Like most breweries in LaCrosse they were near the river.  It is unclear what they did for beer storage in their early days but in 1864 they leased a site on the edge of town and excavated a cave that would serve them well for the next twenty years.

Apparently John and Charles helped excavate the cave, faint graffitti that looks very much like their signatures appears next to this rather prominent date marking.

It is an interesting cave, and I was privileged to have an opportunity to examine it in detail.  In fact some features of it warrant an extra post or two.

LaCrosse was a major brewing city.  Not quite a rival to Milwaukee but by any other standard a beer mecca.  The Michels brewery was one of the biggest ones...but is largely forgotten.  They were not the first.  They did not hang on to attain a measure of modern success as did their rival J. Heilemann.  Little remarkable happened in the corporate history.  The Brothers Michel passed away in the early years of the 20th century leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster of Prohibition.  By 1907 they had a big modern brewery and cave storage was a distant memory.

But the cave was put to other uses.

Local papers can't be entirely trusted, prone as they are to a degree of "boosterism", but circa 1908 - perhaps in conjunction with the new brewery being built? - the cave was handed over to a new project.  It was leased by a company that proposed using it to grow celery, cabbages and mushrooms.

A worthy use of the old cave, and one we have encountered elsewhere in our subterranean journeys.  But Prohibition stepped in and changed things here as well.

In 1923 a series of newspaper articles describe the Feds raiding the cave and arresting a certain Frank Kratzer.  Found in the cave were twenty half barrels of low alcohol "near beer" that Kratzer had purchased and then - by methods not described and probably better not imagined - "worked up" to increase the alcohol content.

Kratzer was quickly tried and found guilty, paying a fine and court costs of just under $400.  The beer was publically dumped into the Mississippi river to the delight of the press and likely the discomfort of the local fish population.  The farmer who had leased the cave to Kratzer had also been charged but basically said "How was I supposed to know what he was up to?  He just slid the rent money under my kitchen door every month!".  In Wisconsin Prohibition was never very seriously enforced and this explanation sufficed for an acquital. 

The beer is shown not in the cave but, and this is a nice touch, in a jail cell at the courthouse awaiting disposal.


The Michels cave is in excellent condition.  It is about 85 feet in length.  It is on private land and not accessable for uninvited visitors.

More to follow....