Forgotten Brewery Caves - Ooops!

There is a tendency to think of brewery caves as being very solid structures.  Indeed, the ones carved out of solid rock tend to be effectively indestructible.  Even the lesser examples made from brick vault construction tend to hold up pretty well.  Many of them from the 1870's and earlier are still hanging in there.

But now and then in the course of my research I run across stories of brewery caves that collapsed soon after construction.  Ooops.

Example the first:

This story is from Manitowoc Wisconsin and if memory serves is from 1869.  Since the brewery was only built in 1865 that means the cellars started to collapse after only three years.  It makes you wonder about the quality of construction.  But remarkably enough, the brewery building is still standing!  Maybe it was a different contractor.

Example the second:

The Melms brewery was on Virginia Street in downtown Milwaukee.  It was one of the biggest of the breweries of the post Civil War era but fell on hard times when its founder died young, supposedly after accidentally sitting on a needle and developing an infection.  In its salad days the brewery looked like this:

The same general location today:

The railroad tracks are gone but the general elevation of the land and the composition of stone below and brick above looks right.  The configuration of windows is a bit off though, so this may have been another building in the brewery complex.  

Presumably there are some vaults down under those parking lots but given the bad luck with vault construction on this site it seems unlikely that they'd survive.

The Melms name has been carried on in the form of the new Melms Brewing Company in a suburb of Milwaukee.  It was started by a descendant of old C.T. Melms and is of course worth a visit when in the area.