The Milwaukee Beer Bottling Company of Eau Claire Wisconsin

Today a local history post that - without some background explanation - will make sense to perhaps .001% of my readers.  I present for consideration the following artifact:

OK, so it is a glass bottle.  Clearly dug up out of the ground and not particularly well cleaned by its lazy finder.  The embossing is cool but where's the mystery here?  Wisconsin loves beer, always has.  And Milwaukee is basically synonymous for good beer.  It all makes sense until I show you the wider view:

Alright, for most of you this still makes plenty of sense.  But a few, a very few of you are now squinting and saying "Wait just a darned minute".

Because that's not a beer bottle.

Nope.  This is a style of soda pop bottle called, after its inventor, a Hutchinson bottle.  It had a spring wire device in the short, stubby neck that held a gasket.  Supposedly the term "Pop" came from the sound what was made when you pushed down on the spring and the pressure  - which had held the gasket in place - was released.  You'd generally pour the contents into a glass as drinking directly with that wire gizmo sticking out the top of the bottle would be unpleasant.

Not a particularly sanitary invention but it replaced various cork and glass stopper devices that were even worse.

"Hutch sodas" were the dominant style from about 1880 to 1910, gradually being replaced from 1905 to 1915 by the "crown top" sodas that were standard until plastic screw caps took over in recent times.

So, did the Milwaukee Beer Bottling Company perversely use a soda style bottle for beer?  Quite unlikely.  Here's what I think to be the real story.

The main business of the enterprise was certainly soda pop.  This article from an Eau Claire newspaper of January 1887 suggests it had been started the year before:

"The Milwaukee Bottling Co., Galloway St., are now importing a two thousand dollar machine to manufacture selzer and all seasonal goods.  Their business in the city has increased so largely during the last season that they find the old machinery inadequate for the growing demand.  Consequently they have shipped away the old machine to Boston, and will have it replaced by the new machine which will arrive here from Boston in a few weeks.  It will be well worthy of a visit when it is set in motion, as many new features will be developed."

The reference to Galloway Street makes this the proper moment to introduce a sketch of the establishment from an 1880's fire insurance map.

You can see Galloway Street in the upper left corner.  Of importance to our story are the railroad siding adjacent to the Milwaukee Beer Bottl'g Co and the platform leading into an area marked Office and Beer.  The actual bottling works and ice house are across an alley.

From other sources it is clear that this company had two product lines.  Yes, they bottled soda pop.  But they were also a bottling agent for one of the big Milwaukee breweries.  In this case the various incarnations of the Falk and the Falk, Jung and Borchart enterprise.

There is a tendency to think that the small breweries of America were done in by Prohibition in 1919.  But the sad fact is that by 1919 at least 75% of them were already gone.  Let's not get overly sentimental, many of them were small outfits that brewed beer in small batches.  And as any home brewer will attest, some batches were great, others not so much.  They only had the advantage of a local market, and perhaps could claim to have a fresher product.

But all this changed in the 1880's.  In the large brewing centers like Milwaukee, St. Paul and St. Louis companies made major capital improvements and brought in more sanitary and scientific technologies.  There were economies of scale even as the incidence of bad batches dropped.  The reputation of their beers rose.  Then they invested in refrigerated rail cars that could bring nice fresh kegs of their product anywhere in the country.  This allowed them to operate chains of brewery owned saloons that only sold their product line.

But for the home market....

It became common for the big breweries to have agencies in mid sized towns.  Beer would come in by rail.  The kegs could be stored on ice for area saloons that were bound to that particular brewery.  And at the same time beer could be drawn off the kegs and bottled for the home market.  Beer style bottles with the main brewery's name and logo would have been employed in most cases.  

It is unusual that the Milwaukee Beer Bottling Company so identified themselves even on their soda bottles.  But it likely suggests where their money was in fact made.  Soda pop is never a big profit center.  But beer can be.  Particularly in the 1880s, a time when the industry was rapidly changing.  Within a few years the healthy little community of small to medium breweries in Eau Claire would be wiped out, with only the Walter's brewery hanging on until Prohibition.