Forgotten Brewery Caves - Very Rural Wisconsin

No location on this one.  It's on private property.  

There were many small breweries in early Wisconsin.  Some farmer brewing up a few barrels of beer and tucking them into a little cave or cellar.  The market for these enterprises was also small,  likely just the taverns and farmsteads for ten miles or so around.  They were in no position to compete with the mega breweries when the combination of mechanical refrigeration, national marketing and expanded rail networks came along in the 1880s.  The notion that Prohibition killed off the small breweries is nonsense.  From a peak in the early 1870's, half of them were gone a decade later.  Very few were still around to be finished off by the Volstead Act.

This little venture got going around 1867.  The picture of who owned and/or ran it is obscure, a gentleman named Kobes seems to have been first, then a man named Adam Warm.  When he died circa 1874 his wife ran it a few more years.  With a production of 30 to 50 barrels a year this was one of the smallest breweries in the state.  It was out of business by 1880.

I usually consult period maps to narrow down a location, but in this case despite a good general sense of where it should be I saw nothing useful on the maps.  Google Earth can sometimes also help, but in this case not even the modern day Eye of Sauron could see anything.

So it took an in person trip.  Several passes up and down the road were fruitless.  I'm no slouch at this kind of hunt, and can usually zero in on the combination of road access, hillside, and water source that would make a "good site" for a little brewery.  But this time nothing fit.  No old buildings.  No creek.  Nothing.

Finally, as the hour was getting  late, the low angle of the sun showed me something I had missed....

Tucked in among scrub and weeds there was a cute little brewery cave.

Note the metal door frame.  I doubt this is original, the cave was probably used later for storage.

I did not enter, a couple of quick photos from the side of the road are enough.  I was able to see that there is a small opening in the back that an earlier source identifies as an ice slide.  This won't help the stability of the structure.  That and the scant amount of soil on top makes it a marvel that this one has survived for over 150 years.  Longer in fact than the brewery building which presumably stood where a particularly dense patch of weeds now grows nearby.