While some attribute the invention of hopped malt beer to Jan Primus (John I), a scion of the stock of Burgundy princes, who lived about the year 1251, others ascribe it to Jean Sans Peur (1371-1419), otherwise known as Ganbrivius. A corruption of either name may plausibly be shown to have resulted in the present name of the King of Beer, viz., Gambrinus, whom we are accustomed to see represented in the habit of a knight of the middle ages, with the occasional addition of a crown. Popular imagination, it seems, attached so much importance to beer that in according the honor of its invention, it could not be satisfied with anything less than a king; just as the Egyptians, in remote antiquity, ascribed the invention of their barley-drink to their benevolent god Osiris, while the ancient Germans conceived of a brew-house in Walhalla, under the supervision of a presiding deity. As a bit of amusing anachronism, it may be mentioned that there is a poetical apotheosis of Gambrinus, which elevates that personage to the dignity of a heathen god, alongside of Bacchus.
This slight digression from our subject, although showing how much mystery has at all times clouded the origin and the originator of beer, may not be regarded by our readers as a sufficient excuse for our inability to supply the needed information; but, much as we may regret this, we cannot help it. According to the testimony of the late Mr. Frederick Lauer, who himself brewed lager-beer in 1844, the honor of having first brewed the famous drink of to-day, belongs to one Wagner, of whom it is said, that, shortly after his arrival in America, in 1842, he set up a lager-beer brewery in a small building situated in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Lauer enjoyed the reputation of a walking encyclopedia of American brewing; as a matter of fact, he took a prominent part in organizing the National Brewers’ Association and bringing about concerted action by the brewers in all matters relating to their trade, and kept himself well posted in all that concerned his colleagues. In 1885, a few years after his demise, the United States Brewers’ Association erected a monument to his memory in a public square of Reading, Pa., the city in which he had spent the greater part of his life. If lager-beer had been introduced before the date here given, Lauer certainly would have known it.
We may take it for granted, then, on Lauer’s authority, that lager-beer was introduced in 1842. Within six years from that date, German immigration began to assume unprecedented proportions; the hospitable shores of our country became the refuge of a great number of highly educated men, of skilled artisans and comparatively well-to-do tradesmen. The total foreign population increased from 1850 to 1860 at the rate of ninety per cent., and we may infer from the following figures to what extent this great influx of beer-drinkers accelerated the growth of brewing, and helped to increase the production of hops and barley:
| Population | Production of Hops Pounds | Production of Barley Bushels | Number of Brewers | Value of Malt Liquors |
| 1850—23,191,876 | 3,497,029 | 5,167,015 | 431 | $5,728,568 |
| 1860—31,443,321 | 10,991,996 | 15,825,890 | 1,269 | 21,310,933 |
Brewing had its earliest Western outposts on the Ohio and Mississippi and along the shores of Lakes Erie and Michigan. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee—this is probably the order in which brewing spread out westward, closely following the German immigrants from about the middle of the thirties. In the fifties Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Cincinnati had already begun their shipping trade, extending their operations as far South as New Orleans. Even thus early that polyglot city had a few local breweries which supplied their customers with a kind of small beer, a beverage that had to be consumed immediately, lest it spoil between delivery and dinner-time. It is not to be wondered at then, that the New Orleans Germans hailed with delight the first consignments of lager beer that reached them in the year 1851 from Pittsburgh and St. Louis. The late J. Hanno Deiler, for many years professor of the Tulane University and a local historian of enviable reputation, refers to this in his “History of the German Press of New Orleans” in these words:
“As this consignment proved to be the first movement towards a great transformation, leading to a change in the habits of the population, inasmuch as it affected extensive commercial interests, abolishing numerous small businesses, and in their place calling into existence great industrial undertakings, employing millions of dollars as capital, the circumstance of its introduction, unimportant in itself as it may appear, assumes the significance of an epoch in the history of culture that brings the past into direct relation with present conditions, and is consequently entitled to more exhaustive consideration.”
It was at about this time that the old praise of beer was again sounded with great vigor by many reformers. The third American temperance movement (the first being that of the early Colonials and the second the great agitation inaugurated by Rush) had again brought out the old arguments in favor of fermented drinks. Those who signed the pledge between 1810 and 1840 vowed to drink beer and cider only,—and even prohibition, which up to 1855 had been rashly adopted in seventeen States, but as quickly revoked or annulled in all but four of them—stopped short of cider and domestic wine and in many instances of beer. Now that the sobriety of the great mass of German beer-drinkers again challenged such comparisons as we have before quoted from Rush’s and Coxe’s writings, brewing again found many able advocates in the ranks of the foremost reformers.
Great as must have been the moral effect of these temperance preachments, they could not, nor did they, affect the consumption of beer which was then and really remained confined to the Germans until after the enactment of the revenue law. Even so, however, the territorial expansion of brewing within the decade preceding the Civil War was truly wonderful. In 1863 there were 2,004 breweries in operation, distributed over 31 States and Territories, and producing over two million barrels of beer; a great part of which quantity was retailed by the brewers themselves.
Then, as now, New York stood at the head of the list in point of production, followed, in the order given, by Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Iowa, Connecticut, Virginia, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Kansas, District of Columbia, etc. Brewing was then still carried on in Maine and Vermont, and breweries existed even in Utah and New Mexico.