Hometown Breweries and Breweriana - Aurora, Indiana (Part 1 - Crescent Brewing Company)

As noted in an earlier post, I started collecting beer cans at age 11 in my hometown of Aurora, Indiana - back in 1975.  Aurora is an old Ohio River town just about 40 minutes west and down river of Cincinnati, OH.  Although distilling of whiskey was a major industry in SE Indiana, brewing beer in Aurora included just one historical brewery until 2008, when a very small microbrewery began brewing beer in the historic downtown area. 

In the mid 1860s, an Aurora businessman named Thomas Gaff and his brother James decided that a brewery would be a profitable addition to his shipping and distilling empire.  Thus was born Aurora's first brewery--the Aurora Brewing and Malting Company - located on the Ohio River at the bottom of Market Street.  By 1874, the brewery had expanded into a six-story stone and brick building that stretched for 300 ft along Market Street and changed its name to the T & J.W. Gaff Company.  Because of the steep hillside along the river, the entrance to the main offices on Market Street was actually the third floor.  The brewery's primary product was "Aurora Lager Beer" (later shortened to simply "Aurora Beer")

In 1877, Thomas Gaff retired to his mansion "Hillforest" and the brewery reorganized as the Crescent Brewing Company with James W. Gaff as President.  For the next 16 years, even though James Gaff passed away in 1879, the brewery did well and expanded its markets --especially into the southern states of North Carolina and Georgia.  The brewery plant was upgraded with a large engine room, ice-making machines and ice storage rooms, as well as rock-lined cellars for lagering (fermenting at cold temperatures) the beer.  



A postal envelope showing a "factory scene" from the early 1880s.  Although
these printed images often bear no resemblence to reality, the brewery building
is more or less accurate on this one. 

 
In the late 1880s, the brewery attracted the attention of a British brewing syndicate headed by the famous Watney of London brewery and Crescent was bought by the syndicate and merged with the Jung Brewing Co of Cincinnati.  While the sale was great timing for the original owners, the British syndicate soon ran into the fierce Cincinnati brewery competition (Christian Moerlein, Windisch-Mulhauser, and Hauck were much larger operations), just as the U.S. prohibition movement was gaining ground.  Losing money, the syndicate closed the Crescent brewery in 1893, and moved all of their brewing operations to Cincinnati. 



Crescent Brewing Co letterhead from the early 1890s showing a highly
stylized factory scene typical of that era.  (Photo from John Ullrich, long-time
photographer in Aurora)

  The Crescent brewery plant remained empty for at least two decades, and was reportedly reduced to a ruined shell by a fire just before World War I.  The brick walls were torn down, leaving nothing but two partial lagering cellars extending into the hillside under Market Street and a few fragments of brick wall along the steep hillside.  The cellar tunnels can still be seen across the street from the parking lot at Lesko Park.

Over the 27-year history of the Gaff - Crescent brewery, but particularly during the golden years of the 1880s, the brand "Aurora Beer" was promoted with some eye-catching signs and humorous advertising.  One of these signs is on display at the Thomas Gaff mansion "Hill Forest" located in Aurora.  Another beautiful lithographic sign is known to exist in a private collection.  Other promotional items of the era included "Aurora Beer" pocket mirrors and playing cards.  The Gaff family also had a captive audience for selling some of their beer -- the Gaff riverboats that plied the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  The same boats also carried cases of Aurora beer to New Orleans, where it was sent abroad on the high seas for the enjoyment of passengers on the fast clipper ships of the era.  



A collection of humorous trade cards for Aurora Beer.  These likely date to the early 1890s.  Trade cards were often handed out by salesman.  Some were the backs of playing cards (a perfect item for a firm tied into the steamboat business and riverboat gamblers!!).  The cards above were actually found tossed out in a dump in Aurora in the 1970s and aquired later by photographer John Ullrich.



A 2" diameter pocket mirror with a tout for a Aurora Beer on
the back.  I guess the thought was that men would notice the
ad when their lady friends decided to do a little primping!!

Although the Crescent Brewing Company was a relatively large brewery and sent its products far abroad, bottles from the brewery are relatively scarce.  Like many breweries of the 1880s and 1890s, the Crescent brewery used "blob-top" cork stopper capped bottles.  At least two sizes (12 oz and approximately 24 oz) with a simple embossed slug plate label are known.  The 24-oz bottle pictured below dates from the later 1880s or early 1890s.  While the bottle is not in the greatest shape, the story behind the bottle tells a lot about the reach of the Gaff family shipping empire--this bottle was found in 1999 buried in an 1890s vintage trash dump in Brisbane, Australia!  The gentleman who dug the bottle believed it got to Australia aboard an American ship that sailed out of the Port of New Orleans, and likely carrying passengers to Australia during a gold rush in the early 1890s.  Quite a journey for a bottle of beer that was filled in Aurora, Indiana.





Time to call it a night and have a cold one.  Tonights brew is a very special one--the first ever canned beer from Aurora, IN.--a Great Crescent Coconut Porter.  That story will be Part 2 of this blog!  CHEERS!

Iron City- the First Pull Tab Beer Can

A popular story in the beer can collecting world is that an engineer in Dayton, Ohio went on a picnic in 1960 and forgot his churchkey (the now extinct can opener used to punch two holes in the top of a beverage container).  After attempting to open the cans by puncturing them with other tools and even the car bumper and getting a beer shower, the engineer thought there must be a better way to open a beer can.  Upon returning home and thinking about it, that engineer came up a the idea of scoring an aluminum lid to create the shape of the hole and using a small rivet to attach a tab that could be gripped with fingers to pull open the scored portion of the top.



The original tab top - no frills!!




Iron City's 1st Can announcing the arrival of the "snap top" pull tab can



Voila!  The tab top was born and in 1962, Pittsburgh Brewing Company decided to try the new device on its Iron City Beer Cans.  They test marketed the tab top briefly on their regular beer cans and when it turned out to be a hit with the public, printed new cans announcing the "new easy-opening snap top" equpped with the pull tab.  The first tab top had a long narrow opening that flared into a triangular shape at the edge of the lid.  The tab was a simple piece of metal (the edges weren't even rolled!)  that extended a half inch beyond the scored area. 

There were no raised smile beads beside the tab and no text stamped into the lid stating to "Lift tab and Pull"  Later versions included this wording and the smile beads (because apparently there were beer drinkers that (1) could not figure out to pull the tab; and (2) several people actually cut their lips on the plain opening while drinking from the can.  Iron City also came out with a second pull tab can that bragged "No. 1 with the Snap Top"



Iron City was quite proud of their tab top!!



Later versions of the early tab tops also had rolled edges on the tab to prevent cut fingers.  The Oconto can below is an example of a second generation tab top- complete with rolled tab, smile beads, and a "Lift Tab and Pull" statement.  Brewers also had many names for these early tab tops - snap top, pop top, zip tab, zip top, tab top; however beer can collectors use the term "Zip Top" to refer to these early self-opening beer cans.



A fully evolved "zip tab top" - with completely rounded tab
edges--collectors call this type of tab a "U" tab



  



A second generation tab top with opening instructions, slightly rolled tab edges, and smile beads beside the hole--collectors call this type of tab a "D" tab for the shape of the tab

The tab top era was brief, because within a few years, can makers determined that a ring that a finger could be put through was much easier to operate, and the ring tab replaced the simple tab.  From about 1966 to 1976, the ring tab was found on almost all beer cans (a few cheapskate brewers and soda makers continued to use flat top lids that required an opener into the early 1970s).  However, the ring top soon created another problem - litter!  Like cigarette butts, the ring top was small and frequently disposed by simply dropping it on the ground.   Jimmy Buffet even sang about the dangers of the ring tab in his song "Marguaritaville" (..blew out my flip flop, stepped on a pop top..).



An early ring top - note the very small ring opening- these
were soon replaced with larger rings.



In 1975, Falls City Beer tested the first "Sta-tab" - a device we still use today. The Sta-tab is lifted to push the scored area of the lid into the can and then folded back down, staying on the can.  Although the ring tab did not disappear as fast as the early tab top, by 1984, less than 20 years after its appearance, the ring tab was also gone from the beer can.

Ancient shorelines - sedimentary structures of the Belt Supergoup of Montana

Its been a while since I had time to post anything and after several beer can posts, its time to do some geology.  A recent vacation to northwestern Montana gave me the opportunity to observe the exposures of the Belt Supergroup.  Just like the entertainment world, we geologists have our own supergroups, although ours aren't defined by popularity!   First off, a few definitions for my non-geologist readers-- a supergroup is a thick sequence of sedimentary rock that occurs over a very large area and contains numerous formations (a formation is a type of rock that can be recognized and mapped over at least a few miles of horizontal distance) that are all the same general age and part of the same sedimentary sequence (no large gaps in age).




The Garden Wall, Logan Pass, Glacier National Park, MT

 

The Belt Supergroup may actually be more like the mega-rockstar -- the rocks of the Belt cover most of western Montana (including what are popularly called the Rocky Mountains) and much of northern Idaho and eastern Washington.  While this isn't really such a large area, the thickness of the Belt Supergroup is estimated to be as much as 60,000 ft (almost 12 miles)!  Its an estimated thickness because the whole area of the Belt is buckled and faulted into numerous mountain ranges, including the MacDonald range of Glacier National Park, and nowhere is any more than 5,000 vertical feet of the group exposed for viewing.  That means geologists have spent years examining outcrops of rock and measuring/mapping the exposed sections to come up a good description of the Belt Supergroup.





Belt rocks near Logan Pass, Glacier National Park, MT

 
What makes the Belt Supergroup special (besides the fact that Belt rocks make up the incredible scenery of Glacier National Park) is their age.  The Belt Supergroup rocks are dated between 1.4 and 1.5 billion years old - and are among the oldest exposed sedimentary rocks in North America.  To put that age in perspective, the oldest exposed sedimentary rocks (limestone, shale, siltstone. sandstone, and occassionally salt or gypsum) east of the Rocky Mountains are between 500 and 600 million years old - a full 700 to 800 million years younger than the Belt rocks. 






Ripple Marks with mud cracks, near Libby, MT

  The other special characteristic of the Belt rocks is that very little of the 12-mile thick pile was deposited into deep water.  The sediments washed off an ancient landmass to the south and west into a shallow sea that was probably like the modern Caspian Sea.  The waters ranged between a few feet and a few hundred feet deep for 200 million years as the seafloor slowly sank at the same rate as the sediments accumulated.  The sediments filled the basin as fast as the bottom sank into the earth's crust, without completely filling and forming completely dry land.  The closest thing to dry land in the Belt basin was broad mudflats that occassionally dried out in the sun.  How do we know this?  Simple- just like after a rainfall today, the wet mud dried and cracked, leaving curled up edges on the cracks, and a distinct polygonal pattern on the ground surface. 


Mud cracks, Glacier National Park, MT


The other sedimentary structure common in the Belt rocks are ripple marks from either wind driven currents on mud flats or from wave currents in shallow seawater.  

Enjoy the pictures.  Time to enjoy a good brew.  Tonight's is thanks to my friend Kenny, who visited family in PA this fall and brought back a sampler pack of Stegmaier Brewing products--the one I'm tasting tonight is the India Pale Ale.  As their label says "Zum wohl" -- to health!!


Ripple Marks in siltstone, near Libby, MT



The Crowntainer - short, squat, and unique beer cans



Oertel's 92 with white enamal paint

 When beer cans were first marketed in the mid-1930s, three-piece (bottom lid, body, and top lid) cans --both flat tops and cone tops were the norm.  The biggest can makers - National, American, and Continental either issued three piece cone tops or flats, and tweaked the designs slightly over the years.  Crown Cork and Seal was the small guy and the late comer to the party, so they went for a totally different design--the Crowntainer.
The Crowntainer was different in several ways --but the two most obvious as can be observed in the photo are the short and squat shape of the can and the two piece construction.  Crowntainers had a heavy extruded body with a sturdy concave bottom.  Less noticeable was the fact that the early cans were coated with silvery aluminum paint to protect the metal body.  Later, Crown developed heavy enamel paint - usually white, but for a while during WWII -gray that covered the entire body and neck of the Crowntainer.

Like cone tops, the Crowntainer was filled on a bottling line and capped with bottle caps.  The Crowntainer was marketed from about 1940 to the mid-1950s.  Like the conetop, it was popular among smaller local and regional brewers, particularly in the midwest and northeast.  And like the cone top, its popularity faded as the small brewers disappeared and the remaining brewers realized that flat top cans were cheaper to ship, faster to fill and package, and easier to display and store. However, because of the durability of the can (thanks to the aluminum coating on heavy gauge steel and heavy enamel paint), crowntainers have survived by the thousands in trash dumps and outdoor environments. 

Southern Select with aluminum coating tin

The Beer Can - 1935 Beginnings

The first beer can hit the market in January 1935 and was an instant success for the Krueger Brewing Co of Newark, NJ.  Within months other brewers, including Pabst, rushed to can their beer. The first cans were flattop cans with opening instructions printed on the side of the can showing how to use the newly invented "churchkey" (See the Hamm's can at left and below).  These cans were heavy - weighing in at over 3-1/2 ounces empty!  The Hamm's is a typical pre-WWII flattop with the word beer printed as large as the brand name and a side panel showing a picture of how to punch a hole in the lid.  In addition, as was common on early cans, text on the label touts how well the "modern" beer can protected the contents.

Collectors call these cans "OI cans", short for "opening instructions" or simply "instructionals"  Although most OI cans disappeared before WWII, several brewers still included the instruction panel on their cans until the early 1950s.  Besides the heavy construction, opening instructions, and the text promoting the container, one other line of text helps date a beer can--somewhere on every beer can made between late 1935 and March 1950, the words "Internal Revenue Tax Paid" or very similar wording will be found.  On the Hamm's can below, look just above the bottom rim.

One can company, Continental Can, decided a can with a familar bottle cap would be more popular, and in August 1935, a conetop can sealed with a bottle cap and containing Schlitz lager was introduced to the public. A few months later, Heileman Brewing of LaCrosse, Wisconsin put their Old Style beer into the cone top can.  The first Continental cone tops were what collectors call FBIR cones (flat-bottom, inverted rib conetops).  As can be seen below, the can had flat bottom and the ribs on the cone are sunk in. The height of the cone on the early cone top was also lower than later versions and collectors refer to these early lower cones as Low Profile or LP cones.  The flat bottom and inverted rib design lasted until September 1936, and then Continental redesigned the can to have raised ribs on the cone and a concave bottom.  This makes it very easy to date a FBIR cone - they all were produced in a one year span from August 1935 to September 1936.  The Heileman can below, while among the most common FBIR cones, is one of my favorite cans because it is one that I know where it was drank and then found.  In this case, it was one of several consumed by a farmer in rural northeastern Nebraska sometime in 1936, then pitched into the crawl space beneath his house.  There it remained for 60 years, until a plumber crawled beneath the house to make some repairs and found the empty cans.  The dry climate and shelter of the crawl space preserved the can without much rust (the archenemy of all steel beer cans).  Incidentally, the cones on the early FBIR cans were not painted or protected and always are rusted or discolored.  Later conetop cans had gold. or rarely, silver painted cones to protect them.   

Time to enjoy a cold one- in moderation as always.  Tonight its a Magic Hat "Roxy-Rollie"  -a dark ale from a good little microbrewery in South Burlington, Vermont- See Ya!!
                                                                                                                       

The Power of Ice

Although its best use is cooling a good beer, ice in volume can make one heck of a nice looking landscape.  In the U.S., Glacier National Park is one of the world's great examples of a terrain created by ice.  Nearly every valley, peak, waterfall, and lake is a product of huge rivers of ice that flowed down from the mountains 20,000 years ago.  These ice rivers, called alpine glaciers, formed from years of snow accumulation that gradually compressed to ice and began to flow slowly downslope.  Ultimately the glaciers of Glacier National Park filled the existing stream valleys to thicknesses of 2,000 feet or more.  By about 12,000 years ago, the ice began to melt faster than the snows at the peak accumulated and the glaciers completely disappeared. (Glacier National Park currently has several small active glaciers, but these formed during a brief cold interval that began in the 1600s and ended by 1850).  

Unlike running liquid water, frozen water is capable of plucking massive volumes of large rocks from walls and bottoms of a valley, and using the rock fragments like an ultra-coarse sandpaper to grind away even more rock.  The end result is a rugged landscape with sheer valley walls, shapely pointed peaks called horns, knife-like narrow ridges called aretes, and broad, U-shaped valleys.  The glacier carries its load of rock down the valley and eventually dumps it at the edge of the mountains into a huge pile of gravel and boulders known as a terminal moraine.  At Glacier National Park, the underlying rocks also aided in the formation of the rugged landscape.  Many mountain ranges are underlain by granites or similar rocks which are very hard and difficult to erode; however, the rocks at Glacier are relatively soft ancient limestones and shales that are easier for the ice to attack and erode.

All of the classic terrain features that geologists now recognize as created by alpine glaciers can be found in Glacier National Park.  The picture above is Dusty Star Mountain on the east side of the Park, which is a textbook example of an arete.  The narrow knife-edge ridge formed when glaciers flowed down the valleys on either side of the mountain.  These two small, or tributary glaciers, joined with a large, or trunk glacier, in the valley that runs across the center of the picture.  The trunk glacier was also responsible for creating the nearly vertical face at the end of Dusty Star Mtn.  The ice, with its load of rock acting like giant sandpaper, simply shaved off the end of the mountain! 

Although Glacier National Park no longer has large active alpine glaciers, futher north in the Rocky Mountains of Canada at Jasper National Park, alpine icefields and alpine glaciers still exist.  Although most alpine glaciers occur at high elevations and are hard for anyone but die-hard mountaineers to reach, Athabasca glacier flows out of the Athabasca Icefield and is easily visited.  Although small compared to the ancient glaciers, Athabasca is still 1,200 feet thick at the second step.  At the base of the glacier, the dirty gray color on the ice is rock melting out of the ice.  The small piles gravel and rock just behind the RVs are part of a small  terminal moraine that formed when the glacier front remained stable for a number of years before melting back toward the mountains.  Although the front of the glacier is retreating due to faster melting, the ice is still flowing down from the icefield (top of photo) at a rate of a foot or so a day.

The ice on the surface of the glacier, about midway up probably fell as snow on the icefield 200 to 250 years ago, which makes it a young glacier--glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland have persisted for as long as 100,000 years!  

Glaciers are not smooth at all--in fact they can be downright dangerous.  Because the ice is very slowly, but steadily moving, the surface is prone to cracking--forming crevasses sometimes 100's of feet deep.  Meltwater also runs across the surface in summer and forms fast moving streams that flow into crevasses.  On the day we were on the ice at Athabasca, it was warm and several soft areas of ice had melted into 1-2 ft deep slush puddles that were difficult to see. 
And yes, the geologist in me could not resist -- I sampled the melt water.  A bit gritty, but cold and fresh otherwise. 

Until next time, enjoy the pics, and I 'll enjoy a beer.

In the Beginning....

1975 - The beer can collecting craze strikes SE Indiana and every pre-teen and early teen boy 9and a few girls) starts a beer can collection.  Overnight, every one of my friends were collecting beer cans from the roadsides and out of trash dumps.  Those of us with willing fathers begged them to buy unusual brands and then drink them by punching holes in the bottom to preserve the pull tab.  The Hudepohl can was my first can--picked up from the roadside while walking home from school in April 1975.  

Its nothing special, even now 35 years later, this is a common can (thanks to those thousands of us who collected the then current brands as youngsters!).  The beer can craze died out by around 1980, and I ended up with the collections of many friends and even my brother's collection.  Many of those cans are still on my walls and the good memories of those days are still in my head.  I can still pull some 1970s era cans off the wall and remember pleasant days hiking or biking along Indiana roadsides with friends to find that particular cans.

Not long after the beer can collection got started, and probably as a result of clambering around in SE Indiana creek beds to look for beer cans, I started noticing the fossil shells that were in the local rocks.  Some of the more interesting ones weathered completely free of the rock and were lying loose waiting to be picked up.  A few years later in high school, I took a geology class (finding out some years later how rarely that course is offered in high school-anywhere!).  Thanks to Mr. Hall, who may have inspired more than a few of his former students to become geologists.  That class was also where I learned what those common fossils of SE Indiana are called.  The photo above shows five common Brachiopods - clockwise from top left is: Rhychnotrema capax, Platystrophia ponderosa, Hebertella insculpta, Rafinesquina alternata, and in the middle, Platystrophia cypha.  All are from the Late Ordovician Dillsboro Formation, which underlies much of SE Indiana (and SW Ohio and northern KY-but with different formation names)

That high schook geology course was interesting and was followed by a few boy scout camping trips to other parts of southern Indiana led to a box of fossils that went into the closet for a few years.  Then it was off to college - to major in history (my high school major) and become a teacher (at least that was the plan at first).  However, the fall semester of freshman seemed like a good time to knock out one of the science courses required by a liberal arts college, and I took the Intro to Geo course.  So much for the human history major, switched it for an Earth history major! 

The end result was a beer can collecting geologist.  Not a unique creature as I count at least two friends with the same career and hobby.  My friend Joe also blogs on beer and beer cans and his blog is included in the links below.  

Time for a cold one--Homebrew tonight is a strong scottish ale, 8% alc, not a lot of hops, very malty, and aged in my cellar for two years to an almost brandy-like smoothness.  Til next time...