Brothers Martin and Michael Stumpf opened Cleveland’s first known brewery on Hamilton Street between Muirson (East 12th) and Canfield, just south of Lakeside Avenue. The proximity to rail service and ice from the winter lake made the area an ideal site for a brewery to supply local saloons (before bottled beer, local commercial distribution was the standard method of the times). During the next 15 years, the brothers split as partners but each continued brewing independently in the same near-east Hamilton Street neighborhood.

In 1859, Michael Stumpf sold his operation to the newly-organized Lyon Brewery, formed by Paul Kindsvater, a popular local saloonkeeper, and brewmaster Jacob Mall. By this time, Cleveland’s brewing industry was thriving. Like most breweries in the city, Lyon was operated by a German brewmaster. They produced the lagers preferred by Cleveland’s large Eastern European ethnic communities, replacing earlier common ales. The business and facility expanded rapidly and thrived into the 1890s as Mall’s leadership role was passed to his son-in-law. In 1896, in pursuit of greater production capacity, a new larger plant was built on Davenport Street.  In the mid-1800s, Davenport Street connected Canfield Street (East 14th) with Briggs Street (East 22nd) along the edge of the downtown bluff— about 70 feet above the rail tracks along the Lake Erie shore. While local competition was fierce, growing demand generally meant there was enough business to go around. However, a new challenge was emerging as consolidated national brewers threatened local brewers’ market shares.

Meanwhile, George F. Gund (b. 1855) grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he later worked as a banker and with his father in the John Gund Brewing Company. George Gund relocated to Seattle in 1890, bought a local brewery, and expanded it. In 1897, he moved to Cleveland and purchased and renamed Jacob Mall’s Lyon Brewery to The Gund Brewing Company. Amidst all the competition, Gund refocused his business model on the individual consumer and away from the traditional saloon distribution. He built a bottling plant, upgraded working conditions and methods, and packaged three-bottle cardboard cartons in lots of eight to distribute to homes near and far. Gund’s Crystal Lager satisfied thirsty Clevelanders. The brewery continued to thrive into the 20th century under George F. Gund’s leadership while he cultivated other business interests in beverages, banking, mining, insurance, and real estate. Gund died in 1916, leaving his chair to his son, George F. Gund II.

George F. Gund II arrived in Cleveland from Seattle having finished Harvard Business School and a banking position. He personalized his arrival with Gund’s "Clevelander" beer, which sold for the next few years. In early 1919, Ohio enacted statewide prohibition rules and Gund ceased brewing beer and transferred his reserve inventory to the Pilsner Brewing Company of Cleveland to exhaust the inventory of Gund beer. During Prohibition, the Gund family refocused business away from brewing towards real estate management, banking, and various other business endeavors including decaffeinated coffee, later sold to the Kellogg Corporation and re-branded as Sanka. In the process, George F. Gund II became one of Cleveland’s foremost bankers as Chairman of the Cleveland Trust Company. His sons maintained the family’s Cleveland presence with philanthropic efforts (The Gund Foundation) and professional sports interests for the next century.

Gund Realty continued to own the Davenport property throughout the Prohibition years. The pre- and post-Prohibition eras also saw constant tensions within the industry between large national brewing conglomerates and smaller local operations in cities throughout the country. With the repeal of Prohibition came a rebirth of the local brewing industry. Gund Realty leased the Davenport facility to the Sunset (later Sunrise) Brewing Company. The new managers renovated and resumed the reliance upon bottled and canned beer with emphasis as a shipping brewer. More federal legal challenges forced another ownership change and product evolution. Sunrise emerged with its premier brand Tip Top Beer by the end of the decade. In 1939, Sunrise Brewing, still operating at the Davenport facility, was renamed Tip Top Brewing Company. More controversy ensued into the first half of the 1940s with rumors of the company’s connection to organized crime. By utilizing wartime rationing regulation loopholes, Tip Top Brewery added hard liquor sales to their beer business to gain market advantages in Cleveland saloons.

In 1944, Tip Top Brewing was sold to the Brewing Corporation of America (Carling Beer) and brewing operations ceased on Davenport Avenue. The building continued to be utilized as a beer and beverage warehousing and distributing facility for the next few decades. From the mid-1970s to the 2010s, the City of Cleveland and the Pennsylvania Railroad, along with several local banking and mortgage agencies and developers carried out property transfers, demolitions, and rezoning initiatives of the Davenport and neighboring properties as urban planning and development transformed the district.

The Davenport Avenue roadway was removed between East 14th and 16th Streets. The area once defined by Stumpf, Lyon, Gund, Sunrise, and finally Tip Top brewing operations is now occupied by Cleveland’s WKYC television studios and the Cleveland FBI headquarters building. The location that played a part in more than a century of the brewing industry’s evolution from a local to a global scale also marked the long arc of Gund family's business and family fortunes, which still resonate in Cleveland today.

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Carling Brewery is a story of a company that took the opportunity to use the power of Cleveland as a home of production to reach markets across America and grow its business exponentially. Founded in 1840 by English immigrant Thomas Carling in London, Ontario, Canada, the Carling Brewing Company first entered the U.S. market in 1898 when the Cleveland & Sandusky Brewing Company purchased rights to the Carling name. This lasted only thirteen years.

The brand returned two decades later under much different circumstances. Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 the Canadian company saw new opportunity south of the broder and turned to Cleveland. Cleveland proved to be a good choice as Carling’s famous “Black Label Beer” dominated markets for decades. The Carling Brewery and the city of Cleveland benefited from one another and each had a lasting impact on the other. Born of industrial adversity in the Great Depression, the Carling plant itself would become a victim of a new round of economic hardship in the 1970s. 

In 1933, Peerless Motor Car Company president James A. Bohannon faced America’s Great Depression head on. Because demand for his luxury cars had collapsed due to the sharp economic downturn, the company’s plant on Quincy Avenue at East 93rd Street, once used to produce these cars, was no longer viable. Bohannon's problem presented an opportunity for him and for Carling. He entered a joint venture that helped Carling expand while promising a new direction for his plant. After incorporating as the Brewing Corporation of America, by 1934, Bohannon's plant that once made luxury vehicles was producing ales that had previously been made only in Canada since the 1840s. In a Plain Dealer article from that year, Harry Smith referred to Cleveland as one of the most modern homes for manufacturing in the world.

After Bohannon acquired the rights from the brewery, Canadian engineers and brewmasters helped transform the auto plant to a brewery, as well as instruct the new employees on how to make the beer. Though the plant was originally intended for cars, it seems that its transition to brewing was rather seamless, and in no time Carling was selling Cleveland-made beer, first Red Cap Ale and soon Black Label Beer. The plant's transition from car manufacturing to brewing beer essentially proved to be its salvation. 

The Cleveland plant, which consisted of a series of long, low-slung brick buildings, was the biggest of Carling’s nine locations throughout Canada and the United States. Cleveland produced an average of 2.2 million barrels of beer annually, which amounted to 68.2 million gallons a year. The Cleveland location also employed 800 people, making it one of the industry’s biggest employers. Not only did the people in the factories make the beer, they had the responsibility of tasting it at every step in the process to ensure it met the expectations of quality.

By 1946, Carling was expanding in Cleveland and rumors arose that the company had planned to buy up a large amount of land in the area and force out homeowners in this corner of the Fairfax neighborhood, which was mostly African American. In a Plain Dealer article that year, an executive from the Cleveland brewery dispelled the rumors by explaining that only thirteen families would be affected by the brewery’s expansion. The Cleveland brewery was proving to be a success, and from 1933 to the start of the 1960s, the company was seeing growth in sales that allowed it to expand to meet demand.

As the Carling brand became increasingly popular, the Brewing Company of America changed its name to Carling Brewing Company in 1954 and began expanding to multiple cities across the country. Opening manufacturing plants in almost every region, the Cleveland plant continued to be the home of the Black Label beer. Through the mid-20th century, brewing local beer was a huge success for the city of Cleveland, sometimes called “the brewery capital of the United States.” As late as 1971, the Plain Dealer could point to over 25 breweries that were at one time producing beer in our own backyard. However, Carling Brewing Company was struggling to keep up with competitors like Miller and Anheuser-Busch, which had emerged as macro breweries, meaning their beer was manufactured and sold in large volume across the United States. These huge brewing companies continued to expand due to their low costs and through acquiring more smaller breweries to expand their command of the beer market.

To maintain their market share, the smaller brewing companies that hoped to remain independent continually had to reduce their prices and spend more on advertising each year. For example, Carling paid dearly for key endorsements like being the main beer sponsor of the Browns and the Indians. As sales declined, Carling had to shut down brewing locations around the country even though many people loved their products. In 1971, the Cleveland plant was among the casualties of insurmountable competition, although another firm, C. Schmidt & Sons of Philadelphia, bought the plant and operated it for another twelve years. 

Although Cleveland’s many older breweries like Carling failed to survive the restructuring of the industry, brewing has been picking up again in the area in recent decades, and the larger companies that have emerged since the 1980s – notably the Great Lakes Brewing Company and Market Garden Brewery – have enjoyed success not only in Cleveland but also in the entire Midwest. Breweries such as Carling exemplified that Cleveland can still be a major player in beer production. The local breweries in Cleveland today, while smaller in scale than older ones like Carling, carry on the city’s great brewing heritage.

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One could easily mistake the recent proliferation of microbreweries and brew pubs springing up on what often seem to be every other block in Cleveland as a modern and unique phenomenon. All of this has occurred here before, however, and with even more vigor and success than today’s upstarts are enjoying. With the influx of beer-loving immigrants from Germany, Bohemia and Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Cleveland was a big, and expanding, beer-drinking town. Just as IPAs fuel the burgeoning beer market today, at the end of the 19th century it was the new German lager that was all the rage, and most of the two dozen breweries then producing upwards of half a billion barrels of beer, switched from ale to lager brewing. Ironically, the shift today is back in the other direction, from the now disdained lager, back to ale. In an attempt to take advantage of the huge profits being raked in by beer barons of the day such as Isaac Leisy and George Gund, in the spring of 1904 a grocer and tailor pooled their resources and built a state of the art brewery on Union Avenue and East 69th Street, and the Forest City Brewing Company was born.

Michael Albl was brought to America by his father in 1850, leaving behind his handicapped mother in Stenovic, a province of Pilsen in what was then Bohemia. Arriving in Cleveland, like many Czech immigrants of the time, Albl quickly found work as a cooper in Rockefeller’s refinery. In the winter of 1873 he opened a grocery at 4950 Broadway that would grow to become one of the largest in the area. By this time Albl was trusted and admired by his community and was often called on to serve as executor of estates and to offer business advice to his neighbors. He dabbled in real estate and the insurance business, and was elected to a string of political offices after garnering the support of the community. He was appointed judge on April 1, 1887, and waterworks trustee in 1890. In 1904 Albl teamed with fellow Czech Joseph Troyen to build a state of the art brewery just a short walk from Albl’s successful grocery and Troyen’s clothing shop. They recruited Vaclev Humel from the Pilsner Brewing Company on Cleveland’s west side to supply the beer brewing expertise they lacked.

The enormous building at 6920 Union Avenue was designed by Mueller & Mildner, a team of architects from Detroit who specialized in breweries throughout the Midwest and Canada at the turn of the 20th century. This was a hulking industrial building built more for function rather than form, but was described as, “the most distinctive and unusual industrial architecture to be found on this continent” by the journal Historic Preservation in 1975. The brewery was among the first to switch to steel fermenting tanks, vats and kegs, and coupled with the steel supports of the brewery itself, made it far less prone to fire than previous breweries. It opened with a brewing capacity of 50,000 barrels/year to serve a mostly local market, and is estimated to have cost $220,000 to construct.

Although the brewery was successful from the start and was featured in many of Cleveland’s saloons in the early 20th century, several difficulties had to be confronted by Albl and his team. A worker named Emil Kohlt was severely burned on July 16, 1909, when scalding wort was accidentally spilled on him. Just two years later Jerry Mrazek was the subject of the most grisly event that occurred at the brewery when his body was found boiled at the bottom of a huge brewing vat. Newspaper accounts vary, with one claiming he fell into the boiling liquid after fainting due to illness, while another maintains that it was suicide. Despite these accidents, the brewery was constantly expanding during these early years, and in 1913 a $25,000, three-story bottling line was planned. With construction nearing completion the night of December 17th of that year, and despite the brewmaster, Marian Hansky, living in a house directly across the street, two men armed with sledgehammers did extensive damage to the new addition and parts of the existing brewery. The men, who were never apprehended, were suspected of belonging to the Prohibition movement, which would be the biggest and most constant threat to Forest City Brewing.

Prohibition began in Ohio in 1919, a year before it became law across the United States. Forest City was one of the very few breweries in Cleveland that attempted to remain open during this period. Michael Albl’s son Frank attempted to keep Forest City afloat by producing Zem-Zem grape juice and XLNT De-Alcoholized beer, but was rumored to have continued supplying local speakeasies with the fully-alcoholized, illegal variety. After numerous lay-offs, Prohibition won and the brewery finally closed its doors in 1930, leaving only Pilsener Brewing Company operating in Cleveland by the end of Prohibition.

With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Forest City immediately went back into production. Hansky was still the brewmaster, brewing the famous Samson Ale—named after the brewery near Albl’s hometown in Bohemia that produced the original Budweiser. Forest City, better suited than most Cleveland brewers to resume production, accounted for 25% of the beer sold in the first year after Repeal, but soon struggled financially once the new beer conglomerates got up to speed. The brewery was purchased by the Carling Brewing Co. in 1944 for $477,000, but they would consolidate their production facilities four years later and the brewery on Union was closed and the equipment sold. The building was not well-suited for other businesses, and after a short period as Distributors Furniture Warehouse in the 1970s, the building was demolished in February 2012. Of all the many breweries that once proudly called Cleveland home, the Forest City Brewing Company's building on Union Avenue is the only one that has ever been named to the National Register of Historic Places.

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On the northwest corner of Walton Avenue and Fulton Road there is a little red brick house that is one of the oldest houses in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. It is also all that is left of Henry Hoffman's dream to build a great brewery in Cleveland.

In 1845, eighteen-year-old Hoffman immigrated from Hesse-Cassell, Prussia (now central Germany) to the United States. He initially settled in Independence, Ohio, where he married, started a family, and worked as a farmer on land he owned. Sometime just as the Civil War was winding down, and for reasons lost to history--although perhaps it was because of the death of his first wife, Hoffman moved to Cleveland. He remarried in 1865 and, in 1868 at age 41 and with his dream in mind, he purchased a large lot of land that stretched along the west side of Rhodes Avenue (Fulton Road) from Walton Avenue nearly all the way to Erin Avenue. By 1870, he had built and was operating a small brewery on the land in a couple of commercial buildings he had constructed. He had also built, and he and his family were living in, that little red brick house. Today we would say that he was now living the dream.

According to Cleveland directory records, Hoffman's Brewery was one of more than a dozen operating here in 1870. Many, if not most, of these breweries were, like Hoffman's, owned by German immigrants and were built to serve neighborhood "needs." Within a few years, however, Hoffman had enlarged the brewery and, in 1878, he added a new brick saloon. This was, according to one industry publication that called him one of Cleveland's prominent brewers, so that his customers might "get a glass of lager without interruption to the men at work in the brewery." Hoffman must have felt that he was well on his way to becoming as large and as successful a brewer as fellow German immigrant Carl Gehring, whose fast-growing brewery was located just a mile away on West 25th Street, a block south of where the West Side Market stands today.

And why shouldn't Hoffman have felt that way? He had enlarged the capacity of his brewery so that it could produce 8,000 barrels (248,000 gallons) of German lager beer per year. He was carefully grooming his son William to help him further grow the business. He was a leader in several important Cleveland fraternal organizations. And, in 1874, he had been elected Councilman for Ward 12. This was the west side ward which encompassed almost all of what today are the Clark-Fulton and Stockyards neighborhoods of Cleveland

As it turned out, Henry Hoffman did not become the next Carl Gehring. Just two years later, in 1880, the local newspapers began reporting that Ward 12 Councilman Hoffman was very ill. And, on November 23, 1880, he died. The cause of death was said to be stomach cancer. Hoffman, who had just been re-elected to Council the previous year, was only 53 years old.

A grand funeral was held in Cleveland for Henry Hoffman. Resolutions of condolence were passed by City Council. Flags flew at half-mast in Public Square (then called Monumental Park). A moving eulogy was delivered (in German) by Rev. Klein at the service held at the Zion Church on Jennings Avenue (West 14th Street) in what is today the Tremont neighborhood. And, with his fellow councilmen serving as pall-bearers, Hoffman was buried at Riverside Cemetery with all the pomp and ceremony that his position as member of City Council and leader in the business community then warranted.

After Hoffman's death, his son William and a partner attempted to run the brewery, but within two years they were hopelessly in debt and were being sued by a number of creditors. The little red brick house and the brewery, ice house and all, were sold to one of those creditors, Miller Spangler, a millionaire maltster. Spangler used part of the brewery building for storage of his malt and rented the rest of the building to others. He also rented out Hoffman's little red brick house. A few years later, the brewery and nearby ice-house mysteriously burned to the ground. What was left of those buildings was later razed. Then, new houses were built on the land where the brewery once stood. Eventually, there was no trace of Henry Hoffman's dream left standing except for the little red brick house on the corner of Walton and Fulton.

In the decades that followed the fire, the house was initially used as a store. Then it was converted into a two-family dwelling. Later, an addition was built on the south side of the building, and various small retail businesses operated out that part of the house, while the rest of the house was used as a residence. Finally, the house's last resident sold the property in 1990 and, since then, it has been used exclusively as the retail business office of a local locksmith.

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The Great Lakes Brewing Company opened in Ohio City in 1988, kick-starting an industry in Cleveland that a few years earlier had appeared to be finished. In 1984, the city's only remaining brewery, C. Schmidt & Sons, closed its doors, becoming the final victim of the brewing industry's trend toward consolidation. The emergence of national beer brands with gigantic production facilities and even bigger advertising budgets hurt Cleveland's breweries -- even those that had retooled and expanded following World War II to become regional producers. The city had nine breweries in 1939, five in 1960, and then none in 1984 with the closing of Schmidt's.

Beer had probably been brewed in Cleveland from its earliest days, but the brewing industry really took off in the 1840s with the arrival of large numbers of German and Bohemian immigrants. Their lager beer (different from "ale," which had English origins) proved to be popular with Clevelanders of all ethnicities, and in 1852 German immigrant Carl Gehring opened the Gehring Brewery at what is today Gehring Avenue and West 25th Street in Ohio City. Other immigrants followed suit, and by 1900 there were 23 breweries in the city. These were generally small, family-run businesses that produced beer for consumption within the city. Already by 1899, however, when ten of Cleveland's breweries merged to form the regional Cleveland & Sandusky Brewing Company, it was becoming clear that only the biggest breweries would survive in the city's increasingly competitive brewing industry.

The start of National Prohibition in 1920 led some Cleveland breweries to permanently close, while others switched to producing juice, soda, or dairy products. Several reopened immediately following Prohibition's repeal in 1933, and by 1939 Cleveland had 9 breweries which employed 1,265 persons and produced over $10 million worth of beverages. New forms of mechanization and expanded sales territories led to increased production at the breweries that made it through Prohibition. Despite further expansions, mergers, and regional sales strategies, though, none of Cleveland's breweries could compete with the national brands that emerged after World War II.

The success of the Great Lakes Brewing Company, however, has brought brewing back to Cleveland. Several microbreweries now operate in the city, with the most recent opening in a space next to the West Side Market. How fitting that Ohio City, home to several breweries during the industry's heyday at the turn of the 20th-century, should emerge as Cleveland's new brewing center over 100 years later!

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In 1873, Isaac Leisy and his two brothers (all originally from Bavaria in Germany) left their small brewery in rural Iowa and came to Cleveland after purchasing Frederick Haltnorth's brewery on Vega Avenue for $120,000. Haltnorth (who was also the proprietor of Haltnorth's Gardens -- a beer garden at East 55th Street and Woodland Avenue) had purchased the brewery in 1864 from Jacob Mueller, who originally opened it in 1858. Only weeks before purchasing Haltnorth's brewery, Isaac Leisy had been in Cleveland to attend the annual Brewer's Congress. Leisy must have been impressed with the opportunities for growth and prosperity in Cleveland, which was quickly becoming an industrial metropolis, as compared to those that existed in rural Iowa.

In the mid-1880s, Isaac Leisy (having bought out his brothers) renovated the old brewery and expanded its operations, constructing a multi-building, eight-acre campus along Vega Avenue and increasing beer production eightfold. The Leisy Brewery aimed to be as self-sufficient as possible, and to this end the brewery's grounds contained, for example, a bottling plant, stables for its fleet of horse-drawn delivery carriages, a cooperage, a blacksmith shop, and two 80-foot silos that held barley prior to its on-site malting. Self-sufficiency was important since competition among breweries in Cleveland at the time was fierce, with nearly twenty breweries operating in the city in 1890. To make matters more difficult for Leisy, in 1898 ten small Cleveland brewers joined the new Cleveland & Sandusky Brewing Co., a massive combination that signaled the brewing industry's turn towards consolidation. Isaac's son Otto took control of the company after his father's death in 1892 and promptly vowed to remain independent of the new combination. He wrote to the Plain Dealer in 1898, emphatically stating that "My firm has existed in Cleveland for over a quarter of a century; has prospered by honorable methods of trade, thereby obtaining, possessing and enjoying the confidence of the same. By its former methods my company proposes to preserve and maintain its trade, and in a fair way compete with its opponent, the huge beer trust."

Indeed, Leisy Brewing remained an independent, family-owned brewery throughout its entire history. It thrived in the decades before Prohibition, steadily increasing its sales and production. When Prohibition took effect in 1920 and brewing beer became illegal, the company made a short-lived attempt to produce non-alcoholic beverages. This proved to be unprofitable, and Leisy Brewing closed in 1923. Unlike some of Cleveland's other breweries which had also been forced to shut down during Prohibition, Leisy returned after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. That year, Otto's son Herbert Leisy reopened the brewery, reequipping it with new machinery to replace the equipment that had been sold off during Prohibition. Industry consolidation, however, continued to chip away at Cleveland's small, independent breweries in the decades after Prohibition. Leisy Brewing finally closed in 1958, and its plant on Vega Avenue was demolished in the mid-1970s.

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