Tuesday 18 May 2010

Fidelio or whatever its successors were called

Apologies for not getting the name exactly right of a brewery that changed it's name more often than I change my trolleys.


4 comments:

Tandleman said...

Complexion ruddy. Excellent.

Bill in Oregon said...

60th Avenue in Elmhurst - frighteningly close to my family's ancestral homeland.

Graham Wheeler said...

It does seem curious that in a collection of papers there is one headed Untied States Brewers' Acadamy, which, along with Schwarz Laboratories, was founded by Anton Schwartz, one of the most influential American brewing scientists, allegedly responsible for the introduction of high adjunct brewing to America and thus responsible for the pale yellow American Standard Beer.

Another paper names William Schwarz as a lowly brewer to a brewery that is on its knees.

It is probable that they were not the same branch of the family, bot closely related, and that it was just coincidence.

If Bill was connected with the other lot then he must have been the black sheep of the family, or out on a training sabbatical, otherwise he would have been working at Daddy's (or Uncle's) company, which was a quite substantial supplier of enzymes, RNA and other complicated stuff to research laboratories, apart from his brewing school.

It is hard to believe that two papers, both dated 1941, one certainly sourced from the academy, and probably brewed on their pilot plant, and another of 300 bls and probably, but not necessarily, brewed at Fidelio, both having a common denominator of Schwarz, could end up in the same collection if the Schwarzes are not related.

One possibility is that they were not closely related, but that Bill studied brewing at the academy, which would be the logical place to go, being as the other academy was at Siebel in Chicago. That would explain how Bill got his hands on the academy recipe.

It was me that made the connection between the two Schwarzes, not you, contrary to what I said earlier, but it looks like it might just be coincidence after all.

Ah well, it will not stop the world turning if the answer was known.

Ron Pattinson said...

Graham, in this case I'm not too worried about about the precise brewery details. All I have are a few fragments of documents.

What's important is that the records give a glimpse into American brewing methods at a very interesting historical moment: after Repeal and before the USA joined WW II. That the Lager doesn't look too dissimilar from later mass-market American beers.

I'm sure large quantities of American brewing records survive. It would be nice is someone went through them methodically. I've seen a lot of speculation about what American beers used to be like, but virtually no real information.