All About The Bruckmann Brewing Company

By: The Gnarly Gnome
Photography By: The Gnarly Gnome

You wouldn’t know it driving down 75 and passing by the smokestack that now reads ‘Worthmore’ from the longtime food producer that once occupied the space, but hiding right in plain sight between Clifton and Northside is one of the city’s historic gems. It’s the remains of the most complete historic brewing complex in Cincinnati (maybe even one of the most complete brewing structures from its time in the country).

Today, we call it the ‘Bruckmann Brewery’ – but when it started, it was nothing more than a family farm.

Picture yourself back in the mid-1800s, Cincinnati looks nothing like it does today. The area that is now the location of this brewery’s remains was then called ‘Cumminsville’, located far outside of the city’s basin and home to the family farm of the Bruckmann brothers. Johann and Friedrich had a little brewery there, serving just enough beer for themselves and probably a few other people. It was closer to a homebrewing setup than what you might think of as a commercial brewery.

In the following years, they’d eagerly start making the new, trendy lager beer that was taking over the city, and by 1872, the operation would grow enough to finally be recognized in the city’s directory as an operating brewery.

The following 20 years saw Johann’s sons take over after his death, and then quickly afterwards a period of growth that can only be called “meteoric”. To put it into perspective, in 1891, they were making around 1200 bbls of beer, and four years later, in 1895, that volume would top 25,000 bbls.

Business was good… no, business was great, until the culture of the time caught up with them and the Bruckmann Brewing Company came headfirst with Prohibition.

They pivoted into a business that they called the ‘Bruckmann Beverage & Products Company’, surviving the next twenty years by making products like their Aristocrat Cereal Beverage, which evidently people liked, because they kept producing it well into the 40s.

The continued production of “near beer” kept something else important for the business – their brewhouse. The brewery was fully functioning, and ready that at the end of prohibition, they were all set up to be the first brewery in town to produce beer… and get it into people’s hands.

Being first back certainly didn’t hurt business, and they were doing so well that they even purchased the Cincinnati Home Brewing Company around the corner for a new bottling plant in 1934. They modernized their facilities in the 1940s, but eventually couldn’t compete with the changing landscape of beer, including the consolidation and closure of regional breweries all across the country.

In 1949, they would be purchased by a local investor, who renamed the brewery The Herschel Condon Brewing Company before being forced to auction the facility off in July of 1950.

There were other businesses that came in (a really fun winery concept operated out of the facility in the 1970s… an article that is certainly for another day), and through a combination of those businesses and a little bit of sheer luck, the structures remained. Even with the construction of a highway, the removal of the canal, the building of a college only a few hundred yards away, and who knows how many other plans that didn’t come to fruition, Bruckmann still stands.

The Bruckmann Brewing Company Timeline

• 1856 – The brothers start a brewery at their family farm.
• 1869 – The brewery starts making lager beer.
• 1872 – Johann buys out Friedrich’s share of the business
• 1887 – After Johann’s death, his three sons take over the business
• 1919 – Prohibition hits, forcing the brewery to refocus its products.
• 1933 – Prohibition repeal comes, and the brewery is the first in town to reopen and sell beer.
• 1934 – The brewery expands with the acquisition of the Cincinnati Home Brewing Company facility.
• 1940 – The entire facility is modernized with new machinery and bottling equipment.
• October 1949 – The brewery closes and is acquired to become the Herschel Condon Brewing Company
• July 1950 – The brewery closes for good.