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| Lemp Brewery in St. Louis, Missouri (color drawing after a photo in the St. Louis Star & Times. March 14, 1914) |
The Lemps knew how to get their name in front of people. They put it on bottles, advertisements, and the side of a smokestack. By the 1870s, they ran the largest brewery in St. Louis.
Before all that, there was a grocery
store.
Johann Adam Lemp came to St. Louis in
1838. He’d learned to brew in Germany and started making beer while running his
store. The lager found customers. Enough of them that groceries stopped being
the principal business.
The family claimed 1840 as the
brewery’s founding year. Historians haven’t quite settled that, but records
show brewing operations by 1841. Adam called it the Western Brewery and set up
near the riverfront.
He had beer to make and a problem to
solve.
Lager needed to stay cold while it
aged. St. Louis got hot, and a brewer couldn’t leave barrels sitting through a
Missouri summer and expect everything to turn out fine.
Adam used caves.
The limestone caverns beneath the city stayed cool. Ice cut from the Mississippi helped keep the storage cold. Workers had to cut it, haul it, and put it away. Before refrigeration machinery, that was part of getting a glass of lager to the customer.
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| William J. Lemp, Sr. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch. February 13, 1904) |
The caves gave Adam room to build the business. His son, William, built a brewery above them.
Adam died in 1862. William took over
and opened the larger plant near Cherokee Street in 1864. He kept adding to it
until the brewery covered five city blocks.
It had towers, arched windows, and
brickwork worth looking at. The buildings were factories, but the Lemps spent
money on how they looked. They had a business people could see from the street
and a name they wanted people to remember.
Anheuser-Busch was growing in the
same city. For a time, Lemp was bigger.
William bought machinery that helped
him make more beer and send it farther. Refrigeration took some of the burden
off the caves and river ice. Bottling and pasteurization helped beer travel
without going bad.
Then there was the railroad.
The family operated the Western Cable
Railway Company and shipped beer under refrigeration. William wasn’t waiting
for people to come to St. Louis for a drink. He was getting Lemp beer into
other cities, then other countries.
By the 1890s, it was going overseas.
The bottles carried several names.
Standard. Extra Pale. Culmbacher. Tally. Tip Top. The company sold different
beers under different labels, giving a customer more to ask for than just a
Lemp.
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| William J. Lemp, Jr. (St. Louis Republic. Juy 12, 1908) |
Falstaff was the name that stuck.
It came from Shakespeare’s Sir John
Falstaff, who liked food, drink, and getting his own way. The brewery
introduced the brand in the 1890s. It became valuable enough that somebody
wanted it even after the Lemps were through.
For years, though, they had little
reason to think they’d be through.
The brewery was large. The beer
traveled. William had a mansion nearby and the money to make it a showplace. He
filled the house with expensive finishes, adding conveniences most families
didn’t have.
His son Frederick was expected to
carry the business forward, but he died of heart failure in 1901. William took
the loss hard. Then his close friend, Frederick Pabst, another man who’d made a
fortune in beer, died in January 1904. The following month, William died by
suicide at the family mansion.
The brewery passed to William Jr.,
known as Billy. His troubles went into the newspapers.
His marriage to Lillian Handlan ended
in a bitter divorce. The family’s money and name made the fight news. People
who’d never been inside the mansion could read about what was going wrong
there.
Outside the house, another fight was
closing in.
The temperance movement wanted
alcohol outlawed. Brewers could expand their plants, improve their equipment,
and buy more advertising. They couldn’t sell ordinary beer if the government
made it illegal.
Lemp tried Cerva.
It was a nonalcoholic malt beverage,
something the company could make as restrictions threatened the beer trade.
Unfortunately, Cerva didn’t earn enough to save it.
The brewery closed on May 3, 1919.
Nationwide constitutional Prohibition took effect the following January. Lemp
was already out.
Billy sold the Falstaff name and logo
to Joseph Griesedieck in 1920. International Shoe Company bought the brewery
property in 1922. The buildings had another use, and Falstaff had another
owner.
The family’s bad luck continued.
Billy’s sister Elsa died by suicide
in 1920. Billy died by suicide at the mansion in December 1922, just months
after the brewery’s sale.
Their brother, Charles, stayed on for
decades. In 1949, he also died by suicide at the mansion. Four members of the
family had died that way in forty-five years.
People eventually called it a curse.
The mansion became a restaurant and inn, and the ghost stories became part of
what brought people through the door.
The brewery had brought people there
for a different reason. They wanted beer. The Lemps made it, bottled it, and
shipped it far beyond St. Louis. For decades, that was what the family name
meant.
Anheuser-Busch survived Prohibition.
The Lemp family brewery didn’t. But Falstaff returned under new ownership, and
people kept ordering it.
The name on the bottle outlasted the
business that put it there.
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