Book Excerpt: Falls City Brewing and Louisville Brewing’s Last Stand
A Falls City brewery worker moving barrels. Courtesy of Dave Easterling
Since I’m doing a book signing event on Thursday at Falls City Brewing Company, I thought it would be fun to share this excerpt from my 2014 book, “Louisville Beer: Derby City History on Draft.” This is chapter 12 from that book, detailing the history of Falls City starting with its inception in 1905.
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Falls City Brewing Co. was the last brewery standing in Louisville following the closure of Oertel Brewery and Frank Fehr Brewing Company. It too has a rich history and is remembered today as one of Louisville’s favorite beer makers.
Falls City was a late comer, having been formed in 1905 by a collection of saloon owners and grocers who were in protest of the aforementioned Central Consumers Company alliance formed by the brewers, which had essentially monopolized beer sales in the city. This group of business men combined forces and built a 75,000-barrel brewery at Thirtieth Street and Broadway downtown, next to Southern Railroad.
It should be noted that a number of smaller operations brewed beer under the name Falls City well ahead of this brewery’s launch; again, as breweries opened, closed, reopened and changed hands in the 1800s, a number of names came and went.
Otto Doerr, formerly of Schaefer-Mayer, was hired as brewmaster, and in November 1906, Falls City Beer was tapped for the first time in Louisville’s saloons and taverns, starting a legacy that is still strong today.
By 1908, Falls City had added a bottling plant and was selling bottled beer across the city as well as draft beers bearing interesting names such as Peerless, Salvator, Life Saver and Extra Pale. During the first years of its operation, deliveries were made with the customary horses and wagons. According to Kentucky Digital Records, in 1911, Falls City bought a five-ton Morgan truck and a one and one-half ton auto car, “and there was great rivalry amongst the drivers as to who would be chosen to drive these two new trucks.”
While the brewery struggled at first, by 1912 it was making a profit, narrowly surviving a 1911 takeover bid by rival Central Consumers. In fact, a meeting on Dec. 11, 1911, to discuss selling Falls City to their rival began in the afternoon and lasted until nearly midnight, with a number of heated debates igniting along the way. But the ultimate decision, at the urging of loyal stockholders, was to keep moving forward. Of course, this was a huge victory for Falls City, which had the original mission of competing against the monopoly.
The ensuing seven years were steady, but a lack of capital and continued competition with the Central Consumers Company provided obstacles to growth. Of course, you already know what happened in 1919 – Prohibition forced the brewing operation to close, and the property was sold at auction to a man named George F. Korfhage for $61,000 just two weeks before national Prohibition was set to become law. Korfhage, along with some newly assembled investors, kept the facility running, producing near beer and soft drinks, and selling ice under the name Falls City Ice and Beverage Company.
But perhaps surprisingly to all, the plucky little Falls City not only managed to stay afloat, it actually turned a profit during Prohibition. When the boilers were again fired up in late 1933, Falls City was primed and ready to start brewing beer for Louisville and beyond. The brewery found an eager audience. Following Prohibition, beers such as Hi-Bru, Falls City Ale, Falls City Bock, Falls City Extra Pale and Falls City Lager were being produced and sold across the city and the South.
Not unlike Oertel, Korfhage’s death in 1929 assured he would never see a beer brewed at the plant, but his leadership would see Falls City distribute its soft drink products regionally – Falls City previously had only sold locally – paving the way for beer brewing later. It should be noted that after Korfhage’s death, former Falls City president Theodore Evers was named secretary and treasurer. At that time, a woman named Lillie G. Madden was named assistant secretary. She would go on to become a key player in the story of Falls City brewing.
By the late 1940s and into 1950, Falls City was brewing 750,000 gallons a beer annually and distributing to Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, the Virginias and Illinois. It had become a dominant southern brewery.
In 1951, the death of long-time president John W. Bornwasser opened the door for Madden – known as “Miss Lillie” – to become president. By 1955, the Falls City plant was undergoing several major upgrades, including a new barrel kettle and faster bottling lines. At one point it was the official beer of the Indianapolis 500, and it enjoyed popularity throughout the region.
But as the years went by, Anhueser-Busch, Miller Brewing, Schlitz and others were establishing their stranglehold on the brewing industry in the region and around the country. Falls City began to adapt its flavor as a way of keeping up, which would gradually result in the beer being less and less flavorful as America began its swing toward corporate light beer.
Advertisements from the 1950s show this emerging trend. A Falls City ad from The Kentucky New Era in May 1956 promotes pasteurization of the beer, promising that it’s “sparkling … light … refreshing,” that it “always tastes the same” and that it was “bitter-free,” bragging that “our process keeps hop’s [sic] bitterness OUT … locks the right amount of taste-pleasing flavor IN.”
By comparison, as recently as 1939, Falls City was describing its beer as “amber,” describing the flavor as “dry,” and with “mellow heartiness” and “perfect balance.” That was Falls City Hi-Bru, and it clearly predates the “light” trend.
Creativity in brewing was dying under the weight of corporate homogenization. Meanwhile, Falls City was doing what it had to do in order to survive, which was to get creative. One offer in the 1950s was for a “Holiday Gift Pack” – a way to give your friends and family the gift of bitter-free beer in a festive, holiday package at no extra charge. A 1962 ad in the Kentucky New Era is positioned as a personal classified ad, and reads, “PARTNER WANTED: Man with cooler full of Falls City Beer and fishing rod wants to meet man with can opener and fishing rod. Object: Fishing trip. Fishermen agree that you can’t buy better tasting beer than Falls City at any price.”
Kenneth Schwartz, who we met in Chapter 7, recalls the slow but sure decline following years of thriving under Madden, beginning with the brewery improvements in 1955.
“They decided they wanted to put a new powerhouse in, and a new engine room,” he said, peering through oval wire-frame glasses. “Those two boilers they put in were brand new. They put new equipment in the brewery part too – tanks and stuff like that. They bought us a new fleet of trucks. One thing about them, when they made up their mind to do something, they done it. And they didn’t buy that stuff on time – they paid cash for it.”
He recalls Madden as being very strict but very fair with her employees. “She was a smart woman,” Schwartz said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s the one who built that brewery up to what it was.”
In later years, he said, employees could drink only in a certain part of the plant, and the limit was two. Schwartz said he recalls a former co-worker who would go beyond that limit, and one day Madden walked in and caught him.
“He said, ‘I guess I’m fired?’ and she said, ‘You are so right.’”
But as the 1960s wore on, sales declined. Distribution and consumption of national brands was on the rise, and local loyalty was waning – well, for everyone but the brewery workers.
“When I worked there, that’s the only beer I drank,” Schwartz said. “Even if I was at somebody’s house and they offered me a beer, if it wasn’t Falls City, I wouldn’t drink it.”
He came home from work one day to find a non-Falls City beer sitting on his kitchen table.
“I said, ‘What in the hell?’ My wife said, ‘What’s the matter with you? I said, ‘Whose beer is that? She said, ‘It’s your son’s.”
He picked up the beer – “It was maybe a Bud or a Miller,” he said – opened the door and slung the bottle out into the yard.
“I said, ‘Tell him there’s his beer.’”
Schwartz said it gradually became clear that the brewery was going downhill. Finally, a last-ditch effort to save Falls City was hatched in 1977. It almost worked. Falls City persuaded famous beer drinker Billy Carter – brother to then President Jimmy Carter – to switch brands and endorse Falls City’s specially brewed Billy Beer. That beer was released in September and was popular at first. Carter himself came to Louisville, toured the Falls City plant, and even made a visit to Check’s Café in Germantown, where a picture of his visit still hangs.
Billy Carter was even quoted at a press conference during his visit as saying, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll be come the Colonel Sanders of beer.”
Maybe not.
“He come back and shook my hand,” Schwartz said. “I didn’t think much of him.”
Still, the Billy Beer experiment nearly worked, and showed a great leap of faith on the part of the struggling brewery – or possibly a last-ditch effort of desperation.
“The only way to survive is to be innovative,” then Falls City president James F. Tate told The Associated Press, “and that’s just what we’ve tried to do. … When you go up against the big guys in this industry, you have a helluva job on your hands.”
Tate said in that article that Miller and Anhueser-Busch were spending $100 million annually in television advertising and were “chasing us off television” as a result. In addition, by that time one of the two mega-brewers was sponsoring pretty much every major event in town. Falls City couldn’t compete in its own market, let alone regionally or nationally.
While publicity fueled the first few months of sales, keeping Falls City in the black for 1977, a massive winter snowstorm immobilized the entire city of Louisville in January 1978 and brought sales and distribution to a near stand-still in the process. By May, sales of Billy Beer were inching back up, but the end was near. Another problem was that the price point was higher than Bud and Miller, and people simply didn’t want to pay it once the novelty wore off. Some of that price point had to do with Carter’s royalties.
“They paid him I don’t know how many thousands of dollars just to put his name on the damn thing,” Schwartz said. “It went over pretty good for a while. It went over well in these colleges because it was something different. Pretty soon – boom, it just petered.”
Brewing in Louisville was dying a slow death; it was a national trend. A Courier-Journal story from June 8, 1978, reported that just after Prohibition, between 1933 and 1935, some 750 breweries were in operation in the United States. At the time of Billy Beer, the number was down to 45.
Late in 1978, Falls City closed; newspapers around the country in November of that year ran a photo of a Reynolds Aluminum Recycling Plant in Louisville shoveling beer cans onto a conveyor belt. Falls City had sold 8.7 million Billy Beer cans to the plant in the shutdown, a sad symbol of the brewery’s last stand.
The plant was sold, and the equipment shipped out of the country, the buildings demolished. The brands, including Falls City and the lesser known Drummond Bros., were sold to the Heileman Brewing Company.
Schwartz, who says he was the last hourly employee at Falls City, remembers his last two days on the job: “I left there one day, and [Tate] said, “Tomorrow morning, Kenny, when you come in, shut the boiler down. I said, ‘All right.’”
When he finished shutting down the last operating boiler, Schwartz walked around the plant one last time and said his goodbyes to a few of his co-workers. Then he got into his car and drove home, in search of a new way of life.
And with that, the lights went out on brewing in Louisville. At least for a while.
