From Beir to Beer… a Brewmaster’s Journey
Christian Heurich took the long route to starting the company that would one day make him a multimillionaire and the largest employer in Washington, DC other than the federal government.
He was born in 1842 in Haina, a town in the central part of modern Germany. At the age of 12 he and his family moved south to Römhild, not far from Frankfurt. His father was an innkeeper and a brewer and gave young Christian the basics of the beer trade. By 14 both of his parents had died and Heurich travelled across Europe doing apprenticeship stints at different breweries, getting experience in a wide variety of settings and coming to understand the processes that go into making different kinds of beer. He would eventually work at breweries throughout what is now Austria, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic.
Eventually his sister, Elizabeth, who lived in Baltimore, Maryland, convinced her brother to move to the United States where she suggested he’d have a better opportunity to start his own brewery. So, in 1866 Heurich set off for the New World and upon arriving moved in with his sister in Baltimore where he worked at a brewery. He soon moved to Chicago then Topeka, Kansas, and St. Louis Missouri, adding to his brewing knowledge base each time. Then he moved back to Baltimore to work on a sailing boat then out to Ripley, Ohio to work at a different brewery then back to Baltimore to become a brewery foreman.
After six years in America Heurich finally hung up his own shingle when he and a partner leased a brewery in Washington, DC, about 50 miles from Baltimore. The next year, 1873, Heurich emerged as the sole partner in the brewery, naming it Christian Heurich’s Lager Beer Brewery. In 1877 he would begin work on a second brewery a short distance away. By 1878 he was producing 30,000 barrels of beer a year and had hired half a dozen teams to deliver to his customers.
In the 1890s the now rechristened the Christian Heurich Brewing Company was brewing 500,000 barrels a year and was known for the cleanliness of its ingredients. In 1891 the company was investigated for impurities in its beers. When the report came back noting no impurities, Heurich took the report and built an advertising campaign around it.
Heurich had found incredible success, becoming the largest brewer in Washington, DC. In 1892 he began construction on a Victorian mansion in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, not far from his brewery.
In 1896, after a series of fires, Heurich built a fireproof brewery on the bank of the Potomac River, where today stands Washington’s famed Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. At the time Heurich brewing was the 2nd largest employer in the nation’s capital, behind only the federal government. The next year he would add a bottling plant to the brewery and eventually added similar plants in Norfolk and Baltimore.
In 1900 Heurich and his wife Amelia would travel to the Paris World’s Fair, where his beer would win a silver medal. His beers would win a gold medal at the 1905 World’s Fair in Liège, Belgium and in 1907 at the Jamestown Exposition in Jamestown, Virginia.
The plant would stop producing beer in 1917, two years before prohibition was passed in the form of the 18th Amendment – because the city had become “dry”. The brewery manufactured ice (250 tons a day!) to survive until 1933 when the 21st Amendment repealed prohibition and it could begin brewing beer again. It would continue to produce ice until 1940 and it was still producing beer in 1945 when Christian Heurich died, still working at the company he’d started almost seventy years before.
Christian Heurich was a master brewer, but also a skilled businessman. His ability to create strong relationships with organized labor allowed him to survive when the rest of Washington’s brewers declared war on him and tried to destroy his business. At the same time, he used creative advertising and innovative techniques to maintain his position as the largest and most successful brewer in Washington for decades. He was also a keen real estate investor and by 1910 had compiled a portfolio worth the equivalent of $20 million today.
He would leave his son, Christian Heurich Jr. running his business and his mansion to his third wife, Amelia. The brewery would shut down in 1956 the same year Amelia died, leaving the mansion to the Washington Historical Society. Today the mansion, one of the first in the city to be built featuring electricity, is the home of the Heurich House Museum.
Christian Heurich would spend much of the first 30 years of his life moving from place to place, country to country, plying his trade and picking up new experiences and expanding his knowledge of his craft all along the way. In America he would sharpen the skills of that craft and would plant a flag that would eventually make him the most successful brewer in Washington and simultaneously a multi-millionaire real estate investor. That’s pretty good for a 14 year old orphan from a tiny town in the middle of Germany.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Heurich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heurich_House_Museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Heurich_Brewing_Company