The Erie Canal: The Golden Age of Hops and Albany, the Forgotten Beer City

 The Erie Canal:

The Golden Age of Hops and Albany, the Forgotten Beer City

by: J. Gostling

When James D. Collidge of Bouckville, in Madison County NY, planted the first hops field in 1808, he could scarcely have known that 50 years later NY would be supplying 87% of all the hops used in the United States. Nor could he have imagined that New York’s capital region would support over 20 breweries by the mid-19^th century. In fact, that first field, aided by cost-effective transportation on the Erie Canal, plus an influx of immigrants from beer drinking cultures, gave rise to a booming beer culture in America.

Central to the success of the beer industry was the Erie Canal, bringing barley and hops from western and central NY to breweries in and around Albany and allowing access to the Hudson River. From 1815 to 1825, the price to ship grain from Buffalo to NYC, dropped from $100 to $10 per ton. This was a huge assist to brewers like Mathew Vassar.

Vassar’s brewery in Poughkeepsie was producing 15,000 barrels of porter annually in 1840. By 1860 the brewery doubled production to 30,000 barrels a year. Mr. Vassar eventually endowed his earnings from the brewery to found Vassar College.

By the end of the Civil War a wave of new immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Great Britain sought beer that appealed to their drinking tastes. The 1860’s onward saw a surge in the production of ale, only to be outpaced by lagers at the turn of the century.

As the country industrialized, workers drank beer during and after their shifts. As personal wealth grew, so did disposable income and beer sales skyrocketed. Bottled beer replaced a sole reliance upon kegs making beer consumption even easier.

The Erie Canal was a key leg in the journey for finished products, like Albany Pale Ale, which according to The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 1849 “found its way to every state in the union, the West Indies, South America, and California.”

John Taylor and Sons of Albany brewed and shipped over 100,000 barrels of beer a year in 1850, relying on the Erie Canal and the Hudson River to move their product.

The late 1800’s saw a shift from local brewing to brewing by firms such as Anheuser-Busch and Pabst in the mid-west. They used the railroads for mass distribution and became known as “shipping breweries”.

Also affecting New York’s role in beer production was a fungal disease (blue mold) which took hold in the late 1800’s. Hop crops began to fail at alarming rates. Within two decades New York State lost its prominence as the leading grower of hops in the nation. With the onset of Prohibition in 1920, the state’s significance in beer manufacturing was merely a memory.

In the past two decades there has been renewed interest in reviving breweries in the capital region. The Common Roots Brewing Company, Albany Outpost, is a recent brewery trying their hand at renewing the local legacy.

In 1999, Common Roots took over the historic Albany Pump House building from C.H. Evans Brewing Company, beer producers with a long history in Hudson NY. C.H. Evans was founded in 1786 and ran until 1999, at their Albany site, when it was bought out by Common Roots.

                                                                       

Fun Facts

·  The Dutch began the brewing tradition in America with a robust oat/wheat beer. That gave way to Scottish, British and German recipes with strong barley and hops as ingredients.

·      Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were home brewers.

·    Picking hops was one of the few activities where men, women and children could mingle and participate in an age & gender approved activity.

·    The contamination of NYC’s early water supply in the late 1700’s helped brewers sell more beer.

·    By 1880, 21 million pounds of hops were harvested in NYS annually.

·   In addition to being a popular flavor among beer drinkers, the addition of hops helped prevent spoilage in beer.

·    The once prolific hop farms in NYS became profitable dairy farms in the 20th century.

·    Ales have top fermenting yeasts while lagers have bottom fermenting yeasts.

·  As the population of America grew, so did per capita consumption of beer, increasing from less than 4 gallons per person in 1865 to 21 gallons by 1910.

Biblio/Images sourced:
    NYS Museum
    NYS Archives
    Historic Marker Database
    History by the Glass, Craig Gravina

 

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