Copper King, Tahoe, Royal, Malt Rose, New Style Lager, Sierra, Riter's Elite Steam -these are just some of the many beers once brewed in Nevada. In the Silver State, as in other parts of the country, the production and bottling of beer was a colorful "local industry" during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beers produced by dozens of Nevada breweries engaged in lively competition with "foreign" beers, as local brewers contemptuously labelled out-of-state products. Whether because of the superiority of home beers or simply native pride, the local products held their own. Local brewing flourished until Prohibition, increased production costs, and the more efficient distribution and advertising of large national companies combined to extinguish the small brewing concerns.

In Nevada, vestiges remain only in the form of fading bottles and cans, old breweries and bottlmg plants, yellowed pieces of advertising, photographs and company records. They are intriguing reminders of the once-considerable manufacturing business that began in the early 1860s, when the first mineral booms brought hordes of miners into the region. Part of an overwhelmingly male society, these wealth seekers spent considerable time gambling and drinking, and the resultant demand for beer encouraged the establishment of breweries in many communities. These fluctuated in number and prosperity with the fortunes of the mining industry and the growth or decline of the state's population.

Nevada's first brewery was established in Carson City, where Jacob Klein and his partners in the Carson City Brewery began selling beer for $3 per gallon in 1860. The Carsonites were joined shortly by a small army of Comstock brewmasters who were practicing their craft by the early 1860s. The Nevada, Virginia, Union, California, and the other breweries were active in Virginia City, and had counterparts in Gold Hill, Silver City, Dayton, and American City. Other western Nevada breweries flourished in such places as Genoa, Crystal Peak, and Washoe City.

As prospectors fanned out into the interior of the state and established new mining camps, brewing activity also spread. The year 1863 saw Ploschke and Betz open Austin's first brewery, the Pioneer, and begin marketing their Pioneer Beer. During the 1860s and 1870s, many more breweries appeared at Austin and other signfficant mining camps - among them Belmont, Aurora, Unionville, Eureka, Pioche, Grantsville, Tybo, Tuscarora, and Hamilton - where in 1869, Davison and Wagner's Philadelphia Brewery became the first in White Pine County.

Reno, Wadsworth, Battle Mountain, Elko, and Winnemucca - railroad towns that appeared along the Central Paciftc's transcontinental route in 1868-1869 - also boasted breweries. In Winnemucca, which became a station on the rail line in 1868, two rival breweries appeared. Soon after passenger service began in May, 1869, Head and Krinkle's Winnemucca City Brewery and Charles Kesler's Empire Brewery were both doing business on Bridge Street, competing energetically for customers. Agricultural communities, too, fostered breweries, albeit to a lesser extent than mining camps and railroad towns. Genoa and Paradise Valley were two farming or ranching centers in which commercial breweries existed.

As Nevada's population grew during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Reno became the leading railroad and transportation center. As such, it was Virginia City's principal rival for the title of beer manufacturing capital of the state. In the bustling city by the Truckee River, as in other places, the industry was monopolized by German immigrants. Frederick Hertlein opened his Reno Brewery, the community's first, on Commercial Row in 1868. fohn George Becker, one of several Beckers involved with area saloons and breweries, built the Washoe Brewery in 1870, with an associate, Charles Knust, and the Pacific Brewery eleven years later. William Hoffman, who purchased Hertlein's building in 1873, shortly before it burned to the ground, later acquired Becker's Washoe Brewery. By the 1890's, Henry Riter, afterward owner of the renowned Bowers Mansion resort in Washoe Valley, was running his Elite Brewery at the old Washoe Brewery location and producing Elite Steam Beer.

It should be pointed out that not all activity in the beer industry involved brewing. After rail transportation made distant markets more accessible, out of state brewing companies began shipping their products into Nevada in large quantities. Barrels of these "foreign" beers were unloaded at "beer depots," which were receiving and shipping centers, usually located on railroad spurs and often with bottling works attached. The beer was then either bottled, distributed in kegs to local saloons, or reshipped by wagon or truck to towns with no rail connections.

Reno's leading depots after the turn of the century, all of which had bottling facilities, were the Rainier Bottling Works, of the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company, on Spokane Street; the Buffalo Beer Depot, on Commercial Row; and the John Wieland Bottling Works, specializing in lager from San Francisco's massive John Wieland Brewery, which German born Otto Benschuetz managed at 251 Ralston Street.

The 1900 discovery of silver at Tonopah ushered in a new mining boom, thereby greatly increasing the demand for the products of Nevada's beer makers and bottlers. A new Reno Brewing Company, incorporated by some Montana entrepreneurs, commenced production of a line of beers in 1903. Within. two years this firm absorbed its principal competitor, Riter's Elite Brewing Company, built impressive new brewing and bottling plant on East Fourth Street and became the largest beer manufacturer in the state. In 1905, it contemplated, but did not build, a brewery in Tonopah; and it continued to prosper despite the advent of beer manufacturing in such new mining centers as Goldfield (where Munich native Max Stenz, formerly with Riter's Elite and later owner of the Carson Brewery, became the leading industrial figure), Ely (where the Consumers Malting and Brewing Company produced its Copper King Beer), and Gold Center, the short-lived camp in Nye County near Beatty.

In places that did not acquire breweries, beer depots often appeared. Among these were Tonopah, where the John Wieland Company occupied a stone storage building in 1901, and Las Vegas. By the summer of 1905, a cold storage warehouse for the Maier and Zobelein Brewing Company of Los Angeles had been completed and was supplying beer to the.swelling populace of Las Vegas as well as thirsty inhabitants of booming mining camps to the north.

The local beer industry in Nevada and the rest of the couptry virtually ceased to exist at the end of the World War 1. Prohibition commenced in Nevada in 1919, under state law, a year earlier than it did nationally. Most small breweries closed and never reopened. in Nevada, only the modem Reno Brewery and the prestigious old Carson Brewery, both of which converted to the manufacture of legal "Volstead" or "near" beer during the dry years, were still around to resume production of real lager when Prohibition ended in the 1930s. However, increased competition from larger, more efficient out-of-state breweries soon forced even these survivors to shut down. The Carson Brewery produced its last Tahoe Beer ("Famous as the Lake') in 1948, and the Reno Brewing Company's renowned Sierra Beer disappeared in 1957.

Not much remains today of the buildings that once housed Nevada's native beer industry. There are a few inactive breweries - such as the Carson Brewery and Virginia City's Union Brewery and a small number of "recycled" bottling works - including Reno's Rainier, Wieland, and Reno Brewing Company buildings. In Tonopah, the modest storage structure erected for the John Wieland Company is still in use as a private residence.

©1986 Nevada State Museum, Carson City, NV 89710