Cover Story

By Kevin Lee Associate Editor

Lots of suds in Mobile mug, in the past, present and future

By Kevin Lee

Associate editor

In a town as old as Mobile, it only makes sense that the Port City would have a similar longtime relationship with one of Western Civilization’s oldest drinks – beer.

Mobile’s Eleventh Annual International Beer Festival resumes Aug. 23 where over 50 different microbrews and imports will be featured in a variety of venues. It seemed an ideal time to take a glance at the city’s relationship with its favorite sudsy adult beverage.

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According to Wikipedia, the brewing and fermentation of starches from cereals into beer may date back to the Sixth Millenium BC. In those times, the brewed beverage could actually be safer to drink than water, with its alcohol and acidity killing bacteria and viruses that infected water supplies.

A prayer to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi served as not only religious ritual but also a method for committing a beer recipe to memory in a society of mostly illiterate people.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology proclaims their researchers found the earliest chemical evidence of beer from inside a pottery vessel dated circa 3500-3100 BC from the site of Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran.

It traditionally had low alcohol content and was flavored with herbs, spices, fruit, honey or tree bark and grasses.

During the Industrial Revolution, beer manufacturing moved from artisanal to industrial and domestic production severely curtailed.

Though contemporary residents may not realize it, Mobile has a long history with breweries.

“It was pretty common to have small local breweries in towns back then,” Kip Sharpe said. Sharpe, a self-avowed beer connoisseur and historian, has made it his business to know. His articles on Mobile brewing history have been published in the Gulf Coast Historical Review and Tampa Historical Review.

One room of Sharpe’s west Mobile home is completely dedicated to the beverage, hundreds of cans of all ages and origins line two walls of shelves, along with a cornucopia of memorabilia. Promotional items such as clocks, drinking glasses and the like have taken decades to acquire.

“We’ve had a lot of them here,” Sharpe said. “One that I found interesting was the Gelbke Brewery that ran for about 12 to 15 years. They had a brewery, a saloon and a gunsmith shop all in one.”

According to records, the Gelbke facility ran from roughly the end of the Civil War until the 1880s in a Springhill Avenue location just west of Broad Street.

“My wife’s favorite was probably the Golden Eagle Brewery,” Sharpe quipped, “because she’s a Southern Miss alum.”

In 1890, Mobile’s renowned Lyons family entered the brewing business when A. Sidney Lyons founded the Mobile Brewery.

Several key employees of that brew house left and formed the largest of the Port City’s brew houses, the Bienville Brewery at St. Joseph and Bloodgood streets. Ground was broken in 1901 and Lebaron Lyons was a chief officer in an endeavor that seemed destined to corner the brewing market for the influential family.

The four-story building was completed in 1902 and had an annual capacity of 50,000 barrels. The brewery was a union shop that employed 75 men.

E. A. Engler was brought to the facility as brewmaster from Tampa, a center of beer manufacturing on the Gulf Coast. In 1904, Engler was replaced by Joseph Friedhoff a German-born Mobilian whose older brother Carl was brewmaster at Mobile Brewery.

Bienville had a rough go of it initially and improvements were being mulled when it was damaged by a hurricane in 1906.

In 1907, the state legislature passed a prohibition that effectively sealed the brewery’s fate. Equipment was sold to a Georgia facility and when the state’s prohibition was lifted in 1911, they were unable to resume operations.

The chief officers of Bienville Brewery returned to similar corporate positions elsewhere around town. Lebaron Lyons resumed presidency of Alabama Corn Mills Company.

Carl Friedhoff was famously slain in 1914 in an altercation with daughter Ellanora’s suitor on a Mobile street.

The Bienville building was next used for lumber storage, then acquired by Fosko Bottling Company in 1946.

It was converted to a Dodge auto dealership in the 1950s and razed in 1991 to make room for an interstate highway.

According to information from the Beer Institute, Alabama ranks 26th in per capita consumption with 31.9 gallons. The national average is 30.4 gallons annually.

Mobile’s Underage Drinking Task Force recently announced statistics saying the amount of beer sold in Mobile County last year equaled 457 12-ounce cans for each person of legal age.

The state average is 233 12-ounce cans per year for every citizen.

A National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism survey on per-capita alcohol consumption concluded 60 percent of Alabamians don’t drink.

“There are a lot of people consuming alcohol in really harmful ways and in massive quantities. That’s harmful to them and their families,” Dr. Bert Eichold told the Press-Register in response to the announcement. Eichold is a county health officer and task force member. “If Talladega ran seven days a week and football was played 12 months a year, I’d hate to think how much we’d consume,” he commented.

There are over 1,500 businesses in Mobile County licensed to sell alcohol, and almost 900 in Baldwin County.

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For Todd Hicks, beer isn’t just a passion, it’s a livelihood. The brew master at the Cannon Brew Pub has held the same position since the building first opened as the Port City Brewery in the early 1990s. Hicks claimed the facility was the first brewpub to open in Alabama since prohibition was lifted.

Originally from the New Orleans area, Hicks’ fermentation yen was cultivated at home. His mother, an award-winning winemaker, introduced him to her specialty and then bought her teenager a kit for brewing beer.

“She was cutting out her chief competition,” Hicks joked.

The young man attended college in Mobile, furthering his brewing prowess all the while.

“One day I was cruising around downtown and stopped in to check on the progress to Port City Brewery,” he recalled. “I found out they were looking for assistant brewers so I talked to them, brought some of my brews by the next day. I got the job and was head brewer after six months.”

Since then, Hicks has brewed at Magic city Brewery in Birmingham, McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola and their branch business in Destin, Sharktooth’s Brewery in Destin and Santa Rosa Bay Brewery in Ft. Walton Beach.

Hicks returned to Mobile in 2003. He still consults with a brewery in Jackson, Miss. and with Perdido Vineyards Winery just north of Mobile.

Understandably, he exhibits the requisite pride in small brews and the discriminating palate one would expect from his profession.

“The stuff a lot of people think is beer, the things that are passed off by larger brewers with famous names, it’s swill,” Hicks said. The pub offers a variety of brews at all times, with ales, lagers and stouts that rotate through the seasons.

Hicks is proud of his product and the 14-barrel-by-length facility he has worked with for over a decade. “I helped start this place,” he said looking around. “I like what we produce.”

He has faced several challenges with the historic building. Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina damaged the pub but didn’t wreak the havoc from less foreseeable forcees.

“We were getting a new roof and had some roofers that didn’t know what they were doing,” Hicks said. “They took our boiler, a key piece of equipment, and threw it off the roof, three stories straight into the street. It took $12,000 to replace that.”

Understandably, Hicks follows the Free The Hops campaign closely. The grassroots movement is seeking to open up the market for Alabama beer aficionados to purchase specialty beers. Their aim is to lift the 6 percent alcohol by volume and 16-ounce container limits in the state. A recent proposal to rescind the limits failed to pass the state legislature.

“It made it through the committee and died on the floor,” Hicks said. “The senate dropped the ball on it.”

He sees the movement as one of freedom for consumers and retailers.

“It’s not the legislature’s job to restrict choice,” Hicks said.

Trying to Free the Hops

By Peter Teske

Lagniappe staff

The Dauphin Street Beerfest will go yet another year without serving craft beers.

That’s like hosting the Olympics, and a day before the opening ceremony, telling Michael Phelps that you’re not allowing fish/human hybrids to compete in any of the swimming events.

Hell, that’s just plain crazy if you take into account the fact that China hired a guy capable of running on air for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Why would any organization throw a festival in honor of something as great as beer without bothering to invite all the superstars? Well, if they could, they would.

The reason you won’t be tasting any Abita Jockamo, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot or Dogfish Head Raison d’Etre is because at least one Alabama lawmaker – true quote here folks – seems to think, “The beer we got drink pretty good. Don’t it?”

Free the Hops thinks it don’t.

Working in a non-profit capacity, Free the Hops is a grassroots organization that finds pride in being comprised of intelligent, professionally successful, polite and amicable craft beer lovers. This works to the contrary of the opinion of one member of the Alabama legislature who accused Free the Hops supporters of all coming from Germany in a Mercedes Benz. Yes, that’s right. One, single, Mercedes Benz. Free the Hops has 1,100 paying members. Must have been a tight squeeze.

According to the group’s Web site, “Currently, Alabama is one of only three states in the country that limits alcohol by volume (ABV) for beer to only 6 percent, and the only state that limits beer containers to a size of no more than one pint (16 ounces).”

The Web site claims these Prohibition-era laws are beyond overly restrictive because roughly one-third of the world’s beers exceed 6 percent ABV and many of these high-quality craft beers are only available in 22-ounce bottles. Alabama does not currently have any such laws restricting bottle sizes or ABV of liquor or wine.

Free the Hops decided to take action in late 2004 and became an incorporated non-profit business by 2007. One year before its incorporation, Free the Hops began introducing the Gourmet Beer Bill, which proposes some staggering changes to current law. The main alteration calls for the ABV limitation for beer to be raised from six to 13.9, just a smidgen less than your average bottle of wine and far less than any liquors, some of which carry with them a 100 percent ABV.

Despite success stories in Southern states that formerly harbored similar outdated laws, like Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, some Alabama legislators are uncomfortable with the idea of a liberated, flavor stabilizing flower. Over the past three years Free the Hops and its Gourmet Beer Bill have been awarded the Shroud Award at least once. The Shroud Award is a gag prize given to the sponsor of the deadest bill of a given session.

No reason to give up hope, though. In three years the Gourmet Beer Bill has been presented three times and some progress has been made.

To learn more about Alabama’s antiquated beer laws and how they can be changed for the better visit freethehops.org.

Kevin Lee is Lagniappe associate editor. Contact him at klee@lagniappemobile.com.

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