How It Was Made

Albany made three very different beers over its long brewing history. The Dutch made beer from wheat. The British-descended brewers of the 1800s made ale from barley, and sold it nationwide as "Albany Ale." The Germans who arrived after 1848 brought lager, a beer that could not be made without ice. Solid

Behind all three stood a whole city's worth of trades: maltsters, hop dealers, coopers, ice cutters, barge captains and the small workshops that made shovels and stoppers. One of those was Stephen Kampf's shovel and bung works at 186 Jefferson Street, the building where this site was made. Solid¹ This page explains how the beer was made, one step at a time.

Three beers side by side

The quickest way into the subject is a comparison. The table below sets a Dutch wheat beer of the 1650s next to an Albany XX ale of the mid-1800s and a German lager of the 1880s. "XX" was a brewer's mark for a stronger grade of ale; Albany's brewers advertised "XX Pale," "Albany XX Ale" and "Amber XX" right through the 1860s. Solid²

Two things leap out. The ale and the lager used the same grain and nearly the same kettles; what separated them was yeast and temperature. And the Dutch column is full of blanks and inferences, because no Beverwijck brewer left a recipe. Inference

From barley to barrel, step by step

Whether a brewer made ale or lager, the job had the same eight stages. Grain was malted (sprouted and dried), milled, soaked in hot water in the mash to turn its starch to sugar, then boiled with hops. The hot wort was cooled, yeast was added for fermentation, the young beer was aged, and finally it was racked into casks and bunged shut. Solid⁹

The steps are the same; the temperatures are not. Click each step to see how an Albany ale brewer and a lager brewer handled it, and what survives about how it was done in Albany itself.

A walk through Taylor's brewery

The best tour of an Albany ale brewery comes from a book the Taylor firm published about itself in 1866, Ale in Prose and Verse. It's a company puff, so its numbers deserve a raised eyebrow, but a second source from 1868 backs up most of the big features. Single source¹⁶²⁵

John Taylor laid the cornerstone on 15 May 1851, on the riverbank block bounded by Broadway, Ferry Street, Arch Street and the Hudson. The site had once been under the river, and several hundred piles were driven to hold it up. Single source The main building was six stories tall and 80 by 200 feet. On the river stood a seven-story fireproof grain store holding 250,000 bushels, with elevators lifting grain straight out of boats "at the rate of one thousand bushels per hour." Solid

Before building, Taylor toured the London breweries and made drawings of their latest improvements. Single source²⁵ The company's own book names the Lion Brewery as the model but dates the trip to 1860, after the brewery was finished, which can't be right. Disputed

Inside, the book lists a machine age in miniature: two 50-horsepower steam engines, mash tuns for 1,500 bushels a day, coppers of 1,000 and 600 barrels, four fermenting tuns of 1,000 barrels each, thirteen drying kilns and "over two miles of pipe." Single source A "three-throw gun metal pump," built from Taylor's own drawings, moved 200 barrels an hour. Single source

The showpiece was the pontoon room. Here stood "three hundred and sixty-five white cedar vessels or pontoons, capable of holding twenty-six hundred barrels," in five sets. As the ale fermented, the yeast rose and spilled over into troughs, so it cleaned itself instead of being skimmed by hand. Solid

"From each pontoon the creamy yeast, crowned with foam, reminding one of white capped billows, slowly pours itself into the receiving troughs."Ale in Prose and Verse, 1866

Taylor's book calls the old hand-skimming "a slovenly and dirty process," and Bishop called the pontoon system "as yet a novelty in American breweries." Solid²⁵ It's the same idea as the "Burton union" system of English pale-ale brewers. Inference

How big was it really? Bishop gave the plant "the capacity to produce over two hundred thousand barrels per annum." Solid That is capacity, not output. In the year ending 1 May 1877, Taylor & Son actually sold 53,453 barrels, behind the Albany Brewing Co.'s 72,723. Solid²⁷

The brewery also had a clock tower. In 1858 the common council came to inspect its new clock and bell: dials six feet across, a 1,200-pound bell nearly 100 feet above the street, lit at night by gas. Solid²⁸

How strong was Albany Ale?

This is the question everyone asks, and there is exactly one early answer. It comes from an appendix note in the 1843 New York edition of Pereira's Treatise on Food and Diet, edited by Charles A. Lee. Solid¹⁵

"According to Dr. L. C. Beck, Albany Ale in barrels contains 7·38 per cent. alcohol, or 14·76 per cent. proof spirit, while that in bottles has 10·67 per cent. alcohol, or 21·34 per cent. proof spirit."Pereira's Treatise on Food and Diet, New York, 1843

Many modern retellings, including earlier versions of this site, add "by weight" to that sentence and convert it to a hefty 9–13% ABV. The original doesn't say "by weight." Solid So which is it?

The clue is in Beck's own arithmetic. His "proof spirit" figure is exactly double his alcohol figure: 7.38 becomes 14.76, 10.67 becomes 21.34. That's the American proof convention, where proof is twice the alcohol by volume. Inference In the same note, a Scottish analysis of Edinburgh Ale gives "7·35 per cent. alcohol, or 16·15 per cent. by volume of proof spirit," which is not a doubling and so was probably by weight. Inference The most likely reading, then, is about 7.4% ABV from the cask and about 10.7% from the bottle. Disputed

The historians split on it. Craig Gravina reads Beck's figures as alcohol by volume. Alan McLeod has suggested Beck's sample may have been ale two years old, which would explain the strong bottled figure. Single source²⁹

The gap between cask and bottle makes sense either way. Stock ale was aged three to six months and bottled "while moderately lively," and "The bottle stock beers are not pasteurized," so it kept fermenting in the glass. Solid⁷ Bottled Albany Ale was a different, older, stronger product than ale from the tap. Inference

Compare the sworn testimony brewers gave a New York Senate committee in 1835, as summarized by Gravina: table beer at about 1.5–2.5% and ordinary ale at about 5–8%. Single source²⁹ And by 1901, Amsdell's XX was a 4.6–4.9% beer, about the strength of a London mild. Solid³⁰ The name "XX" stayed while the beer got weaker, as happened in Britain. Inference

One more clue sits in the same 1843 appendix. The editor boiled down a sample of "North River Ale" and got about 816 grains of solids per pint, or "nine ounces of solid matter to the gallon." Solid¹⁵ The North River is the Hudson, so this was very likely an Albany-area ale: a full-bodied beer, with plenty of unfermented sugar left in it. Inference

Four Albany Ales you can (almost) taste

No Albany brewer's book from the ale's heyday is known to survive. The oldest Albany recipes we have are two Amsdell brewing logs from 1900–01 and 1904–05, held by the Albany Institute, transcribed by Craig Gravina and analyzed by the beer historian Ron Pattinson. Solid³⁰ Since 2013, brewers have used them and other clues to bring "Albany Ale" back. There are really two different modern Albany Ales: a 1901-style XX of about 5%, and a strong 1835-style pale of 8.7–9.5%. Inference

Barley: the canal's harvest

Albany's ale was built on a geographic accident. The Erie Canal ended at Albany, and the grain counties of central and western New York lay along it. Solid In March 1832 the New-York Farmer's Albany correspondent wrote that "Near 600,000 bushels of barley are brought to this market." It came from fourteen counties, from Albany and Schoharie west to Ontario, Seneca, Cayuga and Tompkins. Solid³⁷

The same writer explained why Albany ale beat New York's: "the quality of the water, and … the facilities afforded in Albany for purchasing the best of hops and barley." One big brewer told him he "should have established his business in N. York had the water been good." Solid

By 1849 an Albany paper could boast that "The city of Albany is known far and wide as the barley market of the Union," where five-sixths of the barley reaching tidewater "from the barley growing counties of the west is bought and sold. The trade lasts about two months." That autumn's sales came to 498,000 bushels. Solid⁵ Barley sold for 80–87 cents a bushel late in 1846 and 60–70 cents in spring 1851. Solid

Almost all of it was sold in Albany, and buyers came "for points as far South as Charleston." Solid By the 1880s Albany's own brewers used 600,000–700,000 bushels a year. Solid¹⁰ From about 1860 to 1890, New York brewers also prized barley from Ontario's Bay of Quinte, shipped across Lake Ontario to Oswego, until a tariff of 1890 choked the trade. Single source³⁸

Barley became malt in buildings that dwarfed most breweries. Here are the city's big malt houses in 1886, with their yearly capacity in bushels:

Malting needed water too, and that's where Albany's most famous beer scandal began. In 1835 the temperance crusader Edward Delavan printed a witness's claim that Fidler & Taylor's malt house "on the hill" drew its steeping water from stagnant ponds with dead animals in them. Solid The claim included a precise detail about the work: "seven hogsheads of water are usually placed in a steep-tub at a time, and it is then filled with barley." Solid³⁹ Taylor sued for libel and lost in April 1840. Solid The full story is in the Albany Ale chapter.

Hops: the central New York hop belt

If Albany was the barley market of the Union, the country just west of it was the hop garden. The 1860 census counted 10,991,996 pounds of hops grown in the United States. New York grew 9,671,931 of them, about 88%. Solid⁴⁰

The census itself remarked that six New York counties produced "over eight and a half millions of pounds of hops, out of a total crop of eleven millions." Solid Otsego County alone grew 3,507,069 pounds, more than every state except New York put together. Solid Toggle the chart to see it.

Albany sat at the hop belt's eastern end and traded its crop. In 1832 about a million pounds of hops came to the Albany market, and 300,000–400,000 pounds a year were shipped on to Europe. Single source³⁷ By 1880 New York grew about 21 million pounds, roughly 80% of the national crop. Single source⁴¹

Every September the hop yards needed thousands of hands at once. The brewing historian G. Thomann described the belt in 1909 as running "between Albany and Rochester, a belt two hundred miles long and fifty miles wide." Solid⁴² "On or about the first day of September, they come with a rush": city mechanics, factory girls and whole families, by wagon, chartered train and on foot. "Bread is baked by the barrel; 'doughnuts' are fried by the bushel." Solid

The working day ran from six in the morning to six at night, with half an hour for lunch. Solid Pickers were paid fifty cents a box, and it took fifteen boxes to fill a 180-pound bale. A fifteen-year-old could pick two or three boxes and "earn a dollar a day." Solid Thomann's picture is a rosy one, and the pickers' own accounts may read differently. Inference

New York's hop empire didn't last. "Up to 1899 New York produced the largest quantity of hops; thereafter Oregon took and maintained first place," and California passed New York soon after. Solid⁴² Powdery and downy mildew, aphids and finally Prohibition finished the job, and hop growing moved to the dry Pacific Northwest. Solid⁴³

Ice, then machines

Ale could be brewed in an ordinary cellar. Lager could not. It ferments at 42–51°F and is stored "as near to freezing point as possible" for months. Solid⁷ Before refrigeration, wrote Thomann, "the successful brewer of lager beer depended very much upon the climate, the supply of ice and the chances of securing... 'Felsenkeller,' rock cellars." Solid⁹

The Hudson supplied the ice. At its 1880s peak, the river's ice industry employed about 20,000 workers, with about 135 ice houses between Poughkeepsie and Albany. Single source⁴⁴ Albany's lager brewers probably stored Hudson ice, but no ledger yet ties a particular brewery to a particular ice harvester. Inference

Even a German community didn't guarantee German beer. Craig Gravina has argued that little lager was actually brewed in Albany before 1860. An 1857 furniture ad offered refrigerators for "Lager Beer purposes," a sign of lager being sold, while Rochester lager was being shipped in by the mid-1860s. Single source⁴⁵ A trade history of 1903 disagrees, crediting Hinckel with 500 barrels of lager in his first year. Disputed⁴⁶

The big change came with Beverwyck's 1878 brewery on North Ferry Street, which Phelps called "the model lager beer brewery of the United States." Its nickel-plated pumps moved "beer, air, ice-water." Solid²³ By 1892 the fire-insurance maps show a room labeled "Refrigerating Mach." at both Hinckel's and Dobler's, and Dobler still kept an ice house as well. Solid¹¹ No source names the makers of Albany's machines. Inference

For scale, Thomann's model New York City brewery ran "four De La Vergne machines, each of an ice melting capacity of 310 tons," cooling about forty cellars. Solid⁴⁷ The machines spread to ale, too: by 1901 American ale brewers were using refrigeration to make "brilliant or sparkling ale... that combines the properties of lager beer and ale." Solid⁷ Hinckel later sold a "Sparkling Ale." Single source

The story ends in a neat circle. By 1934, after Prohibition, Hinckel's old brewhouse on Park Avenue had become an ice factory for the City Ice & Fuel Co. Solid⁴⁸

Barrels, bungs and coopers

Every barrel of Albany beer travelled in a wooden cask, and Albany made a lot of casks. In 1886 the county history claimed that "at one time most of the coopers in the United States were located here, and most of the ale barrels used in this country were manufactured here." Solid¹⁰ It's a booster's boast, not a statistic. Inference But the trade was real and big.

Coopers had organized early. On 31 January 1792 Albany's coopers met at Denniston's tavern and fixed their prices: four shillings for a half barrel, three and six for a ten-gallon keg. A year later the "society of coopers" put everything up a shilling a barrel. Solid⁴⁹

The biggest name of the ale era was Matthew Hawe. Born in Charleville, Ireland, in 1814, he came to America as a toddler and started his own cooperage in 1836. Solid He made "beer barrels, half-barrels and hogsheads," and devised improvements so that the heads of ale casks were as strong at the joint as anywhere else. Solid By 1886 the firm, run by his widow and their son Daniel, had shops at 63 Liberty and 58 Union Streets, about 20 skilled men, and capacity for some 75 ale and beer casks and 150 barrels a week. Solid¹⁰

Other shops filled the old South End. John Pennie Jr., stave dealer and cooper since 1843, worked at 39 Arch Street Solid, a block from Taylor's brewery. Inference John Le Gallez began in 1849; by 1886 A. & W. Le Gallez employed 20 men at 51–61 Liberty Street, much of the work "remodeling barrels of all kinds." Solid In 1876 the cooper Jacob Happ worked at 199 Jefferson Street, across the street from Kampf's future shop if the old numbers match today's. SolidApproximate²²

Cooper numbers peaked around 1870–1880 and then fell by more than half by 1900. Inference Thomann explained why in 1909: "Cooperage is no longer a handicraft in America." Machinery had "virtually wiped out the cooper's handicraft," leaving "a half dozen enormous manufacturing establishments, in which nearly all the barrels required by brewers and distillers are made by machine." Solid⁴⁷

Lager casks had one more step: pitch. Coopers coated the inside with hot brewer's pitch, which made the barrel easier to clean and kept the beer from tasting of wood. Big breweries had a pitch oven and rolled the casks on moving rollers to spread it. Solid⁴⁷ Brewers resisted cheaper petroleum substitutes, because they lacked "that peculiar, although exceedingly faint, flavor for which the ordinary pitch is so highly prized by both the brewer and the drinker." Solid English-style ale casks were usually left unlined, though that isn't confirmed for Albany. Inference

The bung

Every cask had a hole in its belly for filling, and every hole needed a stopper: the bung. A 1901 brewers' handbook describes the standard American kind. They "are made from choice poplar wood and compressed across the grain. The thickness is usually somewhat less than an inch, and the size commonly used in the United States is 1 15-16 inch diameter." Solid⁷

The trick was the compression. An 1862 ad in the Albany directory for Kirby's Patent Compressed Bungs explained that they were "formed by being placed in a compressing die, and subjected to a pressure of several tons," so that they would "expand and fill out into all the irregularities of the bung hole." They came "either of OAK OR POPLAR WOOD... BREWERS, use the Poplar." Solid⁵² As the 1901 handbook put it, "The bung becoming moist by contact with the beer, expands, and fits more tightly than at first." Solid

Bungs were used once. They were knocked in with "a blow of considerable force," and when the empty cask came back, a revolving auger called a bung extractor drilled the old one out. Solid⁷ So every filling of every cask needed a new bung, which is why a city of breweries could support a local bung maker. Inference Some brewers branded the racking date on each bung, to settle arguments with saloonkeepers about stale beer. Solid

That bung maker was Stephen Kampf. He first appears in the 1876 directory on Hamilton Street, making malt shovels, scoops, bungs and taps. By 1885 he was at 186 Jefferson Street, living at 251 Elm, the lot directly behind. Solid⁵³ The 1892 fire map labels his two-story brick shop "S. KAMPF. Mfg. SHOVELS & BUNGS." Solid⁵⁴

The whole story of the shop, the family and the building is on the Bung Factory page.

What's a hogshead? A cask converter

Old brewing records are full of units nobody uses now: tuns, butts, hogsheads, kilderkins and firkins from England; tons, half-vats and schepels from the Dutch. Even "barrel" meant different things at different times. The English ale barrel was 32 ale gallons in 1454 and 34 by 1688, and Britain settled on a 36-gallon beer barrel in 1803. Solid⁵⁵

The American 31-gallon barrel is a tax unit. Section 50 of the federal Internal Revenue Act of 1 July 1862 levied "a duty of one dollar for each and every barrel containing not more than thirty-one gallons" on beer, lager, ale and porter. Solid⁵⁶ Federal regulations still define a barrel as 31 US gallons. Solid⁵⁷ The tax itself was $2.00 a barrel until 30 June 1901, then $1.60. Solid⁷

Pick a unit and a quantity, or try one of the historical examples.

Getting it to market

Albany ale was a shipping beer from early on. In August 1806 a Newport, Rhode Island merchant was already offering "Albany Ale by the dozen." Single source⁶² By 1849 it was found "in every city in the Union," the West Indies, South America and California. Solid¹⁸

The raw materials came in by water, and the ale went out the same way. Barley and hops arrived by the Erie Canal. Solid Canal toll tables of 1830 and 1832 list "beer" as its own class of freight. Single source²⁹ The Taylor house wrote that Albany was "the great central mart for the barley and hops raised in the West, and which, by way of the Erie Canal, are brought to a market at a cheaper rate than they could be by any other conveyance." Single source¹⁶

Downriver, the big firms ran their own depots. Taylor opened a New York depot on Warren Street in 1822 and later built a six-story iron and stone depot on Jay Street, begun in 1862 over granite-roofed ale vaults; empty casks went back to Albany "by barges belonging to the firm." Single source A Boston depot followed in 1851. "The Boston depot supplies the entire eastern, the New York one the southern, and the Albany one the western markets." Single source¹⁶ The maltster William Appleton ran "a line of barges plying on the Hudson between Albany and New York." Solid¹⁰

Open each destination below for the evidence that Albany ale got there.

How did ale survive the voyage?

A cask of ale bound for San Francisco or New Orleans spent weeks or months at sea in the heat. Nothing in Albany's records spells out how brewers made it survive, but the period methods suggest four reasons. Inference

• Strength. Bottled Albany Ale tested at about 10.7% alcohol in 1843, enough to resist spoilage. Inference
• Hops. Strong stock ales took 2–3 pounds a barrel Solid, and hops, as Thomann put it, "produce the preservative qualities of the liquid." Solid⁹
• Age. Stock ale was stored three or four months before shipping or bottling, so most of the sugar had already fermented out. Inference
• Tight wood. Strong-headed hogsheads like Hawe's, sealed with bungs that swelled when wet. Inference

It didn't always work. In 1844 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that "a barrel of Albany Ale exploded." Single source²⁹ Live, still-fermenting ale under pressure was part of the product. Inference

Bottles, corks and crowns

Albany's brewers sold in bottles as well as casks. In 1864 A. A. Dunlop offered "INDIA PALE ALE, XX PALE AND PORTER, in bottle or cask." Solid² A Taylor stoneware bottle of about 1880, marked "Bottled at the Brewery, Albany, NY," was made by a pottery in Glasgow. Single source²⁹

Closures changed fast. Charles Hutchinson patented his wire-spring rubber stopper in 1879, mainly for soda Solid⁶⁷, and the Albany Cork Works was selling them by 1885. Solid William Painter of Baltimore patented the crown cap on 2 February 1892, a cap cheap enough to throw away after one use. Solid⁶⁸ In 1892 the Albany Steam Bottling Works stood right next door to Hinckel's brewery on Park Avenue. Solid¹¹

Pasteurization, the heat treatment Louis Pasteur devised in the 1860s partly to stop beer souring Solid⁶⁹, was used on export bottled lager by 1901, but "The bottle stock beers are not pasteurized." Solid⁷ No source yet dates the first pasteurizer in an Albany brewery. Inference

The can came last. The first canned beer went on sale in 1935, and from 1942 to 1947 canned beer for the home market was barred to save tin. Solid⁷⁰ During the Second World War, most of Beverwyck's beer went in green cans to soldiers in the Pacific. Single source⁷¹ The green was probably military camouflage paint, not a brand color. Inference