William Gretz Brewing Company

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The William Gretz Brewing Company is a former American brewery in Philadelphia . The company was founded in 1858 and closed in 1961 .

history

The brewery was founded in 1858 by Albert Schwarz on the corner of Germantown Avenue and West Oxford Street. Ten years later, ownership of the brewery passed to business partners John Gundler and Charles Schwarz. Two years later, Gundler took over the Schwarz shares and ran the brewery until 1876.

In 1881 Leonard and Frank Reiger took over the brewery, and William Gretz became a business partner in the same year. The brewery was renamed Tivoli Brewery (also Reiger & Gretz, Tivoli Brewery ). In the following fifteen years the brewery was expanded by a number of buildings: an ice house was built in 1885, a bottling house in 1894, a four-story brewery, a malt house, a two-story machine house and a boiler house in 1895. Jacob Herold acted as architect for these three extensions. In 1896 another two-story house designed by the architect Kurt W. Peuckert was added. The style that characterizes the buildings is the arched style .

In 1909 the company was renamed Reiger & Gretz Brewing Company . Gretz's son William Gretz Jr. got a job as an engineer and designed parts of the machinery used by the brewery. His second son, Charles W. Gretz, began working as a master brewer for the brewery after graduating from the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago .

In 1920 the brewery had to adjust to the beginning of prohibition . During this time, beer with a low alcohol content was produced ("near beer", alcohol content approx. 0.5%). In 1923 the brewery was accused of producing beer with too high an alcohol content - it was closed for a year as a punishment. In 1930 William Gretz Sr. died.

After the end of Prohibition in 1933, William Gretz Jr. and his brother Charles bought the shares of the Reiger family and started brewing again under the name William Gretz Brewing Company . Can filling was introduced.

The success of the Gretz brewery was, among other things, due to its effective marketing campaigns. In 1940 a marketing campaign was started in which a large poster with a question mark and the slogan "Made the old-fashioned way" was printed and attracted a lot of attention. The question mark was finally pasted over with the logo of the brewery and an advertising figure.

At the height of its manufacturing activity in 1950, 250,000 barrels of beer were produced, representing a 5% market share in Philadelphia. In 1951, the company was completely owned by Charles Gretz. Of the seventeen breweries that reopened after Prohibition, only four remained in 1952: Gretz, Schmidt's, Ortlieb’s and Esslinger's.

In 1957, an advertising campaign was carried out in which the Gretz brewery painted eleven sports cars, which were comparatively smaller than other vehicles, in the company colors and with the brewery's logo. These were first introduced at a football game between the US Army and US Navy at Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia. The idea behind the campaign was to emphasize that Gretz, as a comparatively small brewery, offers superior quality compared to the large companies (“There's big performance in this small car, and there's always better flavor from a small brewery!”) A small car has great performance and a small brewery always offers better taste! ”). Pictures of the sports cars were also found on the cans of the brewery.

In addition, Gretz sponsored various bowling teams, a barbershop quartet and a one-time, televised beauty pageant, the "Gretz Cavalcade of Girls", in 1951.

Due to increased cost and competitive pressure from nationwide breweries such as Anheuser Busch and Schlitz , the production of draft beer had to be stopped in 1958. The market share fell. Four years earlier, Bob Gretz Sr. had left the company. In addition, the master brewer had to resign due to illness.

On January 20, 1961, the brewery was bought by local rivals Esslinger's and closed after filing for bankruptcy. The brewery had been a family business since William Gretz Sr. joined the company. Gretz beer was still produced by Esslinger for five more years, then Esslinger's was bought by the New York Jacob Ruppert Brewery.

The chimney with the inscription "Gretz beer" and the former brewery were not demolished and can still be seen today.

The Gretz family is still in the beer business: The Gretz Beer Company acts as a wholesaler for Anheuser Busch and various small craft beer breweries .

swell

  1. ↑ Some sources give the year 1861 as the year of foundation