Around 350 million years ago, shallow, warm-water seas covered much of what is now the central United States. As the waters receded over millions of years, debris from generations of plants and animals fell to the seabed and slowly compressed into limestone. Buried by subsequent epochs, the limestone was subjected to the appetite of acid rain as it seeped through the ground and carved out subterranean holes. Eventually, underwater rivers would flow through these fissures enlarging them into caves. Thanks to this process, the state of Missouri is home to somewhere between 6,200 and 7,500 caves today.
Hundreds of years before the founding of St. Louis, the porous kerst fields of this region were home to the expansive culture of Mississipians who built the large city of Cahokia on the same land where St. Louis would eventually stand. The location took advantage of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These indigenous settlers attributed spiritual importance to water and Cahokians likely held the subterranean springs trickling within the caves of Missouri in great reverence. At least one Cahokian shrine stood over a large sinkhole on one kerst plain. Watery holes like there were portals to another world.
When German settlers crossed the same land in the 1800s, they found equal importance in the cavernous holes that pockmarked the frontier landscape of the early state. These Germans were fleeing religious persecution, and after 1848, violent revolution. They hoped to find a new home and build a new community on the American frontier.
As German immigrants settled down, they brought with them a culture of brewing. Cities like St. Paul and St. Louis caught the attention of some of the earliest German settlers in part due to their natural endowment of caves and caverns.
Back in Germany, brewers had been digging cellars and using natural caves to ferment beer at colder temperatures since the early modern period. The cold temperatures made for a long, slow fermentation, from which the beer received the name lager, after the German term for ‘storage’. Over hundreds of years of selective brewing practices, brewers isolated and reused yeast that settled to the bottom of the beer. Today, these bottom-fermenting, cold-loving yeast are the defining ingredient of lager and are typically Saccharomyces pastorianus.
While St. Louis’s first brewery began making beer in 1809, lager had to wait for Johann Adam Lemp to move to the city in the late 1830s. His brewery opened in the early 1840s and is supposedly the first one to produce cave-aged lager in the city. Around the same time, McHose & English bought and renovated a cave that became known as English Cave in 1842.
These limestone caves maintained a year round temperature of about 55°F, perfect for lager fermentation. If brewers wanted to make them colder, they could stack ice in them as many were outfitted with drainage systems for runoff. The nearby Mississippi was also an asset to the nascent beer industry for both its abundance of water and its transportation potential.
The early brewers were harbingers of the future population’s appetite–or thirst–for beer. Germans began to flock to the city, particularly after a German man became an impassioned “Missouri promoter” and preached the founding of a “New Germany” there in his report Eine Reise zu den westlichen Staaten von Nordamerika in 1833. They brought with them a great sense of gemütlichkeit or good cheer and camaraderie that relied in part on beer.
Lager was popular, and the early brewers of St. Louis became tycoons in a matter of years. With their money, they dug their caves bigger and deeper, expanding the capacity of their breweries while also creating new subterranean beer halls where St. Louisans came to eat, drink, and dance. English Cave was 255 feet long and 40 feet, with a 30 foot ceiling. Uhrig’s cave had a tunnel stretching all the way back to the brewery in which a narrow gauge railroad was installed. Lemp continued expanding his brewery, intentionally building on top of caves. Similarly, up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where caves were also common, the first brewery produced its signature beer called “Yoerg’s Cave Aged Beer.”
By 1860, there were 40 breweries in St. Louis alone, but the biggest had yet to emerge from its hidden limestone den. The 1852 discovery of a large cave by Joseph Schneider would become the foundation of Bavarian Brewery which in a short time would become the founding place of Anheuser-Busch, the same company that would bring mass-market lagers like Budweiser to America.
While Anheuser-Busch would go on to become the largest brewer in the world after its 2008 merger with InBev, the other brewers of early St. Louis collapsed over time. Artificial refrigeration heralded the first shift away from the use of caves for lagering–they were simply no longer necessary. Lemp brewery stopped using their caves altogether, and the wealthy Lemp family outfitted the caves as living spaces, supposedly even installing an underground pool. The family operated their grandfather’s brewery until Prohibition, when the business finally shuttered its operations. The old Lemp Brewery building stood intact until one of its walls collapsed in 2020.
Today, most of St Louis’s beer caves have been filled in during construction or sealed off and forgotten. Nevertheless, the hollow ground beneath this city was pivotal to its foundation. The caves were known by natives long before Europeans arrived, but they would become a vibrant part of the story of St. Louis. Without these caves, a profitable brewing industry never would have come about. Lagering would have been impossible in the pre-electric era, and the German community might have found their home elsewhere. The caves were even used to dump bodies during the cholera outbreak of 1849.
The caves of St. Louis attracted a community, who went on to build a city. The early economic stimulus of the brewing industry surely set St. Louis up as one of the major hubs of the midwest. Even today, Anheuser-Busch is one of the largest employers in the city. This history is not forgotten, it is only buried. All St. Louis has to do is look down–deep into its foundations, into its beer filled caves.
Alt, Susan M. “Histories of Greater Cahokian Assemblages.” The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology, edited by R. Ethridge and E. Bowne (2020): 61-81.
Brueggemann, Gary J. “Beer Capital of the State—St. Paul’s Historic Family Breweries.” Ramsey County History 16.2 (1981): 3-15.
Elliott, William R. “Zoogeography and biodiversity of Missouri caves and karst.” Journal of Cave and Karst Studies 69.1 (2007): 135-162.
“Karst in Missouri.” Karst in Missouri | Missouri Department of Natural Resources, https://dnr.mo.gov/land-geology/geology/karst-missouri.
Lemp Brewery. Missouri Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 8, 2022, from https://missouriencyclopedia.org/groupsorganizations/lemp-brewery
Miller, Eoghan P. St. Louis’s German brewing industry: Its rise and fall. University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.
Schlafly, Tom. “Schlafly Beer and the Renaissance in St. Louis (Innovations Case Narrative: Schlafly Beer).” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 11.1-2 (2016): 46-58.
St. Louis Public Radio By Rachel Lippmann. “Past Meets Present in Hidden World under St. Louis Streets.” STLPR, 31 Jan. 2019, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/2012-04-20/past-meets-present-in-hidden-world-under-st-louis-streets.
Vollmar, Helen D., and Joseph E. Vollmar Jr. “Caves, Tunnels and Other Holes under St. Louis.” Gateway Heritage: The Magazine of the Missouri Historical Society, vol. 8, no. 2, Fall 1987, pp. 1–7. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=ahl&AN=46904792&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Williams, Craig. “An Examination of the Lemp Brewery Cave.” Brewery History Society 155 (2013): 16-32.
Guatemalans make a sort of limeade out of salt, limes, and soda water. Interestingly, Argentines have used the same term to refer to a kind of yerba mate. The word comes from the earliest years of Conquest in Latin America, and once referred to escaped slaves.
While New Englanders relied on their infamous cold to strengthen their applejack, the neighboring Mid Atlantic states, particularly New York and New Jersey, were famous for their distilled applejack. Unlike New England’s frozen drink which was homemade and home-consumed, New Yorkers made big business with their apple brandy. A 1903 newspaper reported that Orange County, New York paid more in excise tax on distilled fruit than any other state in the Union.
Many species of orchids have two bulbs. One can be dried and ground into a powder called salep. In Turkey, this powder is used to make a thick, hot beverage in the winter and ice cream in the summer. Many believed that the orchid had medicinal and aphrodisiacal powers, so the powder and drink have long been coveted. Over-harvesting orchids has threatened some species, so substitutes are common.
Water kefir is a simple fermented beverage made from water, sugar, and a water kefir grain. The Kefir Chicks, based out of Western Pennsylvania, are bringing the drink to market with a message focused on gut health. The drink is full of microbes and probiotics that can help to replenish the gastrointestinal microbiome. And they will teach you how to make it! Just beware, the living culture is temperamental and the drink may explode.
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