St. Louis, Missouri: A city founded on caves and beer

Beer aged in caves

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. 

Lemp’s brewing cave, later called Cherokee Cave
A 1962 map of Lemp’s brewing cave, later called Cherokee Cave from Williams, Craig. "An Examination of the Lemp Brewery Cave." Brewery History Society 155 (2013): 16-32.

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. 

 

A Lemp’s St. Louis Lager Beer bottle
A Lemp’s St. Louis Lager Beer bottle from 1896 from Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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. 

 

Uhrig’s Cave in St. Louis
The entrance to Uhrig’s Cave in St. Louis around 1870 from Robert Benecke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

 

Sources Cited

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.

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