Near nature, near beer

Modern Spokane is not without its breweries, if you count several fine local microbreweries. Yet for most of Spokane’s history, there was nothing remotely “micro” about the city’s breweries.

100 years ago, Spokane had five big breweries churning out rivers of suds. Local beers with names such as Inland Pride and Gilt Top were served in saloons, carried out in growlers (buckets) and delivered by wagon to homeowners’ doorsteps. In fact, local beer dominated the market even after Prohibition in the 1930s and 1940s.

You could hardly miss these breweries – they were among the biggest buildings in town. Robert Hyslop, in his invaluable book, “Spokane Building Blocks,” calls them “castles on the Rhine.”

To get an idea, take a gander at the old Schade Brewery next time you drive down East Trent (528 E. Trent Ave.). This massive brick edifice, built in 1903, is Spokane’s only surviving building from the golden age of suds.

The first breweries arrived with the first wave of residents. Before the age of refrigeration, beer had to be local because it would quickly go stale in transport. Several saloons made their own beer and a “Spokane Brewery” was in operation on Post Street in 1883.

The first big brewery in Spokane was called the New York Brewery, on the northwest corner of Front (now Trent) and Washington Street, which Hyslop called a “great cube of rubble-stone masonry.” Other major breweries in 1889 were the Henco Bros. Brewers and the Spokane Brewery.

More massive brick fortresses soon began to go up after the Great Fire of 1889. The Galland-Burke Brewery was a five-story brick building at the southeast corner of Broadway Avenue and Lincoln Street. It went up in 1892 and was renamed the Spokane Brewery in 1902 (no relation to the earlier Spokane Brewery). Generations of Spokane residents remember looking across the river from downtown at the huge sign on the roof that flashed the words “Gilt Top Bottled Beer.”

The Schade was built in 1903 by Bernhard Schade, former brewmaster at the New York Brewery. It had the largest capacity in town: 40,000 barrels a year. Another giant brewery was the Inland Brewery, originally called Hieber Brewing and Malting, which operated out of a block-long five-story plant on the north side of Second Avenue, between Walnut and Cedar Streets.

The Inland Brewery has significance in Spokane history because that plant hired a certain Harry Crosby to be a bookkeeper in 1905. He brought his family, including the toddler Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby, from Tacoma. The elder Crosby worked at the Inland Brewery until Bing moved the family down to L.A. in the 1930s.

Bing had a job at the Inland Brewery while a teenager, and in his autobiography, “Call Me Lucky,” he talks about the men who ran Spokane’s breweries.

“The braumeister was an elderly German, Otto Held,” wrote Bing. “I’d go up into the great rooms in the brauhaus where the giant vats, 20 feet across, were installed. … I’d visit with Otto and enjoy myself immensely. He smoked a long German pipe with a porcelain bowl with roses on it and he wore big hip boots. … All the older fellows who worked there were Germans from the old country, with genuine musical-comedy German accents.”

The breweries thrived until 1916, when disaster struck. Washington State had passed a Prohibition law. Some, including the Inland Brewery, squeaked by making near-beer, vinegar and pickles.

Upon repeal in 1933, the industry immediately revived – there were four major local breweries operating within a few years. One was in the old Schade Brewery, now called the Golden Age Brewery. The Inland Brewery became the Bohemian.

Meanwhile, Harry Goetz (the son of “Dutch Jake” Goetz) opened the new Goetz brewery with partner E.G. Sick, and it soon merged with Spokane Brewing and Malting Co. They revived the old Gilt Top recipe, brewing it once again at the old Spokane Brewery plant on Broadway.

The first bottlings of Gilt Top sold out immediately, prompting the manager to say, “Evidently the reputation of Gilt Top in the old days is not forgotten.”

However, by the 1940s and 1950s improved refrigeration and mass-marketing began to kill off regional brewers all over the U.S. Gilt Top was discontinued in 1943, and the Spokane Brewery was later renamed Sicks’ Rainier Brewing Co. The building was torn down in 1963.

The age of Spokane macrobrews was over.

However, if any Spokane microbrewers need a good name for a new brew, here’s suggestion: Gilt Top. It has plenty of Spokane history behind it. Who knows? Its reputation may still not be forgotten.