Like the full, intact bottle of 125+ year-old beer found by divers deep in Nova Scotia mud, it’s not unusual for a lost treasure of beer history to resurface in an unlikely spot.

So it happened one strangely warm and sunny Christmas Eve deep in a stretch of Midwest usually encumbered by cold this time of year, if not snow.

I was perusing a sleepy secondhand bookstore on the rear-facing, lower-rent end of a Midwestern strip mall. While searching (ultimately unsuccessfully) for a juicy tidbit of local ephemera to buy as a Christmas stocking stuffer, I came across a printed booklet of musings written by one Emerson “Bat” Batdorff.

One of these shortish, avuncular, and colorful essays had to with beer in the era of American Prohibition. So we at The Comic Book Story of Beer are reprinting it here for your edification and amusement.

Batdorff, who shook loose of this mortal coil in 2005 (and ranked highly enough to be briefly eulogized on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives), was a war hero and a journalist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He was also a home brewer “before it was cool.”

And so, Batdorff reports, were his father and grandmother.

In the following piece, Batdorff spins a yarn of illicit home brewing in Akron, Ohio, under the not-so-watchful eyes of a thirsty local police and the considerably more vigilant, but far less present, gaze of federal Prohibition agents.

The mix of nostalgia, memoir, and history makes the essay worth reading. I have come across only a few such casual accounts of brewing during Prohibition, and none so well spiced with comic memory.

I am hoping to get our man Mike Smith to comment about the “corn sugar” enumerated among the home brew ingredients in this article.

Until then? Enjoy!

OF PATIENCE AND THE ART OF HOME BREW

by Emerson Batdorff

To my mother, the most dangerous time of basement beer making was the bottling.

My father and I would be down in the basement siphoning the home brew from the five gallon crock into the pop bottles that I had washed. We did this to the accompaniment of floor creaks as my nervous mother stalked uneasily above us from the dining room windows to the living room windows.

She was looking for Prohibition agents. She figured they would likely swoop down—liquor agents always swooped down in newspaper stories of the time—while we were bottling the beer.

She was never able to explain the timing of this anxiety. The beer had been in the basement, feloniously, for two weeks or so already. Eager Prohibition agents could have swooped at any time. They didn’t need to wait. But come bottling time, the “Feds” were the worry of her life.

She knew we would have no trouble with the Akron Police Department. One of the drinkers of the home brew was Patrolman Strayer, from down the street. He was not likely to turn off his source of supply by turning us in.

Or one of his sources of supply. Akron was full of home brew makers, as I expect the rest of the nation was in spite of laws against it. Newspapers carried ads for malt (Blue Ribbon and Red Top are brands I remember particularly) and for corn sugar.

Malt and corn sugar are principal ingredients of home brew. Another ingredient is hops. Those we sometimes bought and sometime raised in the hot sun from which they shielded the back porch. They sting your hands when you pick them.

One of the main necessities of the home brewer is beer yeast. Many years later, after making beer was legal and I started to make it myself, my father told me that he had never been able to get his hands on true beer yeast. He had to exist all those years on baker’s yeast. He resented it, of course.

He did awfully well in spite of the difficulties and shortages. The main shortage was that of money, for this was the depression, but every once in a while he would get together enough money for a batch of beer and come home with the makings. A can of malt cost 25 cents as I remember it. He would also bring a couple of pounds of corn sugar, which Americans, but not Germans, to this day use in their beer.

Sometimes the malt was hopped and and sometimes we had to boil up the hops and mix it in the wort. The inadequate yeast he got at the grocery store.

My main job in the brewery was washing the bottles, and to this day that is the least attractive part of making home brew. I was also entrusted with putting half a teaspoon of priming sugar into each bottle.

My father did the actual siphoning and bottling.

I was told by people talking like they knew, that we made awfully good beer. Those were the friends that who came to the beer parties my family occasionally held.

I don’t know how good the beer was, but I know if was effective. Ern Boser showed me that. We lived on Dayton Street in Akron in a small one-story house with the front steps in the middle of the porch. The walk, however, did not go straight ahead. It went to the right, towards the driveway.

It was bordered on the street by a good hedge of particularly vicious barberry. Old Ern Boser, leaving the house one night after too much home brew, got too much left windage in his walking and instead of proceeding down the sidewalk he strode right into the barberry hedge.

“Umm!” I heard him as the prickers bit in. “Umh! Thithelth!” And he plunged directly ahead , braving the thistles because he didn’t remember that the walk was parallel to them.

My father never let me have any of the home brew because he figured I was too young. I think I was about 11 at the start of his brewing career, which went on sporadically until prohibition was over.

He never had any beer blow up, which is understandable because he knew to let beer work until it was through producing gas. On the other hand, my grandmaw [sic], also a beer maker, was not patient enough to let it come down. She bottled early.

This accounts for the doors on the basement cupboards of her house near us on Dayton Street. At first she stored the beer on open shelves in the basement. It was always a bottle in the back of the three rows on a shelf that would blow up, pushing the other two out onto the concrete floor.

“Verdampte bier!” she would comment, reverting to Pennsylvania Dutch as she usually did in times of stress.

Her solution was to have my grandfather put doors on the shelves, thus saving the other two bottles unless they went up spontaneously on their own.

Beer bottled before its time also is wild when the bottle is opened, and many a geyser of beer anointed her kitchen ceiling.

My father told her time and again not to bottle beer so soon, but she was a stubborn woman and did it wrong to the end of her days.

I remembered my father’s advice. After President Carter did the most humanitarian deed of his career, legalizing home brew, I started making it, and I never had a bottle blow up. It’s a good thing, too, because I don’t think I know enough Pennsylvania Dutch to cope with exploding bottles and beer geysers.

UPDATE January 11, 2016:

On the subject of corn sugar and brewer’s yeast reported in the anecdote above, our man Mike Smith reports the following: