Fitger's Brewing Company was a beer manufacturer in Duluth, Minnesota, United States, from 1881 to 1972. The surviving brewery complex stretches for along the Lake Superior shoreline and East Superior Street, one of Duluth's main roads. The majority of the ten-building complex was constructed between 1886 and 1911. Fitger's, as it is now known, has undergone adaptive reuse as an indoor mall with shops, restaurants, nightclubs, a hotel, and a museum on the brewery's history.
Fitger's Brewing Company grew directly out of a brewery established in 1859, making it the first commercial brewery at the head of Lake Superior and the oldest continuously operating brewery in the state of Minnesota until going out of business in 1972. Fitger's was a major local employer, producing 100,000 barrels of beer annually. It stayed open during Prohibition by diversifying into soda and candy bar production.
Brewing history
Origins
A nationwide financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, had caused most of the Duluth's early pioneers to leave. A history of Duluth written in 1910 relates, "Of the handful remaining in 1859 four men were unemployed and one of those was a brewer. Capital idea; build a brewery. The absence of malt and hops and barley did not at all embarrass those stout-hearted settlers." The men rented property on a stream that emptied into Lake Superior and owned by Sidney Luce. The stream became known as Brewery Creek, as it still is today. While the original brewery "was not a pecuniary success", a few decades later it was to become the Fitger Brewing Company.
The original brewery was purchased in 1881 by Michael Fink, who decided to build a larger brewery a block and a half away and down the stream on Superior Street. Construction of the new building began on September 19, 1881, and was completed the next year. Dubbed Fink's Lake Superior Brewery, it included offices, sleeping quarters for employees, brewing facilities, and its own drinking establishment, the Brewery Saloon. Lake Superior Brewery sold its first beer in August 1882. The brewery was very successful from the beginning and sold beer as far west as Aitkin, Minnesota, and as far east as Thunder Bay, Ontario.
On November 11, 1882, Fink hired a young German brewmaster named August Fitger, a graduate from a premier German brewing school, Weihenstephan Brewing School in Munich (now part of Technical University of Munich). Just months later, in April 1883, Fitger purchased half of the company for $18,000 (). It was agreed that the other half would be purchased by Percy Anneke, a native of Milwaukee and auditor and sales rep for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company. Anneke was a friend of Fitger, and son of famous German-American political activist, abolitionist, and feminist Mathilde Anneke and her husband Colonel Fritz Anneke. The company was renamed A. Fitger & Co./ Lake Superior Brewery.
Prohibition
Beer production continued for 40 years until Prohibition began in 1920, forcing breweries to close their doors or change production. Fitger's was able to find markets other than beer to produce, and was one of the few brewers in the entire country that remained open throughout Prohibition. Fitger and Anneke sold their shares and retired to California. Percy's son Victor H. Anneke, who had taken over from his father in 1920, wanted to keep as many employees as possible, but the beer sales could not justify that. In order to keep employees, he decided to begin making soft drinks and candy and distributing cigars. Fitger and Anneke had set out a strategy several years earlier in order to keep the brewery open during Prohibition, which they only expected to last a short time. The company produced five-cent candy bars such as The King Bee Nougat, the Flapper, the Spark Plug, the Nut Goodie, and the Skookum. Candy sales steadily increased for several years, but did not ultimately prove profitable.
Fitger's was one of the first breweries to start distributing carbonated soft drinks by the bottle. The soft drinks were made in numerous flavors that often changed. Some of the usual flavors included grape, orange, and strawberry, but they also experimented with other flavors such as imitation chocolate milk shake, black calf, black cow, ginger ale, lemon soda, strawberry fizz, and carbonated water. Their experimenting lead them to the production of champagne-like beverages such as Extra Dry and Silver Spray. Both of which were immediate successes through mass amounts of advertising.