Nothing American About Beer Making in St. Louis
More of a Germans in Missouri story than an Irish in Missouri one, but it’s a story about drink so the Irish do make an appearance in this American story of beer, communism, slavery, civil war, Jesse James, Abraham Lincoln, and Karl Marx:
there was a tension growing through the 1850s between the pro-slavery farmers of the Missouri floodplains and the anti-slavery and often communist workers of St. Louis.
There was a parallel, and little known cultural clash going on at the same time: the German workers arrived as beer drinkers and quite a few of them were first class brewers. There were some Irish among the workers, and they too were fans of the Germans’ sudsy “liquid bread.”
Tellling the story and saying there is nothing American about beer making in St Louis, is Mike Ely on the Dissident Voice.
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