Yankee Brew News Archive

Boston Beer Buys Mid-West Brewery

Originally Published: 02/97

By: Brett Peruzzi

Boston Beer Company, which for years has been criticized for being a contract brewer without a full-scale production facility of its own, will soon own Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Company, Cincinnati's last major independent brewery.

The purchase is not related, claims Boston Beer, to the attack ads by Anheuser-Busch over Boston Beer's contract brewing practices. Boston Beer has spent considerable money to purchase equipment for its contract brewers to use in brewing its beers, and purchasing an entire brewery is seen as the next stage in the company's growth. Samuel Adams beers will continue to be brewed at four other breweries around the U.S., not just at the Cincinnati brewery.

The sale should take about two months to complete. Neither company would disclose the sales price of the deal, which originated in March as an option that Boston Beer has now decided to exercise. Hudepohl-Schoenling has been brewing the Samuel Adams brand of beers under contract for about a year for regional distribution. The sixty-three-year-old Cincinnati facility, which can produce 390,000 barrels a year, will continue to brew its own beers as well, as production of Samuel Adams beers only utilizes half of the brewery's total capacity.

Hudepohl-Schoenling, which were separate breweries until recent years, have long produced popular regional beers of note in additional to standard American light lager products. Hudepohl, which was founded in 1855, began brewing its Christian Moerlein lager, a "super premium," all malt beer that meets the Reinheitsgebot German purity law requirements, in 1981, even pre-dating Samuel Adams Boston Lager, considered one of the archetypical U.S. craft beers. Schoenling was beloved for originating Little Kings Cream Ale, considered a fine example of one of the few indigenous U.S. beer styles.

Cincinnati, with its large German-American population, has a long and robust brewing history. It was at one time home to a dozen breweries, including what was the fifth largest brewery in the U.S. in the 1870s. Boston Beer is now the nation's 10th-largest brewer, producing about 1 million barrels annually.