Historic Brewing in Rochester: Nearing Completion

With only a few weeks left till our Thesis papers are officially due I'm feeling confident in how my thesis has progressed. I have captured much of the straight history of 1800s and early 1900s brewing and have begun to move onto the more social aspects of brewing. What I have left to do is write about who drank beer and why. I've already touched on it some bits and pieces, but nothing dedicated to it. I will writing about this in both the past and present, and the later involves me surveying local breweries about their target audiences, and observing their actual audiences. I already have this completed with two local breweries and hope to up that number to three or four by early next week.

I think the most interesting thing I've run into is the Temperance movement. Once I finally started writing about it I realized just how relevant it was to almost every other part of my paper. It drove technological innovations, various industries, and the way it evolved even bolstered the brewing industry. Like many things, it started small only targeting the most extreme abuser of hard liquor, but slowly progressed to include all drinkers of hard liquor. Although eventually moving onto the many varieties of beer, it temporarily pushed everyone into the beer world, giving it an effective monopoly in the alcohol world of Rochester.

A short story about the Kondoff family

Since I've gotten back to Rochester I've not only done some really interesting research with some local collections, but I've also had a lot of progress on my project with Swiftwater Brewing.  But the most interesting thing I've uncovered, and am still trying to piece together is the story of a Germany family in early Rochester.

One of the very first breweries in Rochester was opened by Henry Kondoff, but it was also one of the shortest-lived breweries. Just 5 years after opening he was convinced by his son to become a carpenter instead. At that time children would often take over the family business and his son, Mathias Kondoff did not want to become a brewer, but a carpenter instead, so his father relented. After a 30 year gap of time, years of Rochester that I'm told are the least documented, Mathias became the president of Genesee Brewing, one of the biggest breweries at the time. How he got there? Who knows, well, hopefully me by the end of my research. Although currently unknown by me how he got there, his return to brewing would bring a lot of change to the brewing world of Rochester/

A History of Rochester's Culture and Immigrants

A reoccurring theme I've been coming across in my research is how brewing is connected, in some shape or form, to everything else in Rochester's history. For example, Rochester was called the Flour City (now called the Flower City), due to the massive number of grain mills they had created on the river. However, in the late 1800s there was a spreading wheat blight that greatly reduced their flour production. Farmers, looking to replace their lost crops, decided to seek support from the quickly growing brewing community, and began growing barley instead. This allowed the brewing industry to continue to grow up until the 1918.

Rochester : a pictorial history, by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck

Despite knowing so much about Rochester history, and brewing history in a general sense, I am still lacking specifics about the local breweries. An example of this is I've heard about the Bartholomew Brewery. It has been mentioned in various papers and documents, but I know next to nothing about it besides that it resided in Rochester. However, I don't lack sources where I can search for this information, due to a constant influx of sources/ideas of where to look being given to me.

A working research question on Historic Brewing in Rochester

As I've continued my research, and thought about what I want to do with my thesis paper, I've wavered back and forth, and gone up and down on what I want the scope of my paper to be. Do I focus on specific aspects of historic brewing, or do a certain time period, or the cultural aspects of it, or even all of the above. So I've started to craft a very influx research question for this paper. What were the historic limitations and opportunities of brewers in Rochester during the early 1800s, and what bearing this has on modern brewing culture in Rochester?

The primary mash tun at the GCVM

I feel that a research question along this line allows me to look at both the cultural, and agricultural aspects of historic brewing, both of which I'm interested in, while also being able to connect it with modern brewing practices like 'farm breweries' which share similar limitations with their ancestors from 200 years ago.