Case After Case — Lager Beer’s Time in Court in the 1850s

“It may burst a man, but it will not make him drunk.”

So said Solomon Keyser’s expert witness. The Petersburg, Virginia saloon owner stood trial in summer 1855 for keeping a disorderly beer hall, a fancy way of saying he’d sold Lager beer the wrong way and violated local liquor laws. But the public wasn’t really interested in what Keyser had or hadn’t done. The real defendant in his trial—and the actual mystery everyone wanted to solve—was Lager beer itself.

Keyser’s defense was straightforward, if a little strange. He claimed that liquor laws didn’t really apply to him because those laws regulated intoxicating beverages, and that Lager beer—the only alcoholic beverage he sold—didn’t intoxicate.

Hence the expert witness, who spent a great deal of time explaining to the jury exactly what this new, mysterious drink was, and how it was made. Then he concluded that no matter how much Lager a person drank, they’d never get truly drunk. His evidence: He knew of “ladies” in New York and Philadelphia who often drank 17-20 pints of Lager at once without feeling a thing. That’s up to two-and-a-half gallons, and it’s also one of the more conservative testimonials that Lager drinkers would offer in court that decade.

A quirky argument in a court case is a novelty. But dozens of independent cases, spread out over a few years and thousands of miles? That’s a trend or, more to the point, a craze. 

During the 1850s and beyond, the so-called “question” of whether Lager beer could intoxicate a person repeatedly went to trial. Brewers and saloon owners were hauled into courts urban and rural, eastern and western, big and small as a wave of Lager beer crested over the United States—and as the early prohibition movement tried to stem the tide one block at a time. They shaped one of the first debates on the health effects of American Lager beer during the 19th century, but hardly the only one. I’ll look at more of those debates in the future, but right now there’s a big question to answer: When Keyser and others argued in court that Lager beer didn’t intoxicate … did their gambit work?

Yes. And no. These cases, like the other Lager debates of the 1800s, were proxies for larger concerns over a shifting American drinking culture, public health, urbanization, immigrant inclusion and, depending on whom you asked, the moral soul of the nation. Americans responded to Lager beer in highly subjective ways, but not just because of the product itself. These challenges and conversations also offered fresh attempts to answer a much older question—of whether beer is good for us in the first place.

In other words, everyone prosecuting or defending Lager beer in court during the 1850s went in with a lot of baggage. Prevailing ideas about alcohol’s medical and scientific properties; beer’s broader health implications; and politicized class, ethnic, and community relationships all informed public reactions to a new, weird style of beer called Lager.

INTOXICATION NATION

That baggage was decades in the making. For one thing, alcohol was everywhere in early America. Adults drank more than three times the quantity of alcohol they do today, usually in the form of distilled liquors and hard cider. According to historian Maureen Ogle, they drank every day of the week, at all hours of the day, and that’s why drinking could be seen as such a problem. “And frankly, I have a fair amount of sympathy for that,” she says. “If you were living in, say, New York City at the time, which had a population of not quite a million … in the 1840s and 1850s, you were exposed to intoxicated people all of the time, wherever you went.”

All this alcohol made workers less productive; disrupted social order; and encouraged people of different races, ethnicities, and genders to get a little too close to each other—at least, that’s how the rich and powerful saw it. They were desperate to steer and control alcohol consumption as a way to steer and control society as a whole. And to do that, they needed to explain the effects of alcohol in the first place.

“As Ogle explains, medical knowledge was incomplete and ‘fuzzier’ during the 19th century, and so researchers often expanded their comments into a ‘huge kind of meta argument … that alcohol in general is bad for you. It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for society. It makes people behave in degenerate ways. It breaks up families.’”

But doing that was tricky. As Ogle explains, medical knowledge was incomplete and “fuzzier” during the 19th century, and so researchers often expanded their comments into a “huge kind of meta argument … that alcohol in general is bad for you. It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for society. It makes people behave in degenerate ways. It breaks up families.”

Alcohol use was often associated with behaviors like laziness, fighting, or, in extreme cases, suicide. It was linked with physical maladies ranging from gout to insanity. Alcohol’s effects were also aggregated into social issues like crime, hunger, and poverty, among others. And all of these determinations were heavily politicized and prone to bias. Of course, alcohol use does have real physiological and societal effects—those effects continue to be studied, and both politics and bias can still come into play. But these historical associations simmered through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries until bias became prevailing wisdom. 

A particularly important tenet in early America was that the stronger the drink, the worse the consequences. Toddies and punch might just make a person lazy, but rum and whiskey led to anarchy and murder. Beer and cider, on the other hand, were viewed as moderate and less harmful. If consumed sparingly, they were even considered nourishing and strengthening by some. In other words, there was an imaginary line between allegedly good and bad alcohol consumption, and beer straddled it.

This line, and the perceived connection between alcohol and wider behavioral and societal effects, would linger in American minds throughout the 1800s. But a significant evolution in the politics of alcohol was taking place right around 1840, when Lager first appeared in the United States.

OBJECTIONS

“There’s one reference to it as tasting like tobacco juice and another one that it tastes like a jar of soap suds that a pickle has been put to soak in.”

According to historian and former journalist Lee Graves, Lager made a mixed first impression upon its arrival to the United States. It was, at first, the drink of German immigrants, but it was also more than that. It served as a near ubiquitous expression of German-Americans’ ethnocultural beliefs about work/life balance, social bonds, leisure, pleasure, and the cultivation of a fully lived life. They didn’t just view Lager as an alcohol delivery system. Many German immigrants, particularly those from Bavaria, saw Lager as literally nutritious. Germans fully understood that Lager was alcoholic, and thus a person could overdo it, but culturally speaking they generally didn’t drink to get drunk. Observers of German picnics, celebrations, beer halls, etc, often remarked on how little drunkenness they saw in those spaces. From the German immigrant perspective, intoxication had almost nothing to do with Lager.

But the rest of American society, those watching German immigrant communities from the outside, didn’t always pick up on that. Ultimately, German-American drinking culture would take decades to fully reconcile with broader American culture. In the meantime, there would be growing pains, especially with anti-immigrant partisans called nativists and the anti-alcohol temperance movement.

“People are always also asking themselves what role do immigrants play in American society and how willing are we to embrace them into our culture,” Ogle points out. Whiteness in American history has always been an arbitrary construct with dire consequences, and in the 1850s neither German nor Irish immigrants were considered white by Anglo-American society. Their religion, their politics, their public behavior, their food and music, everything they did seemed strange, if not offensive. And for Germans, beer was so present in all these aspects of their lives that it became a ready target.

“Lager ‘stultifies, stupefies, and brutalizes,’ a prominent temperance magazine announced in 1858. ‘The man who drinks half a pint of raw whiskey is not guilty of the same self-degradation as the fellow who pours down five gallons of disgusting bitter swill, tinctured with alcohol.’”

The temperance movement began targeting beer like never before during the 1850s. Before that time, temperance reformers had often relied on moral suasion to reduce drinking, a tactic which worked well on imbibers of traditionally “bad” liquors like rum and whiskey. But few Americans wanted to give up alcohol completely, and public perceptions of beer had always straddled that line between good and bad. So reformers moved the goalposts by demanding total abstention from alcohol, or teetotalism. And if people wouldn’t give up alcohol voluntarily, reformers would use the rule of law to force them.

“There were literally thousands of attempts around the country using local option laws,” Ogle says, “which meant that people in a county or even a township could vote to limit … how much access people could have to alcohol.”

Short of outright bans, nativists and temperance reformers could seek other limitations that focused mainly on immigrant drinking. “It was really a practical idea for the legislators to attack [Lager beer] in court rather than any other way,” Ogle says. “And so they pass laws, said you can’t sell intoxicating beverages on Sunday, and they try to enforce it.”

In a vacuum, Lager beer might have slotted into that earlier spectrum of good and bad alcohol quite well. It was lower in alcohol and largely associated, at least among German immigrants, with moderate consumption habits. But the political landscape had changed that equation entirely.

Lager “stultifies, stupefies, and brutalizes,” a prominent temperance magazine announced in 1858. “The man who drinks half a pint of raw whiskey is not guilty of the same self-degradation as the fellow who pours down five gallons of disgusting bitter swill, tinctured with alcohol.” Facts like those, they also said, “would never be doubted anywhere, except in a New York Court.”

They weren’t wrong about that last part. By 1858, New York courts already had years of waffling over Lager beer under their belt.

PERIPATETIC BEER VATS

Long before national Prohibition in 1920, the temperance movement temporarily succeeded in getting some dozen states to pass prohibition laws called Maine Laws (named for the first state to enact one). New York passed its own in spring 1855, and soon snagged its first victim: John Berberrich, a Poughkeepsie saloonkeeper charged with selling Lager beer. Like Solomon Keyser, Berberrich readily copped to selling the beer, but he claimed he was innocent all the same because Lager beer didn’t intoxicate.

It sounds silly, but there was a certain logic to this defense. As Ogle explains, it helped differentiate beer from the problematic hard liquors of the period, and did so by playing on commonly held beliefs about gradations between alcohol types. It stoked the exact mindset that the temperance movement was trying to change, frustrating their efforts.

Next, as Graves points out, it forced the prosecution to prove a difficult point. “[T]here was no standard of what constitutes intoxication,” he says. “There was no 0.08 blood alcohol level or whatever some of these states [say] about what constitutes … if you’re drunk or not. So it was just a matter of interpretation.”

Without hard science or legal standards to fall on, many of these cases hinged on testimony. In other words, a witness would get on the stand, swear to drinking Lager, and say whether or not they got drunk when they did. Of course, some local barfly claiming he took a sip and felt fine wouldn’t exactly help the defense, so some of these witnesses ended up saying they could drink ridiculous amounts of Lager beer without ever getting drunk.

In Berberrich’s case, a physician testified not only that Lager beer wasn’t intoxicating, but that he could drink 20 glasses in a single sitting without feeling drunk. One Christian Clause, a reportedly stout man, swore to the court that he drank 60 pints of Lager within 12 hours without feeling a thing. The courtroom audience laughed out loud when he said so, and the press dubbed him a “little walking beer cask” and a “peripatetic beer vat.”

It sounded silly, but it worked. The jury in Berberrich’s case halfheartedly convicted him but sidestepped the question of intoxication. It was enough grounds for an appeal. The case wound up before the New York Supreme Court, who ruled in Berberrich’s favor and struck down the state’s shiny new prohibition law in the process.

Of course, not everyone was buying it. A New York Herald reporter covering the story suggested that Berberrich must be cheating his customers with watered-down beer, and suggested locking a “jury” of Germans in a room for 12 hours to confirm they could drink that much, but the media spectacle didn’t change the verdict.

OVERRULED

Barred from a statewide solution, New York temperance reformers reverted to local option tactics. In early 1858, they finally convinced the mayor of New York City to enforce a Sunday ban on liquor sales that basically everyone ignored. According to Graves’ research, several police officers were sent to patrol Brooklyn on a Sunday night and began asking Lager beer vendors—including concert halls and beer gardens as well as saloons—to close shop for the night. It was such a controversial move that about a dozen reporters followed the patrol to observe what happened. Some venues complied but others, like a Brooklyn saloon run by proprietor George Staats, refused. And Lager beer went back to court.

Staats’ case in Brooklyn followed the same basic pattern of Berberrich’s, only magnified. Same argument—that he was innocent because Lager didn’t intoxicate—just with more witnesses. A professor testified that Lager, at roughly 3% ABV at the time, was therefore far less intoxicating than other forms of alcohol. A physician then took the stand to say that Lager beer was the “nearest thing to nothing a man can drink.” They were followed by a string of local Germans, each claiming to regularly drink 20, 40, 60, even 80 glasses of Lager a day without problems. One Jacob Haas boasted that he could drink 106 glasses of Lager in a single sitting, and had in fact drunk 22 that very day before appearing in court … at 11 a.m.

Newspapers had a field day. The story was reprinted around the country until readers in just about every state knew how much Lager a group of random New York Germans could purportedly drink. As one paper said, “It is sworn to, but we don’t swallow it, nor do we believe anybody else will.”

“A professor testified that Lager, at roughly 3% ABV at the time, was therefore far less intoxicating than other forms of alcohol. A physician then took the stand to say that Lager beer was the ‘nearest thing to nothing a man can drink.’ They were followed by a string of local Germans, each claiming to regularly drink 20, 40, 60, even 80 glasses of Lager a day without problems.”

Except the jury. Staats was likewise acquitted when the jury ruled that, as far as New York City law was concerned, Lager beer was a non-alcoholic beverage. To be clear: that’s since been reversed.

Lager beer trials weren’t confined to New York City. Similar trials took place in upstate New York; rural Wisconsin and Indiana; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Massachusetts, among other areas. And humblebrags about drinking gallons of Lager didn’t always convince juries. Verdicts shifted with locations as politics did. “[I]t’s going to be like pornography,” Ogle points out. “I’ll know it when I see it. But the people who are seeing it are jurors, and jurors in Iowa would have been completely different than jurors in say, New York City or Washington, D.C.”

Lager was declared non-intoxicating in Washington, D.C., but not in Washington, Indiana. New York struck down its prohibition law over a Lager beer trial, but the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld its own. Interestingly, an Ale brewer tried to ride the Lager beer hype to get their 8% Strong Ale declared non-intoxicating in Burlington, Vermont. It didn’t work.

All the while, the media fed a nationwide frenzy with the debate over intoxication. An Ohio paper quipped “much information has been gained as to the capacity of the stomach of lager bier-drinking Dutchmen,” as Germans were derisively called at the time. When a Richmond, Virginia man was arrested for drinking beer and subsequently passing out in public, the paper winkingly remarked that he “rather upset the theory adopted in New York Courts” about Lager. Though the hype died down as the Civil War loomed, the periodic Lager beer trial would dredge up familiar arguments (and wisecracks) over the next 20 years.

Temperance literature tried to make real hay out of the controversy, publishing (among other things) rambling essays that blamed German culture, Germans’ bodily health, and even the state of their government on their affinity for Lager beer. But for all the bluster, the temperance movement didn’t win this battle.

CONTINUANCE

Lager beer wasn’t given a complete legal pass in American courtrooms, but these trials kept the game going. Debates over Lager beer’s intoxicating effects went unresolved, and the Prohibitionists’ game of jurisdictional whack-a-mole dragged on while more and more Americans grew fond of Lager beer. In the near term, Lager beer trials and the wider political debates over alcohol that they contributed to provided support for an industrializing brewing industry.

But, as we also know, political debates over alcohol would only intensify with time and led, many years later, to national Prohibition. Paradoxically, the Lager beer trials contributed to that process as well by spilling the question of whether beer is good for a person into yet another arena of the human experience. It helped teetotalers chip away at the old-school spectrum of good vs. bad alcoholic beverages, and put an enormous spotlight on the alleged healthiness of a rapidly proliferating style of beer.

Around the same time as these trials, temperance reformers ramped up accusations that beer could help spread disease, damage a person’s health, or else contain “adulterating” substances ranging from questionable to outright dangerous ingredients. As trials faded into memory, these accusations would only increase later in the 1800s.

Words by Brian Alberts
Illustrations by Colette Holston