Breweries and Wineries
Licking County is home to a number of local breweries and wineries
Contents
Early History
Licking County has a long history of brewing. Early accounts of the area's history made frequent mention of liquor consumption (primarily whiskey) and the production and consumption of ale and lager would not become part of the industry and social life until the arrival of German immigrants to the region in the 1830s. The earliest record of commercial beer production in licking county was in 1844 with the brewery founded by Michael Morath, an immigrant from southern Germany. Morath arrived in Newark Ohio in 1832. He became a successful brewer and property owner in the growing town. Morath opened his first brewery in the southern part of Newak, south of the canal.[1] Many of Newark's early breweries clustered in the this area and catered to German immigrants and travelers. Morath's second, larger facility opened in 1858 along sixth street, in a large piece of property that served as a beer garden.
A number of other German brewers established themselves in Newark in the middle of the nineteenth century: Graff, Kneule, Rickrich (Spring HIll), Benner-Beuthal-Eichhorn (White Top), Augustus Morath (Rock Hill) and Korzenborn (Newark Brewery).[2] In the late 1860's as many as five breweries operated in and around Newark at any one time. Korzenborn's brewery was the most successful of these smaller operations yet none rivaled Michael Morath's early commercial success. The culture around alcohol consumption changed in the late nineteenth-century Newark. Facilities like Morath's Beer Garden, and his son Augustus' unsuccessful "Beer Resort" south of the city, lost ground as more and more taverns opened around the square and in the neighborhood south of the downtown. These taverns catered to a growing working-class population in the city, as well as passengers and transient workers using the canal and rail systems. By the 1890's only Charles Korzenborn's "Can House" remained local Newark breweries, now under new management in a industry facing both a changing beer culture and the generational change in German-American families. The brewery had developed a reputation for drunken confrontations among patrons and regularly appeared in the newspapers' police reports.
Regional competition among brewers grew steadily in the late nineteenth century as breweries in Columbus, Cincinnati, and even further afield, competed for markets and taverns across the Midwest, including Newark. A new local brewery with regional ambitions was founded in 1898 to try to meet local market needs with local products: Consumers Brewing Company. Charles Andre, another German immigrant and a veteran brewer with experience in both Germany and the United States, founded Consumers with the motto "Not to Brew the Most but the Best." Consumers undertook an active and aggressive marketing campaign to combat external competitors, promoting local production.
