Cincinnati's Beer Legacy

The Cincinnati Equirer looks back at Cincinnati's brewing history:

As Germans arrived here by the thousands in the mid-1800s, they brought with them their recipes and taste for German-style beers.
“Because so many Germans were concentrated early on in Over-the-Rhine, that’s where many of the breweries were established,” says Don Heinrich Tolzmann, local author and German-American historian.
Most breweries were located near the Miami and Erie Canal, today’s Central Parkway, which brewers used to transport grain in and brewed beer out. Immigrants dubbed it the “Rhine” after Germany’s longest river, and the neighborhood north of it Over-the-Rhine.
Beneath their brew houses, brewers dug deep, wide caverns known as Felsenkeller (literally “rock cellar”) to store and keep the lager cool while it fermented. A federal law prohibited brewers from making beer and bottling it in the same location. It led many brewers to construct a number of buildings to house their operations.
After the law was repealed in the late 1800s, many brewers dug underground tunnels to cart and pipe their beer from one side of the brewery operation to the other – often just across the street.
Historians estimate that more than 30 breweries got their start in Over-the-Rhine in the 1800s, including Christian Moerlein Brewing Co., the John Hauck Brewing Co., Hudepohl Brewery, Schoenling Brewing Co. and Windisch-Muhlauser Brewery. Christian Moerlein, whose operations were mostly along Elm Street near Findlay Market, grew to become Cincinnati’s biggest brewer and the fifth largest in the United States by the early 1900s.

It is definitely an interesting history, which should be highlighted more by the city.  More on the history of brewing in the German Triangle (the area between Cincinnati, St. Louis and Milwaukee) here.