09/12/2024
Brewery History - As a part of the Ohio History Open Door Program, the Tiffin Historic Trust is hosting "How Well Do You Know Your Brew-Story?" On September 12th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. the public can take free tours of the historic Laird Arcade Building and the Laird Arcade Brewery. For more info, please find the following link - https://www.tiffinhistorictrust.org/Calendar-of-Events...
To bring attention to this event, we’re featuring some photos and history from our rich German heritage of brewing beer here in Tiffin. Today, we’re featuring history of the Hubach Brewery in Tiffin, Ohio. Henry Hubach was born in Dur Kheim, a province of Rheinpfalz, kingdom of Bavaria on January 27th, 1843, and he came from a line of people prominent in the brewery business. Henry came to America with his parents in 1865 and worked in the brewery business in Philadelphia for a short time. He then spent additional time working in breweries in both Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Cincinnati, Ohio, before landing a job in a brewery in Fort Wayne, Indiana for four years.
In 1877, he came to Tiffin and purchased the F. J. Wagner brewery at the end of Madison Street next to the river, and made major improvements. By 1910, Hubach had demolished the original old brewery building and built a tall 5-story structure that would be used as a part of a “tower brewing process”. The purpose of a tower brewery is to allow this multi-stage flow process to continue by gravity, rather than lifting or pumping the brew liquor between stages. Once the bulk raw materials, water and barley malt, are first raised to the top of the tower, they can then mostly flow downwards without requiring further pumping.
Henry Hubach was the first brewery west of the Allegheny Mountains to produce a lager beer. His famous “Royal Ribbon Beer” was “bottled for family and medicinal use” and it was known for its purity due to the choicest hops, malt and excellent artesian well water. This huge brewery had the capacity of making 40,000 barrels (1.2 million gallons) per year! Henry Hubach died on June 15th, 1915, sparing him from seeing the enactment of the 18th Amendment of 1919 that prohibited “intoxicating liquors”, and putting all breweries out of business.
Due to prohibition, the Hubach family turned their building into a huge dairy and began bottling milk and making ice cream. They eventually went out of business in the mid-1950’s and the building was later destroyed by a fire in August 1966.
Today, we’re comparing views of Hubach’s letterhead logos. The top logo is from when they were a brewery and the bottom logo is when Hubach’s was a dairy. We can see images of the buildings used by the brewery and dairy haven’t changed, but the wording did. We love the slogan in the upper left corner stating that their product was “The beer that makes all other curious”. Then when they became a dairy, that slogan was changed to “The Cream of Tiffin” and they also used the slogan; “Hubach’s Of Course”. Whatever the product, the Hubach family operated successful businesses for many years.
