An Interpretation

From Old Muddy to Naturally Clear: Early Edmonton Brewing and the Bohemian Maid
by Gordon Morash

Biographical information:

Gordon Morash is an Edmonton writer and editor. He has written on Alberta history for Legacy Magazine , and researched, written and edited Alberta historical websites for the Heritage Community Foundation in the areas of law, radio, feminism, business, and the arts.

Introduction to Essay:

Pour a mug of cold beer on a hot day, and try to imagine a brew concocted from the murky waters of the North Saskatchewan. Writer Gordon Morash investigates the trade secrets of Edmonton's early brewers who supplied a thirsty city for generations.

For over 30 years, as a food writer and very amateur historian, I've been intrigued at the prospect of beer having been made from North Saskatchewan River water. I've tasted beer from around the world, have judged homebrew, met renowned beer aficionado and author Michael Jackson (no, not that one!), and read enough brewing literature to be aswim in the possibilities of making my own. Still, I've never actually made beer, though my father certainly did as a hobbyist, mostly from kits.

So, when I first encountered information on the location of two of Edmonton's early breweries, I wrote a piece on our river "chilly and wide" for the 1984 edition of the Edmonton Access Catalogue , published by Tree Frog Press. When Tom Cairns established the Yellowhead Brewing Company in September 1894, located just upstream from the current Low Level Bridge - and technically the first brewery in Edmonton, as the town had not yet amalgamated with the town of Strathcona - I wondered how it might taste.

According to period accounts, Cairns would use river water until the North Saskatchewan became "too muddy and fragrant," at which point he would draw from a well beside the brewery. There are no records of what Cairns brewed or how it tasted, but the style for the period would have been in keeping with the Bavarian "Purity Law" or Reinheitsgebot of 1516 - water, barley or wheat, hops and yeast. These days, such basic ingredients are in keeping with hobbyist brewers, and the craft and microbreweries. Back then, given the population, which in Edmonton would have been at the 2,500 mark, such microbreweries were the order of the day.

"You have to remember that the North Saskatchewan was a lot clearer than it is today," says Barry O'Neill, who with fellow Canadian Brewerianist Society member Bill Borgwardt, researched the early Edmonton brewery scene for a project published in 1980.

Why, I asked, would anyone prefer river water beer, when across the North Saskatchewan in Strathcona was a brewery that predated Cairns' by seven months, and used pure water from a natural spring? The South Edmonton Brewing Company (whose name was changed under new management in 1907 to the Strathcona Brewing and Malting Company Limited) was located near Queen Elizabeth Park just below present-day Saskatchewan Drive. Until 1907, it was operated by Robert Ochsner, who from 1891-1893 had managed the Vernon Springs Brewery in Vernon, B.C. Ochsner was the salesman for the venture in Strathcona; his wife Elizabeth would become Alberta's only - and one of Canada's very few - female brewmasters, though the tenor of the times would never allow the existence of the obvious feminine form of the title, "brewmistress."

There is little information held in Edmonton about the Ochsners, a surprise given the eventual long history of the brewery. We learn, for instance, that Edmonton lumber baron John Walter, gave the couple wood for the brewery on credit. We read also that until 1901, the Ochsner operation was the only competition for Cairns and his partner John Kelly. After the flood on Aug. 18, 1899, when headwaters rose 35 feet and swamped the Yellowhead Brewery (or the Riverside Brewery, as one source names it), the Strathcona-based company drew Cairns' hotel customers away. The hotels had run out of beer, and Ochsner, located on higher ground, sent his beer across the river on a powerboat owned by Sid Hubbard, an engineer working on the then-incomplete Low Level Bridge. A year later, Cairns left Edmonton, chasing the Gold Rush to run a brewery in Dawson City. Yellowhead would close, then later re-open under new management in 1904 as Edmonton Brewing and Malting Company Limited, with the owners constructing a two-storey red brick plant on the Rossdale Flats. As Michael Tilleard wrote in the Strathcona Plaindealer in the fall of 1985, "This building remains the oldest unaltered industrial structure in Alberta, and still can be seen today in the river valley."

There is even less in the public record about Elizabeth, who came to Edmonton with her German-born husband Robert from the great brewing city of Chicago, and outlived him by 37 years. In fact, newspaper accounts of the period do not provide her first name, a typical situation for a time where women's status was below that of men.

We do know that Elizabeth brewed five varieties of beer: an amber, a pale ale, an export lager, a bock beer in the spring, and a porter. The marketing of the latter predated the niche focus grouping that would become familiar to some breweries during the Alberta Prohibition years from 1916-1924 when a doctor's certificate was required for a pharmacist to provide beer to a customer. Elizabeth Ochsner's porter was described as "a dark, sweetened beverage for ladies who were run down or had babies," mother's milk, perhaps, to the ill and ravaged.

Prohibition would provide another wall to history-gathering, says O'Neill. "The history from that era is hidden. Brewing had become a bad rumour, even though it had employed a lot of Albertans."

We learn slightly more about Elizabeth Ochsner in the only company history of the brewery, written by J.L Weaver, the general manager of the brewery in the 1960s, which by then was called Bohemian Maid, in honour of Alberta's first and only brewmistress.

"The Ochsners were prodigious workers, in the tradition of the frontier," wrote Weaver in his short 12-page history, currently stored at the City of Edmonton Archives. "Mrs. Ochsner was slight and pale, with blonde Germanic hair brushed straight back. Mr. Ochsner, on the other hand, was a perfect barrel of a man, with a blonde mustache and bright pink complexion that fairly shouted the praises of Ochsner's beer."

There are reasons why researchers have been stymied about Elizabeth, the spelling of the family surname being one of them. The name has often been misspelled as "Oschner," according to O'Neill, a common occurrence during the early brewing years, when Robert would make a two-day trek marketing his beer by wagon to Leduc and Wetaskiwin. "It's an easy mistake," he says. "They even had it misspelled on the kegs."

The kegs themselves had a bit of a history, according to Borgwardt. Made of 1½-inch-thick maple, the kegs often would be kept by customers after emptied of beer for aging and storing sauerkraut. Robert Ochsner, then, became of the earliest Edmonton proponents of container deposits when he charged $2.50 per keg at a time when beer was available at the brewery for 25 cents per pail.

As well, some Ochsners anglicized their name to Oxner after emigrating to North America, opening up a further field of inquiry that with the brewing Ochsners would lead nowhere.

"We have a very thin file on the Ochsners," admits City of Edmonton archivist Bruce Ibsen, "but an excerpt from a local history, The Bitter 'n Sweet: The History of Bittern Lake-Sifton District , published in 1983, is in the file."

In that 634-page book - indeed the first source to provide a first name to the Bohemian Maid - it is possible to piece together the lives of the Ochsners after 1907, when Robert traded his interest in the brewery for Canadian Pacific Railway dispatcher Col. William A. Stoughton's 2,000-acre ranch located near Bittern Lake.

By 1914, the land - officially renamed the Bittern Lake Ranch - was a diversified farming operation with several hundred acres of grain under cultivation, beef cattle, milk cows, hogs, sheep, poultry, and Percheron and Belgian horses.

Robert Ochsner would die in 1915, having left brewing far behind. None of his children - son Ernest, and daughters Elsie and Pansy - continued in the trade, all of which makes researching their industry roots quite difficult. The Bittern Lake history ends the story of Elizabeth with her moving to Richmond, California, where she died in 1952.

The brewery would continue a nomenclature that is itself a history of the city and the province, growing as the city grew, from microbrewery to a member of a national chain.

Over the years, the Ochsners' spring-fed brewery on Saskatchewan Drive would become the Strathcona Brewing and Malting Company, Northwest Brewing Company, Calgary Brewing, Canadian Breweries Limited, Bohemian Maid Brewing Company Limited, and finally Carling O'Keefe.

No family members appear to remain in Edmonton. A lead to the Ponoka area turned up nothing, and only when you encounter other local beer historians such as O'Neill, Borgwardt, Lawrence Herzog and Ed Cooke does something of a picture emerge. Cooke is most poetic as he describes the location of the workplace of Robert Ochsner and his brewmistress wife, the Bohemian Maid.

As it stands, Herbst has his heart set on re-introducing to the Edmonton market Yellowhead Beer, the popular brand from Tom Cairns' brewery on the North Saskatchewan. And his voice takes a decidedly excited jump when he learns of the prospects of Varsity Beer, which would be historically closer to his southside home base.

One guarantee Herbst can make: Neither brew will contain the river water of yore.

Beer Facts
In the published brewing annals of Canada, Edmonton barely rates a mention, thanks somewhat to the Calgary and Lethbridge corporations that bought and amalgamated this city's early breweries.

Like it or not, the historical attention had shifted to the south, reflected in the Canadian industry's most complete history on the market, Allen Winn Sneath's Brewing in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada's 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry .

That said, while the Edmonton story is given little ink in the text, this city's milestones are recorded in a 106-page chronological history that occupies a quarter of the book's length.

"Robert Ochsner's spring still runs," he wrote in the Strathcona Plaindealer in the winter of 1994. "For a couple of years after the brewery closed, it created a sort of mini-glacier across the roadway in winter. The spring has now been tamed and, unfortunately, rendered invisible by underground concrete conduits."

Yet, none of the researchers has yet laid hands on the Holy Grail of Edmonton brewing - the original recipes of Elizabeth Ochsner, which would include her quintet of traditional beers. Or even the recipe for Varsity Beer, produced to honour the provincial government's awarding in 1907 of Strathcona as the site of the University of Alberta. With those smaller-yield recipes, microbrewermaster Neil Herbst of Alley Kat Brewing Company in Edmonton, says he would be able to construct a truly historic beer to celebrate the city's centenary.

The microbrewery already produces limited-run beers carrying such names as the German drinking toast Ein Prosit! (a reddish amber Oktoberfest beer), a smoked porter (a mahogany winter beer infused with flavours of smoked cherry and pecan woods), and Weihnachtskatze - which translates as "Christmas cat" - a dark lager for the festive season. Herbst describes the latter as having been "been spiced with freshly ground cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, and clove.

This holiday classic is toffee coloured. The aroma of cinnamon is followed by the warmth of cardamom and has a slightly sweet finish." Such brewing is in keeping with the tradition of Elizabeth Ochsner.

Herbst has even taken a historical tack with Charlie Flint's Original Lager, named for the man who from 1884-1886 operated Calgary's City Brewery on the site of Fraser's Fruit and Confectionary on Stephen Avenue.

"There's not much information on him, either," he says, "though our research describes him as 'a fine Nor'wester,' and that he brewed a good stout and porter."

However, even the history in currently held in Edmonton can be lacking, particularly for a researcher homing in on a specific subject. The sources for extant bits and pieces can range from privately published community histories, unpublished collections of information stored in archive files, and the reminiscences of beer historians. Thankfully, Edmonton is home to several such historians who range from writers to a brewmaster to memorabilia collectors.

A "niche" hobbyist historian such as I only discovers the roadblocks of the task when he encounters others who have attempted to till the same field. Some of those are cultural popularists such as Ed Cooke and Michael Tilleard from The Strathcona Plaindealer , Lawrence Herzog from Real Estate Weekly , Alley Kat brewmaster Neil Herbst, Barry O'Neill and Bill Borgwardt - who in early 2003, sold his own ample collection of beer bottles from the late 19 th century to Ron Bodnar, another private collector.

What Borgwardt did retain, however, was a vast trail of printed paraphernalia such as labels, bottlecaps, photographs (acquired from the City of Edmonton Archives, Provincial Archives, and the McDermid Collection at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary), advertisements and stock certificates, as well as his own history of early Edmonton brewing from 1980, co-written with O'Neill.

Their history was compiled for the Canadian Brewerianist Society, for many, an unknown, unheralded group of beer enthusiasts. Internet references are few, but in the world of beer, this is Canada's national organization for collectors of brewery memorabilia.

"I've always been interested in marketing and advertising, although I haven't exactly worked in the field," says Borgwardt, whose career was in photography and cinematography. "I've also been a collector all my life, so the two came together when I started collecting early Alberta items, including brewery material, like bottles and various advertising pieces."

The day I contacted him, he had begun to place his own archives in storage, and was lucky to lay his hands on his own research, much of which he obtained from an album of print materials retained by former Northwest Breweries brewmaster Arson Buffel.

A view of the pages makes for fascinating reading. It is here, for instance, where you can read of the growth from what in today's market would qualify as craft or microbrewers, to becoming part of a provincial and then national network.

An advertisement in a 1911 edition of The Edmonton Bulletin describes the "unexcelled" quality of the South Edmonton Brewing Company's lager, porter and ales. By 1927, when the company had become North West Breweries, the same newspaper would carry ads with somewhat confusing and conflicting messages hyping the "Milwaukee style" of its Bruin Beer - "It's a Bear! Exhilarates like mountain air!"

"My interest in researching the Alberta breweries was mainly to learn what there might be out there to add to my collection at the time. I did a lot of research about various Alberta industries at one time, but haven't done any for 15 or more years now. I did have a bit of vested interest in researching the Strathcona Brewery owned by Robert Ochsner, as my grandfather was the engineer at North West Breweries for many years."

Borgwardt retained that beer contact, partly because of his hobby, but also because it was somewhat in the family. Buffel had worked with his grandfather at North West, which Strathcona would become when it re-opened after Prohibition in Alberta was repealed in 1924.

The full history of Edmonton industry brewing remains to be written, the city's character to be defined for those beer-lovers and historians who don't live here. As it stands, the stories of the early years have not been preserved, from either the viewpoint of the industry or the people - and that includes accounts of early feminism as shown by Elizabeth Ochsner, Alberta's first and only brewmistress.

These tales range from the North Saskatchewan River's "muddy, fragrant" source of Edmonton's first beer, and of the 1899 flood that knocked out Tom Cairns' riverside Yellowhead Brewery, enabling the Robert and Elizabeth Ochsner to ship their spring water beer by powerboat to the hotels across the river. Later, the "Milwaukee style" of Edmonton beer would be touted, and another American analogy would land an Edmonton brewery in trouble with the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association of St. Louis, Missouri, the brewer of Budwieser. Edmonton Brewing and Malting had been using labels similar to those on Budweiser bottles, and in 1911, the company was awarded a permanent injunction from the Alberta Supreme Court. A photograph by Edmonton pioneer photographer Ernest Brown shows Edmonton Brewing employees pasting labels on newly returned bottles.

One could argue that Alberta beer came to international prominence in 1988 with the publication of The New World Guide to Beer by renowned brewing and single-malt expert, Michael Jackson. There, on the front cover, as an example of world-class Irish ale, was a photograph of McNally's Extra Ale, from the Big Rock microbrewery in Calgary. It would be the only Canadian beer to appear on the cover, and while Jackson was effusive in his compliments for the Calgary beer - "the most characterful Irish-style ale I have tasted" - it reveals more about the envelope-pushing nature of many Canadian microbreweries in general. In addition to the aforementioned Big Rock and Alley Kat are such distinctive breweries such as Unibroue of Chambly, Quebec; Niagara Falls Brewing Company of Niagara Falls, Ontario; Cannog Ales, of Sorrento, British Columbia; Yukon Brewing Company in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory; and Garrison Brewing Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

And despite decrying the "normally conservative Canadian brewers" in his book, Premium Beer Drinker's Guide: The World's Strongest, Boldest and Most Unusual Beers and The Great Canadian Beer Guide follow-up, Toronto author Stephen Beaumont has at least noticed the work of Alley Kat's Neil Herbst and his over-the-top barley wine, Old Deuteronomy. "An outstandingly rich, complex ale" is how he describes it in The Great Canadian Guide .

Today, that brewery remains this city's only purveyor of bottled microbrew, an echo of the small number of city breweries a little over a century ago.