Bub’s Brewery

In the midwestern United States, beer always has and seemingly always will possess a great deal of importance. Whether or not that’s a good thing likely depends on who you ask, but it’s true nonetheless. The city of Winona, Minnesota is no exception to that stereotype. With over twenty bars in the city today and a population of just about 27,000 people, it’s evident that Winonans sure do love their beer. The city, like many others in the area, has its own unique history with beer as well, with many different breweries surfacing and resurfacing all over the city from the mid-1850s through the early 1900s. One of the more famous breweries to emerge early in Winona’s history was known as Bub’s Brewery, and it still maintains sentimental value to many Winona citizens today due to its close ties with some of Winona’s more famous historical landmarks.

It is the mid-1850s, and American breweries are beginning to sprout up more and more frequently all over the country. A young German immigrant by the name of Jacob Weisbrod arrived in Winona in the year 1856 and decided to join in the widespread brewery frenzy. He opened what was then called the Sugar Loaf Brewery. What made Weisbrod’s Brewery unique to the city was its location and the way that the landscape was used to aid in the process of brewing. Because it was necessary to keep their product cold as often as possible, brewers such as Weisbrod benefitted greatly from finding climate-controlled areas where the temperature was cool enough to keep the beer from going bad for long periods of time. Enter the Sugar Loaf caves. Weisbrod saw an opportunity to use the caves as a climate-controlled area to store his beer, and thus the Sugar Loaf beer caves were born. Not only was Weisbrod’s idea efficient and innovative for his Brewery, but it also gave it a connection to the city that nobody else had. Winona has long been defined by its geographical features, and Sugar Loaf is one of those defining features. By simply looking for a good way to keep his beer cold, Weisbrod was able to find a way to forever tie his Brewery with the city of Winona as well.

Unfortunately, Weisbrod was only able to see the infant years of the Sugar Loaf Brewery. In the year 1870, just fourteen years after starting his business, Weisbrod contracted typhoid fever, one of the more serious diseases of the period due to frequent contamination of food and water. At just 39 years old, Weisbrod passed away, leaving the Sugar Loaf Brewery without any real direction and a great deal of uncertainty about the future. As it would happen, things got worse before they got better. Just two short years after Weisbrod’s death, the Brewery burned to the ground and its fate seemed extremely bleak. At that point, many people were beginning to wonder if the Sugar Loaf Brewery would be able to recover, or if its legacy was already written after just sixteen short years.

Another young German immigrant by the name of Peter Bub was determined to not let Weisbrod’s Brewery disappear from the city of Winona. Bub, whose name is actually pronounced “boob”, was born in the German state of Bavaria and began learning the art of brewing at a very young age. In the year 1870, Bub decided to immigrate to the United States to pursue a brewing opportunity there. He first spent time in the city of Milwaukee, which just so happens to have quite a rich history with beer in its own right. After working at different breweries in Milwaukee for just over a year, Bub decided to take his expertise to the state of Minnesota. He traveled just across the Wisconsin-Minnesota border to the city of Winona and shortly after found himself working in the Sugar Loaf Brewery. Once the Brewery burned down, Bub saw another opportunity for himself. He purchased the land and decided to build his own brewery. As a young man with great ambition looking to make his own fortune in the United States, Peter Bub was exactly what Winona’s brewing industry needed, especially after Weisbrod’s death and the burning down of the Sugar Loaf Brewery.

With both Weisbrod and Bub there is a common theme of immigration from Germany. It is worth noting that German immigration shaped the culture of the midwestern United States and is still very evident today. According to the book Germans in Minnesota by Kathleen Neils Conzen, “In the 1860 census, the first federal census taken after Minnesota became a state, some 16,000 persons, or about 9% of the new state’s population, were reported as German-born. Ten years later, perhaps every fifth Minnesotan was either German-born or of German parentage, as was also the case in 1880 when census takers found 152,138 first and second-generation Germans in Minnesota” (Conzen). Naturally, the German people brought with them a distinct culture that can still be seen in the region today. Both Weisbrod and Bub are perfect examples of the cultural shift due to German immigration. They both came to the Midwest with ambitions to start their own brewing companies and were far from the only two to do so. Needless to say, beer would not have the same level of importance to the region today if it weren’t for the influx of German immigrants in the mid to late 1800s.

Now that there’s an understanding of the background and reasoning for Bub and Weisbrod immigrating to America, it’s time to return back to the story. At this point — the mid-1870s — Peter Bub had successfully rebuilt and taken over the brewery that Weisbrod started. Bub, however, decided that he wasn’t a huge fan of the name Sugar Loaf Brewery and elected to change it to Bub’s Brewery. In another interesting move, he married the widow of Jacob Weisbrod. It seemed as though Peter Bub almost just decided to take over the life of Weisbrod after he passed away. Regardless of his intentions, Peter Bub and his Brewery were extremely successful in the following years. His beer became increasingly popular in the area and he continued to grow his business. Naturally, his success brought him a great deal of wealth, and he became one of the more well-known figures in Winona and the surrounding areas. Despite his great personal successes, Mr. Bub was also known as a generous man who would not hesitate to donate money to charity and give back to the community. Still a relatively young man who had only immigrated from Germany a short time ago, Peter quickly found a great deal of success and prosperity and ingrained himself in the history of Winona.

Bub’s Brewery remained successful up until Peter’s death in 1911. In Volume 38 of The Brewers Journal — written in January of 1912 — Bub’s life and lasting legacy in the brewing industry of Winona is highlighted. In the piece, it is written that “Mr. Bub was one of the best-known brewers in the northwest, although his business was confined almost entirely to Winona and vicinity. He will be greatly missed by the citizens of Winona, all of whom were his friends and admirers” (Brewers Journal). Based on the words from the journal, it is evident that Peter Bub was far more than just a man who owned a local brewing company.

In 1920 — nine years after Bub’s death — the Prohibition era began in the United States. Bars all over the country began to fall off the map with the sale of alcohol becoming completely illegal. Bub’s, however, was able to adapt and survive. By substituting soft drinks and other beverages with less than 1% alcohol in them, the Brewery was able to make it through the Prohibition without going under. Once the sale and consumption of alcohol was legalized again in December of 1933, business continued as usual for Bub’s. The beer remained a popular fixture in Winona and the surrounding areas up until the mid-1900s.

When the 1960s arrived, there was a rather sudden shift away from the small brewery in the United States. The shift was primarily characterized by the increasingly competitive market from many of the bigger industries. In the article A Geographical Analysis Of The Development Of The Brewing Industry Of Minnesota from Library.RU, the author states that “Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, national brewers began to compete seriously for a larger share of Minnesota’s malt beverage marketplace. Finding that barriers to entry into state markets were not high, large national brewers consistently increased their share of sales in Minnesota and thus the number of state breweries continued their historical decline” (Library.RU). Suddenly, the smaller local breweries were unable to compete with large beer-distributing companies, and unfortunately the storm was too much for Bub’s to weather. In the year 1969, Bub’s Brewery officially closed for good. The problem for smaller craft breweries at the time was not that people simply didn’t enjoy their beer, but rather that they didn’t have the money to produce bigger volumes of beer or compete with the larger corporations from a marketing standpoint. For a very long time, marketing was characterized by simply just putting an ad in the newspaper. As the larger corporation made the market more and more competitive however, much more was demanded from smaller breweries like Bub’s that were unable to afford it. The closing of Bub’s Brewery was upsetting for many Winonans, as it had served a unique and fairly significant role in the history of the city. It was especially difficult to see the Brewery disappear for the older generations that had grown up in Winona and saw Bub’s as an important fixture to the community. After surviving for over 100 years — during which it was burned down in 1872 and the prohibition occurred from 1920–1933 — Bub’s Brewery was finally done in by its inability to compete in a corporation-dominated market.

While the large corporations were able to completely control the beer industry for many years in the late 1900s, craft beer and individual breweries have experienced somewhat of a resurgence in the past decade. Nowadays, many smaller breweries have their product advertised and distributed by larger companies, making it easier for them to survive and thrive in the competitive market. According to an article from Brewbound.com, there was a total of 997 new breweries opened across the United States in 2017, which set a record. One of those breweries was opened here in Winona. Island City Brewing was opened in March of 2017 and has done quite well. There is also a Bub’s Brewing Company located in downtown Winona. Unfortunately, it’s not an actual brewery but a bar named for the historical Bub’s Brewery. On their website, information can be found about the history of Peter Bub and his Brewery, and they are dedicated to keeping that history alive in the community. After all that Peter Bub and his Brewery did for the city, it’s wonderful to see the people of Winona pay tribute to such an important part of the city’s history. At the site where the Brewery itself was located at — right underneath the Sugar Loaf bluffs — there now sits an old antique shop. Even though the building can no longer be used to produce beer, it is now filled with history and is itself a historical reminder of one of the more famous and successful breweries Winona has ever seen.