Kyle Nabilcy
The author's Grandpa Don (at right) was a Bud man, but as a long-time Appleton resident, he knew his Adler Brau.
If you’re an aficionado of historical brewing in Wisconsin, this week should mark an exciting development for your refrigerator. Appleton’s Stone Arch Brewing, one of the oldest brewpubs in the state, has just started distribution in the Madison area. There’s a lot of history behind that label, even if the name “Stone Arch” has barely been gracing those labels since February of last year.
Even for a brewery that originally opened in the relative olden days of 2004, in a building originally built in 1858, the trademark monster is always lurking. Stone Arch was first christened Stone Cellar, but as the brewery succeeded and expanded, it bumped against an existing trademark. The name Stone Arch was applied to the brewery only in 2012, with the pub retaining the Stone Cellar name.
That’s confusing enough just to write out, so imagine how it went for the brewpub in real life. The bottom line is that by 2017, everything was consolidated under the Stone Arch brand. The history, however, is baked into the brewery’s identity just as it’s baked into the bricks that built the strange throwback building in which it is housed.
Even though the original brewery in the building now named Between the Locks was the Fischer Brewery, and even though the Walter Brewery was the occupant that made the space regionally famous, everyone who knows the history of beer in Wisconsin probably knows it as the Adler Brau brewery. When it reopened in the late ’80s, it was in fact called the Adler Brau Brewery and Restaurant. It’s been the Appleton Brewing Company, and the restaurant space was Dos Bandidos for many years, but the name Adler Brau has been near the top of the letterhead no matter who owned the brewery at Between the Locks, even to this day.
(That building, the Between the Locks Mall, is the weirdest mall you’ll ever encounter. It’s built like an old mill, because it basically was one, and has a lot of personal childhood history for both my wife and me. There’s only, like, four businesses in it. It has been renovated over the years, but only enough to keep it up to code. It still feels like an old building, in all the right ways.)
Back at the end of January, Stone Arch brewed a one-off batch of what they billed as a faithful reproduction of the Adler Brau recipe circa 1946, based on written recipes the brewery says were tracked down with the help of a local collector. Adler Brau was a crisp lager, born at a time when this was the style to brew, and small breweries across the country are returning to those old-world styles and simpler presentations in droves.
Macro breweries have been making those styles — in inferior, flavorless iterations — for years, of course. And they have naming issues, too. If you saw Stone in the headline of this column, you’d be excused for thinking it was a column about Stone Brewing’s suit against MillerCoors and Keystone Light, but that’s a topic for another day.
So while Stone Arch is dropping fresh bottles of a big, sweet vanilla stout on Madison shelves, my most recent bottle of Stone Arch beer was a simple old-timey Adler Brau, which my mom was kind enough to stand in a small line to get for me. It’s sweet with a kind of apple/grape skin character up front and some cereal grain flavors in the finish. It’s not the best example of the style I’ve ever had, but come on, it is a beer that’s over 70 years old, with even more history behind it. It’s holding up all right.
