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Sebewaing Beer and eBay

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When it comes to eBay, the most popular items available for auction with the name Sebewaing no doubt has to be brewery related items. Today, there are fifty-two entries! Everything from single labels and bottle caps to Pasteurizer plateposter board presentations of many different labels. Some of the specialty machinery built for the brewery like a pasteurizer had a special plate (pictured) on it from the company. This item is listed at $850 or best offer!  It is amazing what collectors may pay for a piece of history.  Proxy cards, payroll checks, and other business papers also make appearances on eBay.  I have seen my grandfather, Otto H. Thede’s business card with the title “Bottle house Superintendent” from time to time.

How did these people obtain these items?  Did they purchase them from others?  Did they visit the brewery after it closed and search for relics knowing one day they would be worth some money?  I remember the floors littered with papers, labels, bottle caps, and so many other items that would be considered valuable today.  The blue plastic barrel caps along with the foil were in several brown cardboard boxes in the Keg Storage Room just waiting for someone to help themselves.  I remember empty barrels of various sizes in this same area.  If I were just a bit more business savvy as I entered my young teenage years living next to the brewery!  At least these relics did not end up getting hauled away in a dump truck or buried during the demolition years that started in 1979.

Good luck to all the eBay sellers and buyers.  Keep the brewery memories alive.

Lost Architectural Plans Surface

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Spring cleaning usually involves discarding items that have been packed away occupying space for mblueprint-rectangle-800x480any years.  Tools, fishing tackle, hunting supplies, old boxes of photos, newspaper clippings, and business documents just to name a few.

During the summer as William Thede was cleaning his garage area, he navigated through some papers that were being disposed into the wood stove.  As he was working through the pile, some of these papers were just leaving his finger tips into the stove when he stopped.  These papers looked different than the others.  Upon a closer look, he found a set of 1964 architectural drawings for the Bottling House addition!

What could have been lost forever was recently turned over to this website archives and will be posted in a future article once they have been researched and scanned.

The Can Debut

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Canned beer makes its national debut in 1935. The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company worked with the American Can Company to deliver 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale in Richmond, Virginia. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved and further production was approved.

By the late 19th century, cans were instrumental in the mass distribution of food, but it wasn’t until 1909 that the American Can Company made its first attempt to can beer. This was unsuccessful, and they would have to wait for the end of Prohibition in the United States before another attempt. Finally in 1933, after two years of research, American Can developed a can that was pressurized and had a special coating to prevent the carbonated beer from chemically reacting with the tin.Church Key Opener

The concept of canned beer proved to be a hard sell, but Krueger’s overcame its initial reservations and became the first brewer to sell canned beer in the United First Sebewaing Beer Can DesignStates. The response was overwhelming. Within three months, over 80 percent of distributors were handling Krueger’s canned beer, and Krueger’s was eating into the market share of the “big three” national brewers–Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. Competitors soon followed suit, and by the end of 1935, over 200 million cans had been produced and sold.Flat Top Opened Can

The purchase of cans, unlike bottles, did not require the consumer to pay a deposit. Cans were also easier to stack, more durable and took less time to chill. As a result, their popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s, and then exploded during World War II, when U.S. brewers shipped millions of cans of beer to soldiers overseas. After the war, national brewing companies began to take advantBlueCanage of the mass distribution that cans made possible, and were able to consolidate their power over the once-dominant local breweries, which could not control costs and operations as efficiently as their national counterparts.

Through the 1940’s, Sebewaing Beer was sold in various barrel sizes and bottles.  The first cans were distributed in May 1950.  The initial light brown and red can design is pictured at the top of this post.  It required a church key style opener.  After the can was opened, it would look something like the top of the can pictured, one hole for letting the beer out and a second for replacing the beer BlueCanPullTabwith air.

The sand colored brown can was hard to see against backgrounds whether it was around the house or outdoors.  It was soon replaced with a different color can that became the more popular colors for Sebewaing Beer.  The first blue can also required a church key style opener.  The last can design included a pull tab and used the same blue color scheme.