Drinking Wyoming: Historic Green River Brewery Once 'Made Milwaukee Jealous'

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is sponsored by Pine Bluffs Distilling.

GREEN RIVER — Railroad workers and miners are notoriously thirsty, but even nursing mothers have been said to enjoy the Sweetwater Brewery’s famous “beer that made Milwaukee jealous.”

At its height in 1907, the brewery, located today on Railroad Avenue in Green River, was bottling 18,000 bottles of its medal-winning lager beer each day, boasting it was so good it put Milwaukee’s famous brew to shame.

And maybe that beer really did make Milwaukee “jealous,” as the brewery advertised, because cease-and-desist demands and threatened litigation soon arrived.

Today, only one of the three buildings that made up the Sweetwater Brewery remain, but it’s still a humdinger with merlons and crenelles aplenty. Crenelles, for those not born in medieval times, are the spaces between the raised merlons of a fort or castle. The crenelles are where one would shoot at the enemy and behind the merlons is where one would hide.

The Brewery at 50 W. Railroad Ave. looks every bit like a German castle situated along the Rhine. And, given that the guy who built it was a German immigrant named Hugo Gaensslen, it might seem it was inspired by a German castle of old.

But according to the National Register of Historic Places, Gaensslen actually grew up in Chicago, and his inspiration was more likely the Chicago Water Tower.

Today, it’s just The Brewery, and also is no longer an actual brewery, despite its name. But it does offer three Wyoming craft beers on tap. They are the 307 Lager and Saddle Bronc Ale from Black Tooth Brewing Co. and the Speed Goat Golden Ale from Ten Sleep Brewing Co.

They also offer a daily special that’s made from scratch in house.

“We are one of the only bars that offers that in Green River,” manager Kate Forrester told Cowboy State Daily.

Homemade green and red chili are available for hot dogs on Saturday, there are hand-pattied burgers on Monday, and Tuesday is often taco time.

There’s also an everyday menu, with items like burgers, fried fish, chicken strips and shrimp, with a choice of beer-battered or waffle fries. Salads, chicken wings, potato nachos and other appetizers are also available.

Pioneer Wyoming Brew

The present owner of The Brewery is John Bingham. He's owned the business for the past 30 years.

“A friend of mine owned it, and he built the bar in 1981,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And I just always wanted it from then on.”

Bingham had occasional drinks at the bar on and off while he was working in the oil field, and eventually told the friend that if the bar ever came up for sale, he’d like to buy it.

“He actually helped me get into it,” Bingham said. “Because I’d already bought property from him next door. So, when it became available, I couldn’t really make another loan on that property plus this one. So, he pretty much gave me the down payment to step right in and take it over.”

Among improvements Bingham made when he bought the place was a new kitchen.

“We’ve also put in a back patio, and we have horseshoe pits out back,” Forrester said. “And there’s karaoke on Friday nights.”

Bingham doesn’t ever plan to sell the bar. It’s just something he has always liked, and he knows a lot of other people like it as well.

“If I was 40, I would turn around and do it all over again,” he said. “And, if I had a nickel for everybody who stopped out here and took a picture, I’d be wealthy.”

Wyoming’s First Brewery

The structure that Gaensslen built that Bingham now owns is 124 years old. It was built in 1900 from local sandstone quarried from behind Tolgate Rock, near Greenville, as well as from Spring Canyon, which is north of Green River. The rocks were hauled to the site by horse and wagon.

Gaensslen bought the business from Karl Spinner in 1891, who bought it from Otto Rauch in 1879, who bought it from Adam Braun in 1875 after Braun was washed out by a flood.

Braun built his brewery in Green River in 1872 — before even a school or courthouse were built. That makes his the first recorded brewery in Wyoming.

But it was Rauch who built The Brewery at its present-day location, and then it was Spinner who grew the business into a force. He brewed 5,000 barrels of beer a year and was soon shipping beer throughout the country.

He called his beer Columbia Beer after it won second place in the 1890 Columbia Exposition.

No doubt, it was the quality of Spinner’s operation that attracted Gaensslen, who had trained as a brewmaster in New York and really knew his beer.

Denied his slogan, "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Jealous," Gaensslen took to calling his beer the Pioneer Wyoming Brew, highlighting the brewery’s status as Wyoming’s first brew pub.

His beer won prizes at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1905 and the Portland Exposition the following year, and the future seemed bright.

The Volstead Hammer

Alas, Sweetwater Brewery’s days were numbered. It, like about 800 other breweries in America, were crushed by the Volstead Act of 1919, which made the production and sale of alcoholic beverages a crime. Prohibition.

Beer-making at the facility shut down and Gaenslenn, like the other 1,578 breweries of the day, scrambled to find a lifeline.

"Near beer" was among the products Gaenslenn tried. Essentially, a brewer made his own beer recipe, then boiled off the alcohol for a product that had less than 0.5% alcohol and was supposed to taste like beer.

“Supposed to” being the operative phrase.

Gaensslen called his product “Wyoming Beverage.”

He also carried a few citrus crush beverages and a carbonated lemon-lime drink called Green River.

The latter was not named after Green River as one might think.

Green River was actually invented by Richard C. Jones of Iowa in 1916. He owned a soda fountain and candy shop, and had long been trying to craft a soda that would have a refreshing “pop” like champagne, but without any alcohol.

When a customer of his asked for one of those “Green Rivers,” the name stuck, and the pop has been called that since. It’s still available in the Chicago area, mostly on a seasonal basis around St. Patrick’s Day.

During prohibition, Chicago brewer Schoenhofen Edelwiess bought Jones’ formula for $120,000 — $1.8 million in today’s dollars — as a way to get itself through Prohibition. It worked, though the company no longer survives.

Green River pop was popular from the 1930s to the 1950s, second only to Coca-Cola sales in the Midwest.

But the near beer never really took off. There was too much moonshine being sold in the shadows.

When Gaenslenn died in 1931, his business was shuttered.

The Long, Slow Revival

Prohibition ended in 1933, and in 1936 an Irish flim-flam artist named Tom Flaherty bought the Sweetwater Brewery as a front to sell brewery stock.

The Great Depression was still having an impact on everyone, and so he was even able to talk his workers into taking brewery stock as payment.

Flaherty hired a German brewmaster named Emile Mehle to make things look good, but the beer was very poor quality. When it didn’t sell well, Flaherty skipped town with all the money he’d made — mostly from selling stock in his brewery — leaving his workers high and dry.

The Brewery building was at one time offered to the city of Green River for office space, but there wasn’t much interest. There was a sense it would take more money than it was worth to make it a suitable office space.

The building served for a time as a plumbing business, a fencing company and a variety of other things until Bingham bought it in the early 1990s, returning it to its original function as a bar, topped with storybook turrets and towers that make it unique in Wyoming.

It’s a great place to raise a toast to history and enjoy a night out on the town in Green River, like an outlaw of old.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.