Courtesy of Norfolk Southern Archives

A sketch of the Virginia Brewing operation on Railroad Avenue, now Norfolk Avenue in Southeast Roanoke.

Courtesy of Norfolk Southern Archives

The original Virginia Brewing Co. building, along what was then Railroad Avenue Southeast, between 12th and 14th streets, burned down in 1892.

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PBS

The new Ken Burns documentary, "Prohibition," debuts tonight at 8 on WBRA (Channel 15). The three-part series continues Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m.

They call it "craft beer" these days.

A hundred years ago when little local breweries made it, it was just beer, and Roanoke had its own mighty little suds machine.

The Virginia Brewing Co. started from scratch on what's now Norfolk Avenue near the shops in southeast. It became one of the boomtown's great early success stories. It was diversified and vertically integrated, with distribution in a half-dozen states.

While still in its infancy, it fended off a full-on assault from Anheuser-Busch when the king of beers tried to crush its fledgling competitor.

But things changed.

As the Ken Burns three-part documentary "Prohibition" shows, the 18th amendment "turned citizens into criminals, and criminals into kings," as one movie trailer says. It essentially created women drinkers.

And Prohibition killed hundreds of distilleries and breweries, including Roanoke's little brew house that could.

'Southern Progress'

The water was the key.

Six local entrepreneurs, looking to diversify boomtown Roanoke's industrial profile, saw a brewery as a good bet and chartered the company in 1889.

They hired a 25-year-old German-born brew master named Louis Scholz, who proclaimed water from Roanoke's Crystal Spring perfect for brewing beer, as historian Rand Dotson tells the story in his book, "Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912: Magic City of the South." Dotson's book contains what's likely the most comprehensive history of the brewery.

Scholz was already living in the United States because he'd come here from Freiburg, Germany, to marry a girl, said his great nephew, Henry Scholz IV, a Roanoke commercial real estate agent. But family lore holds that Louis Scholz wasn't in fact a master brewer.

Whatever he knew about beer, it was enough. He brought his brother Henry (Scholz IV's great-grandfather) in to handle the business and retail sides of the operation.

The brothers had the Virginia Brewing Co. up and running quickly from a brew house along what was then Railroad Avenue Southeast, between 12th and 14th streets.

"Every little town had a brewery," Dotson said in a recent interview.

But the VBC was proof of Roanoke's rise as a major New South city, Dotson said. The city, in full bloom after the Norfolk and Western Railway's decision to locate here, was on a mission to prove itself.

"The whole notion of the New South was that it was going to break with the Old South, it was going to be industrialized and modern," Dotson said. "So this brewing industry is evidence of this progress."

The evidence was also right on the VBC label, above the winged globe: "Southern Progress."

That told drinkers, Dotson said, "that Roanoke is this progressive-leaning, future-focused town."

A local hit

VBC had a company baseball team before it sold its first beer, Dotson tells in his book, and it was at a game between the VBC team and "The Roanokes" that VBC Pilsener had its unofficial debut. Players who made it to third base got a glass of the brew.

When the beer finally hit the market officially in August 1890, the entire stock of 250 kegs was gone by 3 p.m., Dotson wrote. Local saloons - of which Roanoke had no shortage, especially along what is now Norfolk Avenue in downtown - happily pasted the VBC logo on their doors, according to Dotson.

That local pride would soon serve VBC well.

Within three months, VBC was shipping thousands of bottles out of town and employed 35 people. Within a year it would have distributors up and down the Shenandoah Valley and into North Carolina.

The VBC essentially had no competition, especially in Roanoke, where Alexandria-based Robert Portner Brewing Co. had a small presence. VBC effectively cornered the market in Roanoke, Dotson said, but in the process, they awoke a giant.

The beer war

Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association - which, according to its history, introduced Budweiser, the first national beer, in 1876, and broke the 1million barrels of beer sales mark in 1901 - had taken notice of small-town VBC's success.

And they meant to put an end to it.

Anheuser-Busch slashed the price of its beer in Roanoke from $9 a barrel to $4 - below cost - in an effort to undersell VBC.

But the Anheuser-Busch folks didn't count on Roanoke loyalty.

The Roanoke Times lashed out, calling Anheuser-Busch a "foreign enterprise" in an editorial quoted in Dotson's book. VBC was a "home enterprise" and the Anheuser-Busch people were out to destroy it.

The "beer war" raged for 11 months, and by the end, Roanokers had sent a message. They wanted their VBC beer.

Anheuser-Busch surrendered and raised its prices.

A short time later, however, VBC's brew house burned to the ground.

5 million bottles

Happily for the VBC and beer drinkers around the valley, the company had enough beer in stock to get by while it rebuilt, Dotson reported.

The Scholz brothers more than recovered. VBC became a wild success. They owned their own stables, rail cars and ice company, which soon swallowed up Roanoke's other ice companies.

Early on, the brothers added the Wayside Inn to their operation, retailing their beer right next to the brewery. Soon they opened their own saloons around Southwest Virginia, too, according to Dotson, making the VBC truly vertically integrated.

The family also owned 50,000 acres in Catawba, said Scholz IV, where they intended to one day build their own glass plant.

They got into the soft drink business, too, with something called "Kola Nerva."

By 1896, VBC was selling 150,000 bottles a year.

In 1905, sales topped 3 million bottles, and the beer was distributed across Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland and Ohio, according to Dotson.

By 1912, sales were 5 million bottles, and the company employed 100.

But all the while VBC had been gaining steam, so had the burgeoning temperance movement.

Down by law

Roanoke was a decidedly "wet" city in its early years, with its saloon row and boisterous boomtown feel.

Drinkers in the city fended off several "local option" votes that would have dried the city out, Dotson said. The city had very active chapters of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

While neighboring localities went dry, Roanoke was the last holdout, Dotson said.

VBC, like other brewers, countered the dry movement by positioning beer as good for you.

"Pure beer is pure food," proclaimed a full-page ad on the back of a 1906 Academy of Music program.

Other ads Dotson found called VBC beer "pre-eminently a family beverage" and "highly recommended by physicians for its nutritious qualities."

Historian Daniel Okrent, in his book on Prohibition, "Last Call," describes how brewers took this tack to counter not only the temperance activists but also to distance themselves from distilleries in hopes that beer might escape Prohibition even if liquor did not. (Okrent worked with Burns on the documentary.)

The ad on the Academy of Music program also boasted that beer was beloved in the leading nations of Europe, England and Germany.

Invoking Germany is something few if any brewers would do a few years later, when World War I erupted in 1914.

As anti-German sentiment welled up in the U.S., Okrent writes, the Anti-Saloon League capitalized on it by using it to demonize German brewers such as Busch and Schlitz.

Dotson said he found none of that in Roanoke aimed at the Scholz brothers. Indeed, according to Scholz IV, Henry and Louis brought their brothers Richard and Fritz to Roanoke. While Richard left, Fritz stayed and opened a German restaurant called The Bismarck.

They never wanted to go back to Germany, Scholz IV said.

The Scholz brothers became Magic City boosters themselves, like those men who bankrolled the brewery to begin with, Dotson said.

Still, in 1916, three years ahead of the nation as a whole, Virginia banned the sale of alcohol and killed one of Roanoke's great business successes.

Bringing beer closer to home

The Scholz brothers shuttered the brewery. They kept the ice company going, and by then they were involved in other enterprises. They were part owners of the local fairgrounds, among other things.

They had come to the U.S. with money, Scholz IV said, and did so well here that when the Depression hit, they were largely unaffected.

In 1933 the nation repealed Prohibition, and Virginia voters opted to abandon their state law against alcohol, too.

Before Prohibition, Okrent reports, the U.S. had more than 1,500 breweries. Only the largest found ways to re-tool to make other products and survive Prohibition. Within six months of repeal, fewer than 100 had reopened.

Prohibition was ultimately a boon to the Busches and the Schlitzes, as it led to broad consolidation of the beer business.

A brewery called Virginia Brewing Co. did eventually get going again in Roanoke in 1936, run by E. Cabell Tudor, but the Scholz brothers weren't involved. That incarnation of VBC closed in 1957, according to the beer can collecting website rustycans.com.

The Scholz family had moved on, Scholz IV said. His father and grandfather were in the movie house business. They owned the American Theater on Jefferson Street, among others.

It was Scholz IV's father who demolished it to make way for the high-rise occupied by Dominion, First Union and Wachovia banks. It's now owned by Carilion Clinic, and it's where Scholz IV has his office with Hall and Associates.

Scholz IV has but a handful of VBC keepsakes, including a wooden plate he assumes was once affixed to a keg.

Dotson, in the course of researching VBC, became "obsessed" with collecting pre-Prohibition VBC memorabilia. He owns some letterhead, a century-old bottle and a tip tray he had restored.

"There's a really intense market" for pre-Prohibition beer memorabilia, Dotson said, including VBC products. He recently was outbid for a VBC playing card that came up for sale on eBay.

A century after VBC's heyday, beer in America is returning to an alignment that's beginning to resemble the way it used to be.

Smaller craft breweries are popping up in various towns, including Roanoke.

"There's people in towns and cities all over the United States who are interested in becoming brewers," said Charlie Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch professor of brewing science at the University of California-Davis, "and some of them want to start companies."

According to the Brewers Association, 1,753 breweries operated in the U.S. for some or all of 2010. That's the most since the late 19th century.

Many, like Roanoke Railhouse with its nod to our railroading roots here, "have a local provenance and speak to local values," Bamforth said.

Big brewers such as Anheuser-Busch make a wonderfully consistent product, Bamforth said, but he tells beer drinkers what those early VBC loyalists perhaps already knew.

"Beer is best when it's closest to where it's being brewed."