Bozeman Brewery: Julius Lehrkind's German Gamble
Near Bozeman, Montana
In eighteen sixty, seventeen-year-old Julius Lehrkind stowed away on a ship bound for America to escape compulsory military service in Germany. He eventually became a brewer in Iowa. In eighteen ninety-five he sold that brewery and moved his extended family and a crew of experienced brewers to Bozeman, Montana, choosing it for two reasons: excellent water and a ready supply of barley from Dutch farmers in nearby Manhattan, Montana.
Lehrkind took over the existing Spieth and Krug operation, which German immigrants had founded in eighteen sixty-seven, and expanded it into a regional powerhouse. The Bozeman Brewery Historic District, anchored by Lehrkind's brick brewery buildings, preserves a slice of German-American frontier industry that once defined this block of the Gallatin Valley.
