Bozeman's German Brewery District
Near Bozeman, Montana
In eighteen eighty-two, German immigrant brewers Jacob Spieth and Conrad Krug built a lager brewery on the north edge of Bozeman, hauling ice from the Gallatin River each winter to keep the underground cellars cold. Montana's mining and railroad crews were thirsty customers, and the brewery expanded steadily through the eighteen eighties into a full brick complex with a malt house and an ice house. Julius Lehrkind bought the brewery in eighteen ninety-five and renamed it the Bozeman Brewery, and Prohibition then ended brewing there.
The surviving buildings, including the Lehrkind mansion, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Bozeman Brewery Historic District, one of the few intact examples of nineteenth-century frontier brewing architecture left in the northern Rockies. Today the complex has been adaptively reused and stands as a monument to the German-American tradesmen who supplied a cattle and copper frontier with its beer.
