Brewing Heritage Trail

04/08/2025

It's Brewsday and the Brewing Heritage Trail has some great news to share! We've been awarded a grant to help fund Phase 2 of the Brewing Heritage Trail App! Once completed, it will contain more than double the amount of brewing history information as the current app, with 32 new sites being added along the west side of the Brewery District in OTR. Historic breweries included in Phase 2: Christian Moerlein, Jackson, Sohn/Mohawk/Clyffside, Lafayette, Windisch-Muhlhauser/Burger, Schoenling, Bellevue, Jung, Germania, Hauck, and more!

Phase 2 of the Brewing Heritage Trail App is funded in part by the Ohio History Fund, a grant program of the Ohio History Connection. Your donations to the Ohio History Fund make this program possible. www.ohiohistory.org/historyfund

Work will begin this summer, with a planned launch for Phase 2 by June of 2026! Along the way, we'll be sure to provide project updates, including some of the great history we're collecting. Don't have the FREE BHT app yet? Well, that's easy to fix, just go to: https://onelink.to/6phb2v for both the Google Play or App Store version and hopefully we'll see you along the Brewing Heritage Trail!

04/01/2025

It's Brewsday and now that winter is in the rear view and warmer days are ahead, I thought it would be a great idea to give the Brewing Heritage Trail a shout out! The first portion of the Brewing Heritage Trail opened in April 2019 and is about 3/4 of a mile long. You can “HOP ON” the Brewing Heritage Trail at one of the custom trailheads at Findlay Market and Grant Park with maps and other information, then follow the bronze medallions in the sidewalks through the historic Brewery District to informational signage, brewing themed art installations, and historic brewing structures!

In 2024, we expanded the content of the trail by creating and launching the Brewing Heritage Trail app. This allows you to take a tour of the trail from the comfort of your couch or when walking through the neighborhood! It’s FREE and has lots of other great information, including about upcoming events that our non-profit is organizing and involved with throughout the year. Here is the link to download it: https://onelink.to/6phb2v

For the most immersive way to enjoy the Brewing Heritage Trail, we lead a guided tour of it during the warmer months of the year called the Brewers & Barons Trail Tour. It runs at 10am on Saturday mornings beginning in May and takes guests along the trail and also inside the underground lagering cellars of the historic Schmidt-Crown Brewery (pictured). Go to: https://brewingheritagetrail.org for more details and hopefully one way or another we'll see you along the Brewing Heritage Trail!

03/28/2025

A big THANK YOU to Queen Kelley and her Royal Sausage Court for joining the Brewery District's entry in the Opening Day Parade! So many fantastic entries and we're looking forward to a great season of Cincinnati baseball!

03/25/2025

Happy Brewsday! I had the recent good fortune to get to check out the site of the former Germania Brewery, located just west of Over the Rhine along Central Avenue. Brewing began at this location in 1854 when Daniel Jung established a small brewery next to his blacksmith shop. Jung and his partner Peter Weyand would gradually grow their production over the next decade and in 1868 they bought land a few blocks away where they built a larger brewery complex. However, they continued to operate this site until it was sold to the John Wetterer in 1880.

Wetterer operated it as a malt plant (which was his current trade) until 1885 when he decided to establish the Germania Brewing Company. The brewhouse and malthouse were located to the left of the two buildings pictured, but were unfortunately demolished in subsequent years after the brewery closed due to Prohibition. What remains today is the former icehouse and bottling facility (right), which were both constructed around 1901. Current plans for the building are TBD, but the owners are very excited about its history and want to preserve and share it in the future.

03/24/2025

Checkout this great video update from The Gnarly Gnome about the work we’re doing at the former Bruckmann Brewery site!

It isn't easy to prep a space that is more than a century old for public tours... especially when it's below ground, filled with water, and hasn't really bee...

03/24/2025

Moon French Adam French Matt Jacob

It isn't easy to prep a space that is more than a century old for public tours... especially when it's below ground, filled with water, and hasn't really bee...

03/18/2025

It's Brewsday and we'd like to share with you some of the progress made last weekend at the former Bruckmann Brewery site. Thanks to the effort of our volunteers, we have successfully replaced the upper deck of the staircase! Special thanks goes out to the father and son team of Moon and Adam French! Those guys jumped right into the void (as you can see), cut out the deteriorating metal supports, and installed new materials allowing us to move on to the stair replacement. That work will continue next weekend on March 22, so if you'd like to assist, we're looking for a couple of volunteers.

Here is the link to sign-up: https://brewerydistrict.ivolunteer.com/march2025

Our goal is to have the site open for public tours in time for the Missing Linck Festival on June 7, taking place at the Urban Artifact Brewery, less than one mile away. We'll have a shuttle bus to take tour guests from the festival to the Bruckmann Brewery site and back, so stay tuned for more details!

03/11/2025

It's the Brewsday after Cincinnati's Bockfest and I hope you all had a great time attending! Just in case you weren't aware, our organization puts together that event every year and now that it is successfully in the rear view, we can turn our attention back to the former site of the Bruckmann Brewery! For those of you who check out our posts regularly, you're probably already aware that we have been working since the fall on opening up this site up to public tours. We've cleaned out a lot of trash and debris, rebuilt the roof on an access building to the underground cellars, reinstalled and rerouted sump lines, to keep the cellars from filling back up with water (it was 3 feet deep when we first started!), and now it is time to perform some significant repairs to the stairs leading underground.

We're looking for a few handy people to help us with the project this Saturday, March 15, to build some scaffolding, grind out some metal, and cut new steps, so if this sounds like fun to you, then you're just who we're looking for to volunteer! Shifts are 10am-1pm and 1pm-4pm and you can use the link below to sign up. Those who do so will be sent an email a day ahead of time with some additional instructions, as well as directions to the site.

Tour are scheduled launch during the Missing Linck Festival on June 7, so if we don't see you as a volunteer on the project, hopefully we'll see you on one of the tours this summer!

Volunteer Sign-up Link: https://brewerydistrict.ivolunteer.com/march2025

03/07/2025

Bockfest is here! There's lot's of great stuff to do this weekend, including the special 2025 Bockfest Tour of the Lafayette Brewery, the oldest brewing structure in Cincinnati! Saturday tickets are nearly sold out and Sunday is filling up too, so don't wait to buy, as this tour is ONLY running during Bockfest weekend. Tickets include a bock beer to drink while you explore this building with your guide! Go to: https://brewingheritagetrail.org for times and tickets!

03/04/2025

It's the Brewsday before Servatii Bockfest!! Time flies when you're relentlessly planning a massive annual event! There is lot's of great things to do at this year's Bockfest such as:
- Opening Ceremonies at Rosedale on Friday at 7pm, following the Bockfest Parade
- Bock beer tastings at the Moerlein Lager House (all weekend!)
- The return of the Beard Baron Competition at Northern Row on Saturday at 5pm
- Sausage Queen Competition Finals at Rhinegeist on Saturday at 7pm
- The Brewing Heritage Trail's special Bockfest Tour of the Lafayette Brewery, the oldest brewing structure in Cincinnati! Tickets are selling fast and are available at: https://brewingheritagetrail.org

There is so much more to experience, so be sure to visit https://www.bockfest.com for all the details!

02/25/2025

It's Brewsday and we're just 10 days away from Bockfest! There are lot's of great things to do at this year's event and you can find out all the details at https://www.bockfest.com. Every year the Brewing Heritage Trail puts together a unique tour just for Bockfest and this year is no exception! The Lafayette Brewery was originally built in 1832 by Friedrich Billiods (pictured) along Hamilton Road. This street would later pick up the nickname of "Brewer's Boulevard" due to the large number of breweries that sprang up along it during 19th century, including the original Hudepohl Brewery and the Christian Moerlein Brewery.

Billiods original brewhouse was built primarily from timber, like many other breweries of the day, and as a result, it was destroyed by fire in 1847. He rebuilt immediately afterward, but this time he used bricks, and it is this building that still stands today. It is the oldest remaining brewing structure in the city, however, onsite commercial brewing has not taken place there in well over a century.

The current and longtime owner has agreed to let our organization bring tour groups in during this year's Bockfest celebration on Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9, so if you'd like to check it out, go to: https://brewingheritagetrail.org for schedules and tickets. Our Bockfest tours, sell out every year, so don't wait to pick up your tickets until the last minute and hopefully we'll see you soon along the Brewing Heritage Trail and at Bockfest!

02/22/2025

Frothy is going to take one for the team on Friday...

Awwww, this poor guy doesn't know what's about to happen to him this Friday. Come join us at the Precipitation Retaliation at Northern Row Brewery & Distillery !!

02/22/2025

Bockfest is almost here!!!