Old Brewery exploring was something I couldn’t pass up. Exploring Minnesota took me to the south this weekend, stopping in Mantorville to check out the ruins of the old brewery caves. There isn’t a lot left of the old four-story, sandstone structure, but admittedly there’s more than I thought I’d see. The once-proud structure is losing the battle to Mother Nature, as you may imagine.
brewhouse, but don’t quote me on that. (Photo by Chad Smith)
There doesn’t seem to be a ton of information on the brewery online. One source who seemed to know what they were doing says what’s leftover is actually the second brewery built in Mantorville. The original brewery appears to have been built in 1858, entirely out of sandstone quarried out of the bluff directly behind where the structure was built.
The Dodge County Brewery reach four stories at its pinnacle and produced upwards of 7,000 beer-filled barrels a year at their peak in the late 1800s. Reports say the brewery was fortunate in avoiding so many of the fires that claimed other early breweries that began in Minnesota around the same time.
Two 40 X 70 caves were used to store the aging beer and keep the barrels ice cold. The brewery ran purely on steam power during its lifetime. Only a shell of the building remains, but there is one cooling room still intact.
Like many of the other Minnesota breweries, when Prohibition rolled around, that pretty much ended the business. There was some bootlegging during the dry years. When Prohibition was repealed, they tried to crank up production again. New owner Otto Schuman took over the brewery and ran it as a pop factory. But it wasn’t to be. Even though the brewery had some of the largest and most advanced technology of any brewery in the state, Schuman shut down the factory for good in 1934.
The brewery was partly demolished in 1942. The site did contribute a lot of recovered metal to help the effort in World War 2, but that appears to be its last significant contribution.
The littered floor is where I first entered the place and wouldn’t want to accidentally fall
into that hole. (Photo by Chad Smith)
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