Vintage Oldenberg Brewing Company Outrageous Bock Beer Label 🍺 Fort Mitchell Kentucky Microbrewed Bock Beer Collector Label 1990s

Who Brewed Bock Just Across the River From Cincinnati? 🐐 Oldenberg Outrageous Bock Beer Label, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky Microbrewery

Size: 5" x 3" ~ little to no wear.

OUTRAGE-O-US in green over BOCK in big red letters, a curly-horned goat peeking out from under the K, the Oldenberg Brewing Company name over a little drawing of the brewery building, and down both sides the motto BE FIRM, BUT FLEXIBLE. Along the bottom: MICROBREWED BOCK BEER, 12 FL OZ, and "Hand crafted in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky." One side panel carries the Surgeon General's warning; the other says it was brewed and bottled by Oldenberg in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky 41017 - and in Dubuque, Iowa. Never used.

🍺 The Brewery Across the River

Jerry Deters opened Oldenberg on Buttermilk Pike in Fort Mitchell, out in Kenton County, in 1987 - a brewery, restaurant, pub and entertainment center all in one, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A lot of folks count it as the start of Cincinnati-area craft beer. Deters was a contractor, and that stretch of Buttermilk Pike was already his: he bought the ground in the late 1960s, his Rowntowner Motor Inn opened there in November 1970, and by the mid-1970s it had become the Drawbridge Inn. Public talk of adding a small brewery started in January 1984, growing out of an earlier dinner-theater idea, and the doors opened in September 1987, five miles south of downtown Cincinnati. Architect Addison Clipson drew the building to look like it had been standing there forever - masonry, massive arched windows, ironwork, the look of a 19th-century brewery wrapped around a modern 12,500-barrel plant - with two restaurants, J.D. Brews and a German dining hall whose ceiling topped sixty feet. Fort Mitchell itself is named for a Civil War fort, one of seven built to defend Cincinnati, and the fort was named for General Ormsby M. Mitchel, the astronomer who founded the Cincinnati Observatory (the town spells him with an extra L). In 1991 Oldenberg added the American Museum of Brewing History and Arts, with what was billed as the world's largest collection of breweriana, and its Beer Camp drew beer lovers from all over the world. Beer Camp was a crash course in beer spread over several days - tastings, bottle shares and lectures.

The big collection belonged to Herb and Helen Haydock of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Herb came home from his tour of duty in Germany in 1951 with nine beer glasses that caught his fancy, and over the next thirty-five years the two of them built it past a million pieces. It was on display all through the Oldenberg complex. When ownership changed, the collection went up for sale. All three of the big American brewers came to look, and Wisconsin's own Miller bought it - for about a million dollars, as it was reported - kept the Miller and Wisconsin pieces, and let the rest go back into circulation. A 2018 Wisconsin newspaper story tells it the other way around: Miller bought the Haydocks' first big collection in 1996, and the one at Oldenberg was a second collection they put together from 1987 to 1996.

That was early days for American craft beer. Sierra Nevada brewed its first batch in Chico, California in November 1980, and Cincinnati-born Jim Koch started the Boston Beer Company - the Sam Adams people - in 1984. It was old German beer country, too. Cincinnati's first commercial brewery opened on the riverbank in 1812, the first German-owned one in 1829, and by 1860 as many as 36 were running. Most of them sat along the Miami and Erie Canal, which got nicknamed the Rhine, so crossing it into the German neighborhood was going "over the Rhine." In 1893 Cincinnati drank 40 gallons of beer for every man, woman and child - two and a half times the national average. Ludwig Hudepohl II, son of an immigrant from Hanover, founded Hudepohl in Cincinnati in 1885. Bavarian brewed in Covington from 1866 to 1966. And by the 1900s Eisenach-born George Wiedemann's brewery in Newport, over in Campbell County, was the biggest south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. Wiedemann had put in fifteen years at John Kauffman's brewery in Over-the-Rhine before he crossed the river and started his own in 1870. By the time Oldenberg opened, Hudepohl had merged with Schoenling (1986), and G. Heileman, which bought Wiedemann in 1967, had quit brewing in Newport in 1983. That left Northern Kentucky without a single brewery until Oldenberg came along.

That government warning dates this label too: the Surgeon General's warning had to be on beer labels starting in November 1989, so this one is from the 1989-or-later run, and with the last batch brewed on Buttermilk Pike in April 2001, nearly all of that run falls in the 1990s. The other half of the brewer line, Dubuque, is an old Mississippi River beer town in its own right - it had nine breweries back in 1869. In November 1995 Oldenberg Enterprises put 800,000 shares of stock up for public sale, and by January 1996 slightly more than 2,000 beer lovers had bought every one, raising $1.96 million. In 1996 the company started opening Oldenberg brewpubs away from Fort Mitchell, one in Louisville and one in Oviedo, Florida; the Louisville one, the Oldenberg Grill, ran from 1997 to 2001. In 1998 the brewery turned out about 7,890 barrels for the Ohio Valley. Silver Creek Brewing bought Oldenberg's brewing operations in 1999, Ken Schierberg brewed the very last batch on Buttermilk Pike in April 2001, the rights to the Oldenberg name went to Miami Trail Brewing in Xenia, Ohio, and most of the building came down starting in 2013.

Schierberg had been there from the very beginning in 1987, hired as assistant master brewer and made Master Brewer in 1990. He brought more than eleven years in the trade with him, at the Wiedemann division of G. Heileman Brewing Co. and at Hudepohl Brewing Co. of Cincinnati, and he was a professional judge at the Great American Beer Festival.

🐐 Why a Goat?

Bock and goats go way back. The old brewing lore is that bock started in Einbeck in Lower Saxony, the Bavarians said "Einbeck" as "ein Bock" - a billy goat - and the goat has been on bock labels ever since. The style was first brewed in the 1300s in Einbeck, a Hanseatic trading town, and Munich's brewers took it up in the 1600s. Oldenberg described its Outrageous Bock as a traditional rich dark beer for spring, or a late-winter warmer, with a hearty flavor that came from the large amount of grain that went into it.

🕰️ The Stories

The great hall had a forty-foot clock that took six months of restoration just to make it displayable, and regulars still bring it up. Old-timers from the Cincinnati beer crowd talk about Beer Camp like a favorite summer, and by the early 1990s Oldenberg was billing itself, in its own promotions, as "America's Most Awarded Microbrewery." Northern Kentucky dealers will tell you the good Oldenberg pieces show up around Cincinnati, Covington and Lexington first.

A great one for a Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky beer fan, a man cave, or a breweriana collection. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Oldenberg's Outrageous Bock label again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.