Vintage 1950s-1960s Top Hat Beer Label 🍺 Cincinnati Brewery Ohio Breweriana Collectible Bar Decor Bottle Label

Who Brewed Top Hat Beer? 🎩 Vintage 1950s-1960s Top Hat Beer Label, Cincinnati, Ohio

Size: 3 1/4" x 2 3/4"

An unused Top Hat Beer label from Cincinnati - a black top hat with a cane laid across the front of it and a pair of white gloves hung over the cane, set in a yellow oval on deep maroon, with barley and hops on either side. Down the left edge: BREWED AND BOTTLED BY TOP HAT BREWING CO., CINCINNATI, OHIO. Down the right: CONTENTS 12 FLUID OUNCES. And under the art, "Brewed from the finest malted barley, cereal grains, and selected hops." It never made it onto a bottle.

A top hat, white gloves and a cane - that's Fred Astaire all over. He introduced Irving Berlin's "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" in RKO's 1935 picture Top Hat, and that number was the first time he ever used a cane as a prop in one of his filmed dances.

🎩 The Top Hat Was a Schoenling

Here's the fun part. "Top Hat Brewing Co." wasn't a little brewery of its own - it was another name for the Schoenling Brewing Co. of Cincinnati, which started up as the Schoenling Brewing & Malting Co. in 1934, right after Repeal. It opened on Good Friday that year, and it was a brand-new company, not one of the old pre-Prohibition breweries starting back up. Schoenling used the Top Hat Brewing name from 1950 until 1987, but the beer is older than the trade name - Schoenling was printing TOP-HAT labels by 1940 - and it was still being brewed, in cans too, in the mid-1980s. The Top Hat name itself goes back further than that: Schoenling's federal trademark for TOP-HAT beer and ale, filed in 1960 and registered in July 1961, gives January 31, 1938 as the day it was first used. They brewed a Top Hat Ale too, and a Silk Hat. Schoenling is the same Cincinnati outfit that made Little Kings Cream Ale (it came out in 1958, in little 7-ounce green bottles), and in 1986 it bought its crosstown rival, Hudepohl, to become Hudepohl-Schoenling. In the late 1990s the brewery itself was sold to the Boston Beer Company, the Samuel Adams people. In 2006 Christian Moerlein Brewing bought up all of the old Hudepohl-Schoenling brands and recipes, and in late 2019 a new ownership group bought into Christian Moerlein and renamed it the Cincinnati Beverage Company.

🍺 A Queen City Beer

Cincinnati was a German beer town long before Schoenling came along. German immigrants started pouring into Cincinnati and the rest of Hamilton County in the 1830s, and a lot of them settled just north of the Miami and Erie Canal. They nicknamed the canal "the Rhine," after the river back home, so crossing the bridges into their part of town was going "over the Rhine" - and the name stuck. Back when the rest of the country called it Porkopolis for all its pork packing, the old Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was full of breweries and beer halls, and a lot of those local labels, Top Hat included, are gone now.

By 1880 Cincinnati was being called the Beer Capital of the World, with Over-the-Rhine at the heart of it, and in 1893 the city went through about 40 gallons of beer for every man, woman and child - two and a half times the national average. Then came Prohibition, and by the end of the 1920s the three biggest breweries in town, Moerlein, Hauck and Windisch-Muhlhauser, were closed for good. Repeal finally came in 1933. This one has no "Internal Revenue Tax Paid" line on it, the wording labels had to carry until 1950, so it was printed after that. It's a 1950s or '60s label.

Breweriana - labels, cans, trays and all the rest - has had organized collectors for more than fifty years: the Beer Can Collectors of America got going in 1970, and the National Association of Breweriana Advertising in 1972. Frame it with your other Cincinnati breweriana, or give it to somebody from the Queen City. You'll get one like the one shown. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Top Hat labels for Cincinnati again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.