Vintage 1960s-1970s Horlacher Brewing Beer Label Pair 🍺 Perfection Nine Months Old Gnomes and Duke's Bulldog, Allentown PA

🍺 What Do Two Gnomes and a Bulldog in a Bowler Hat Have in Common? Two Vintage Beer Labels From Horlacher Brewing of Allentown, Pennsylvania

Size: Perfection 3 1/2" x 2 1/2", Duke's 3 1/2" x 2 1/4" ~ Never went on a bottle.

Two labels that couldn't look less alike, out of the same brewery in the same town. One has a pair of bearded gnomes in red pointed caps rolling out a barrel. The other has a white bulldog in a bowler hat peering out from the curl of a giant letter D. Both say Horlacher Brewing Co., Allentown, Pa., and I put them together because between the 1960s and the 1970s, those two labels are the last chapter of a brewery that went back more than a hundred years.

🧙 Perfection, Nine Months Old

I love the gnomes on this one. One has an armful of hops, the other a sheaf of grain, and they've got a barrel with a big 9 MONTHS OLD on its head, under Perfection Beer in old German lettering and a ribbon that says THIS BEER IS NINE MONTHS OLD. That was the brag. Horlacher aged it that long so it would stand up to long-distance deliveries. And Perfection is an old name for them: when the brewery registered it as a beer trademark in 1948 (Reg. No. 504535), the filing gave 1905 as the year the name was first used.

The gnomes are no accident of the art department, if you ask me, because gnomes have deep German roots and so did the family on this label. The word comes from Paracelsus, the Swiss physician, who wrote about gnomes as earth spirits in the 1500s, borrowing the little men of the mountain from German miners' tales. Small folk who could move through solid ground and kept watch over buried treasure. Germany gave us the garden gnome too: the town of Gräfenroda in Thuringia was making them from around 1860, and they've traditionally worn red pointed caps just like these two.

🐶 Duke's

Look at that face. The bulldog sits inside the long curl of the D in Duke's, set in big blackletter on a hot orange ground, and the word beer runs down the right edge in the same lettering. Up the left side, in tiny type, it says BREWED AND BOTTLED BY HORLACHER BREWING CO., ALLENTOWN, PA. 18102. Down in the corner is a union printers' bug, the little mark a union shop put on its work to show every step was done by union hands. This one sits in the 1970 to 1978 stretch, the brewery's final years.

Both labels carry that five-digit 18102, and since ZIP codes only started in July 1963, neither was printed before then. Perfection is the 1960s label. Duke's is the later one. So what you've got is the old-country family brand and the cheeky late-model one, side by side.

👨‍👦 A Jeweler From Württemberg

Fred Horlacher was born on December 3, 1840, in Württemberg, Germany. He sailed for America in November 1865 and went into the jewelry business in Philadelphia, staying until 1874. Then it was Parryville in Carbon County, where he worked at his trade and later owned a hotel, four years in Bowman, and Slatington in the spring of 1882. By 1894 he had bottling works in Slatington, Allentown, Lehighton and Bangor plus an ice plant, and he'd organized Slatington's electric light plant back in 1888. Not bad for a jeweler.

The brewery itself is older than the name. James Wise started the Allentown Brewing Company at Fourth and Hamilton Streets in 1866, Fred Horlacher took it over in 1882, and in 1902 his son moved it to North Third and Gordon Streets and put the family name on it. That son, Fred H. Horlacher, was born in Philadelphia in 1868 and grew up to be the brewery's president, general manager and head brewer. Lehigh County sent him to the Pennsylvania House as a Democrat for 1909 and 1910, and he's buried in Grandview Cemetery in Allentown.

🤫 The Dry Years and the Cement Man

Through Prohibition the company went by The Horlacher Co. and bottled Pur-Ox ginger ale, root beer and lemon soda. The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, writing up an old Horlacher TV commercial, say the brewery kept making beer on the side. Legal 3.2 beer came back on April 7, 1933, and real beer followed, but those were hard years and the company went bankrupt. In the mid-1930s it was bought by Fred Franks, an Allentown man who had built cement plants all over the Lehigh Valley, Keystone Cement in Bath among them. A cement man buying a brewery sounds odd until you remember where you are. In 1871 David O. Saylor received the first American patent for Portland cement and made it at Coplay, a few miles from Allentown.

In the 1930s and '40s the brewery was run by a brewmaster the Lehigh Valley still talks about, Charles E. Lieberman, and the brand list ran long: Coburger, Penguin, Little King, Short Snorter and, from 1956 to 1960, a Hess Patio Beer.

🏙️ Allentown

Allentown was a working town. Its silk mills earned it the name Silk City, and Bethlehem Steel, the second-largest steelmaker in the country, was right next door. When the mills and the steel faded, Billy Joel sang about it. "Allentown," from The Nylon Curtain, came out in 1982 and reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. Horlacher had already gone by then. It closed in 1978, the last of Allentown's major breweries.

A fun pair for a Pennsylvania beer collection, a home bar, a bulldog lover, or any Lehigh Valley kid. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.