Vintage Stegmaier Bock Beer Label 🐐 NOS 1960s–1974 Wilkes-Barre PA Brewery Collectible

Why Is There a Goat on Stegmaier Bock Beer? 🐐 A Vintage 1960s-1974 Stegmaier Bock Beer Label, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Size: 4" x 2"

A foaming stein with a goat's head peeking out from behind it. TRULY BREWED sits up in the corner and BOCK BEER BY STEGMAIER runs across the stein. The small print says BREWED & BOTTLED BY STEGMAIER BREWING CO., WILKES-BARRE, PA. 18701 and CONTENTS 12 FLUID OUNCES. These labels never went onto a bottle.

🐐 Why a goat

Bock was first brewed in the 1300s in Einbeck, a Hanseatic town in Lower Saxony. Munich brewers took the style up centuries later, and with their Bavarian accent "Einbeck" came out sounding like "ein Bock," a billy goat. The beer became Bock, and goats have been on bock labels ever since. Bock was a beer for special times of the year, with Christmas, Easter and the fast of Lent all tied to it, and the paler maibock is brewed for spring festivals. Old barroom lore says bock was made from whatever was left at the bottom of the vats when the brewery cleaned them out in spring. The brewers always said otherwise, but the goat stuck either way.

🍺 Stegmaier of Wilkes-Barre

Charles Stegmaier was born in Gmünd, Württemberg, and started learning to brew there at 15. He sailed for America in 1849. In 1851 he brewed the first lager beer in northeastern Pennsylvania, and in 1857 he and his father-in-law, George Baer, opened the Baer & Stegmaier Brewery in Wilkes-Barre. In 1863 they built a bigger brewery on East Market Street, and the Panic of 1873 ended the partnership. By 1880 Charles and his son Christian had it back as C. Stegmaier & Son. A new brewhouse and storage went up in 1894, built for 300,000 barrels a year, and in 1897 the firm became the Stegmaier Brewing Co.

In the early 1910s its beer won eight gold medals at expositions in Europe, which is why the flagship became Stegmaier Gold Medal. After Prohibition it grew into one of the largest independent breweries in North America and reached about half a million barrels in 1940. One history of the brewery says Charles started out in 1857 delivering his own barrels behind a wagon pulled by a husky goat. A goat on the bock label fits right in.

Old-timers in Wilkes-Barre have passed down the story that while a new brewhouse was going up, Stegmaier brewed in a wooden kettle and kept its beer cool in an abandoned coal mine tunnel. It fits the place. Wilkes-Barre sits in the Wyoming Valley along the Susquehanna River, and anthracite coal built the city. People called it the Diamond City. Irish families came first, and after about 1870 the mine operators went looking for workers across central and southern Europe.

🏭 The end of the line, and the way back

The brewery closed in October 1974. Charles's great-great-grandson, Edward R. Maier, made the hard call to sell the brand to Lion, Inc. of Wilkes-Barre. The Lion hired about 50 former Stegmaier workers, and Stegmaier Gold Medal became its best-selling beer. The city of Wilkes-Barre bought the empty brewery in 1978 for back taxes. The brewhouse, finished in 1894 in the Romanesque style, went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and is the Stegmaier Federal Building today.

The name went home in 2022. The Lion sold the Stegmaier brand to Susquehanna Brewing Company in Pittston, which Ed Maier started in 2010 with his son Fred and a partner. Susquehanna is named for a brewery Charles bought in Nanticoke in 1897 and renamed Susquehanna Brewing Co. the next year.

📅 How old is it?

Nothing on the label is dated. The five-digit ZIP code means it was printed after July 1963, and the Stegmaier Brewing Co. closed in 1974, so these are 1960s to 1974 labels.

🐐 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 4 by 2 inches. It's a natural for a home bar, a beer label collection, a bock fan, or anybody from Wilkes-Barre and the coal region. The supply is finite. Nobody is printing these labels again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.