Vintage 1960s Perfection Beer Label 🍺 Horlacher Brewing Co Allentown PA NOS Gnome Breweriana

Remember Horlacher's Perfection Beer? 🍺 Vintage 1960s "Nine Months Old" Label, Horlacher Brewing Co., Allentown, PA

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

I love the gnomes on this one. Two little bearded fellows in red pointed caps, one with an armful of hops and one with a sheaf of grain, rolling out 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. It's an unused label from the Horlacher Brewing Co., Allentown, Pa. 18102, 12 fl. ozs.

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 mines and buried treasure. Germany gave us the garden gnome too: the town of Gräfenroda in Thuringia was making them from around 1860, and they have traditionally worn red pointed caps just like these two.

🏭 Allentown's Last Big Brewery

The brewery goes back to 1866, when James Wise started the Allentown Brewing Company at Fourth and Hamilton Streets. Fred Horlacher took it over in 1882, and in 1902 his son Frederick moved it to North Third and Gordon Streets and put the family name on it. It got through Prohibition making near-beer and soft drinks, came back with real beer after 1933, and in the 1930s and '40s it was run by a brewmaster the Lehigh Valley still talks about, Charles E. Lieberman. Horlacher was the last of Allentown's major breweries when it finally closed in 1978.

👨‍👦 The Horlachers

Fred Horlacher was born on December 3, 1840, in Württemberg, Germany. He sailed for America in November 1865, settled in Philadelphia and went into the jewelry business there, staying until 1874. Then he moved up to Parryville in Carbon County, where he worked at his trade and later owned a hotel, spent four years in Bowman, and came to Slatington in the spring of 1882. By 1894 he had bottling works in Slatington, Allentown, Lehighton and Bangor, an ice plant in Slatington, and he had organized Slatington's electric light plant back in 1888.

His son Fred H. Horlacher was born in Philadelphia in 1868 and grew up to be the brewery's president, general manager and head brewer. He was president of the Allentown Ice Manufacturing Company too, and Lehigh County sent him to the Pennsylvania House as a Democrat for 1909 and 1910. He died in Allentown in 1927 and is buried there in Grandview Cemetery.

🤫 The Dry Years

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 beer came back on April 7, 1933, when the Cullen-Harrison Act let brewers sell 3.2 beer, the company took back the Horlacher Brewing Company name, and the Twenty-first Amendment ended Prohibition altogether on December 5, 1933. Those were hard years for the business, though. The company went bankrupt, and 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.

⏳ Why Nine Months?

Perfection was Horlacher's famous "Nine Months Old" beer - aged that long so it would stand up to long-distance deliveries. Perfection is an old name for them, too: when Horlacher registered it as a beer trademark in 1948 (Reg. No. 504535), the filing gave 1905 as the year the name was first used. Horlacher made a Nine Months Old lager too, brands like Short Snorter and Duke's, and from 1956 to 1960 a Hess Patio Beer. The ZIP code on this label means it was printed in 1963 or later.

🏙️ Allentown

Allentown was a working town. Its silk mills earned it the nickname Silk City, Bethlehem Steel, once the second-largest steelmaker in the country, was right next door in Bethlehem, and when the factories and the steel declined, Billy Joel sang about it in "Allentown," the 1982 single from The Nylon Curtain that climbed to No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100.

A fun one for a Pennsylvania beer collection or anybody from the Lehigh Valley. You'll get one like the one shown. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Horlacher's Perfection labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.