Vintage 1970s-80s Bergheim Beer Label 🍺 Bergheim Brewery Philadelphia PA & Cleveland OH NOS Hex Sign

A Pennsylvania Dutch Beer Brewed in Cleveland? 🍺 Vintage 1970s-80s Bergheim Beer Label, Bergheim Brewery, Philadelphia & Cleveland

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

Such a pretty one - Bergheim in big red blackletter over a whole little countryside: a waterfall tumbling down the rocks, dark pines, a red barn with a yellow roof, a horse-drawn buggy, and a red-and-gold Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign in the corner. BEER in blue, NET CONTENTS 12 FL. OZ. up one side, and BERGHEIM BREWERY, PHILA., PA. & CLEV., OH. down the other. Down in the bottom corner sits a tiny oval union label. Never used.

That little oval is the union label of the Allied Printing Trades Council - the printers' union "bug." The printing unions settled on that design in 1897, and by 1939 it was on print jobs all over the country. The bottom arc names the city of the local council, and the number next to it belongs to the print shop, given to it when the shop organized.

🏡 From Reading to Schmidt's

Bergheim started out as a Reading Brewing Company beer from Reading, Pennsylvania, right in Pennsylvania Dutch country - that's where the hex sign and the buggy come from. The name suits the picture, too - Bergheim puts together the German words for mountain and home.

Reading Brewing went all the way back to 1886. In its early years it made a Pennsylvania Dutch lager, about 1,200 barrels a year, and by 1891 it was up to around 50,000 barrels. Prohibition shut it down: in June 1922 a Reading truck heading out with a shipment got raided and the beer tested over the legal limit, more turned up in a vat inside the plant, and on New Year's Day 1924 the company lost its license to brew. It came back after Repeal. Reading was brewing Bergheim by the 1960s, and from 1965 "Bergheim Brewing Company" was one of the names it went by.

Reading stopped brewing on March 24, 1976, and April 15 was its last day. The beer was all gone by then, but there were a few Bergheim cans left over - so they sealed them up with nothing in them but air and set them aside to sell to souvenir hunters.

When Reading went under in 1976, Schmidt's of Philadelphia bought the Reading and Bergheim labels and the rights to brew them, and "Bergheim Brewery" became one of the names Schmidt's put on its own cans and bottles. That's why this label names two cities: Schmidt's brewed in Philadelphia and also ran a plant in Cleveland, Ohio.

Schmidt's first came to Cleveland in 1964, buying the old Standard Brewing plant on the West Side - the home of Erin Brew - from Schaefer of New York. In 1971 it bought Carling's much bigger brewery on the East Side, and by 1972 it had moved its Cleveland brewing over there. That East Side brewery started out as the Peerless Motor Car factory, where they built luxury touring cars until the Depression finished Peerless off in 1931. Peerless's president, James A. Bohannon, turned the factory into a brewery when Prohibition ended, and it grew into Carling's. So the Cleveland on this label is the old Peerless car plant.

🏭 Schmidt's

Christian Schmidt came over from Württemberg, Germany, and in 1860 bought a little ale brewery on Edward Street off Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. By the late 1970s Schmidt's was the tenth-biggest brewer in America, and it kept buying up old names - Duquesne of Pittsburgh in 1972, Reading and Bergheim in 1976, Rheingold in 1977, Erie's Koehler in 1978. April 1976 was a big month all around: the same month the Reading brands came in, the Schmidt family sold the company to William H. Pflaumer. The Cleveland brewery closed in 1984 - the last brewery left in a city that had nine of them in 1939 - and in 1987 Schmidt's sold its brands to Heileman of La Crosse, Wisconsin. When the Philadelphia brewery shut down in 1987, it was the first time in more than 300 years the city had no brewery at all. The old Philadelphia brewery is gone now - apartments stand where it was.

📅 Dating It

Schmidt's only got Bergheim in 1976, and the Cleveland plant closed in 1984, so a label naming both Philadelphia and Cleveland comes from those years - the late 1970s and early '80s.

⭐ The Hex Sign

The Pennsylvania Dutch have painted those bright star rosettes on their barns for generations. They started showing up in the early 1800s and really spread decades later, once ready-mixed paint was easy to buy, and you'll see the most of them in Berks County - Reading's county - and in Lancaster and Lehigh. The farmers mostly just called them Blume or Sterne, flowers or stars; the name "hex sign" didn't come along until after Wallace Nutting put out his book Pennsylvania Beautiful in 1924. The artist even painted three of them on the side of that red barn. Folklore says they were for good luck and good harvests and kept trouble away - though plenty of farmers will tell you they were just for pretty.

A great one for a Pennsylvania or Ohio beer collection. You'll get one like the one shown.