Vintage 1960s Mountain Brew Beer Label 🍺 Hatfield-McCoy Brewing Co — Reading, PA NOS Breweriana

Was Hatfield-McCoy Brewing Co. a Real Brewery? 🍺 Mountain Brew Beer Label, Hatfield-McCoy Brewing Co., Reading, Pennsylvania, 1963-65

Size: 3 1/2" x 3"

An unused 12-ounce label for MOUNTAIN BREW BEER, "Brewed with Blue Mountain Water," with a lanky mountain man in a pointy black hat leaning on a barrel, rifle in hand, and HATFIELD-McCOY BREWING CO., READING, PA. up the side. Yours will look just like this one.

⛰️ A Two-Year Beer

Hatfield-McCoy wasn't really a brewery - it was a name. From 1963 to 1965 the Sunshine Brewing Company at Hockley, West Elm and Gordon Streets in Reading sold Mountain Brew under the Hatfield-McCoy name, one of the "aka" brand names a regional brewer could run out of one plant. That plant had been Peter Barbey's brewery since 1880; the Ortliebs and Nate Cooper bought Barbey's in 1951 and renamed it Sunshine, and Sunshine it stayed until the brewery closed in 1970. So Mountain Brew had about a two-year life - Sunshine also used names like Falcon Brewing Co. out of the same plant.

Falcon was just one of a whole closet full of names. Over the 1960s that single Reading brewhouse sent out beer as Falcon Brewing Co. (1961-63), Muhlheim Brewing Co. (1962-68), Hatfield-McCoy (1963-65) and Jamaica Brewing Co. (1964-66), and in its last years as Esslinger, Ruppert and Playmate (all three from 1967) and finally Bavarian Brewing Co. (1968-70).

The Barbey end of the story goes way back. Peter Barbey was born in 1825 in Dierbach, in the Bavarian Palatinate, learned brewing as a boy, and worked for Reading brewer Frederick Lauer before he and a partner, Abraham Peltzer, opened their own brewery on Penn Street in the late 1850s. His son John became his partner in 1880 - that's the P. Barbey & Son years - and ran the business after Peter died in 1897. When Prohibition shut the brewing down in 1920, John held the company together, and in 1933 he reopened as Barbey's Inc. and started calling the beer Sunshine. He was still at the helm when he died in 1939, at 89. John was a banker as well as a brewer, and he left Reading one more thing: in 1911 he bought out his seven partners in the Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing Co., a little company founded in 1899 that became Vanity Fair Silk Mills and, in 1969, VF Corporation.

The Ortliebs of 1951 were the Henry F. Ortlieb Brewing Co. of Philadelphia, so when Mountain Brew came along in 1963 this was a Philadelphia-owned Reading brewery. That changed in 1964, right in the middle of Mountain Brew's run, when Reading Financial Corp. bought Sunshine. Sunshine put about a million dollars into the plant in 1966, including a new 30,000-square-foot packaging building, but the big national brewers kept squeezing. It filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and shut down for good in 1970, everything inside went at auction in 1971, and the old brewery buildings came down in 1973 for urban renewal.

The timing makes sense, too. The Beverly Hillbillies hit CBS in September 1962 and shot to number one in the Nielsen ratings, and a year later a Reading brewer put a hillbilly with a rifle and the most famous feud in America - the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, who feuded across the Tug Fork from 1863 to 1891 under Devil Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy - on a beer label, a mountain-folklore twist where most brewers stuck to hops and barley. "Blue Mountain Water" was the local touch: the Blue Mountain ridge is the northern skyline from Reading.

That ridge is the southern and eastern edge of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians. It runs about 150 miles across Pennsylvania, makes the northern line of Berks County, and looks back at Reading across the Great Valley. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary sits up on it, right on the Berks-Schuylkill line - Rosalie Edge started it in 1934 to put a stop to hawk shooting - and on average 20,000 hawks, eagles and falcons sail past its lookouts every fall.

📜 The Stories

Old-timers in Reading breweriana circles have speculated for decades about who in the brewhouse came up with putting a mountain man on the bottle. And the question collectors love to ask: did anybody from the real Hatfield or McCoy families ever see this label? Descendants of both were alive and well in 1963, and nobody has turned up an answer. The families did finally make peace on paper - in 2003, at Pikeville, Kentucky, descendants declared an official truce.

A fun one for a Pennsylvania beer fan, a West Virginia or Kentucky family, or anybody who loves a good feud. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Mountain Brew labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.