Vintage 1950s-1960s Old Tavern Premium Lager Beer Label 🍺 Warsaw Brewing Corp, Warsaw Illinois, Fox Hunt, Unused

Drinking While Driving!? 🍺 Vintage 1950s-1960s Old Tavern Premium Lager Beer Label, Warsaw Brewing Corp., Illinois

Size: 4 1/4" x 3 1/2"

Look closely at the front of this one. While the red-coated fox hunters and their hounds gather outside the old tavern, there's a fellow in an early open motorcar with a mug of beer tipped up to his mouth. Drinking while driving! You'd never get that past a label review today. It's an unused Old Tavern Premium Lager Beer label, brewed and bottled by the Warsaw Brewing Corp. of Warsaw, Illinois, 12 fluid ounces, with the old line "This beer does not contain more than four per centum of alcohol by weight" up the side.

🏭 A Brewery on the Mississippi

Warsaw sits on the Mississippi River in western Illinois, and beer was brewed there for more than a hundred years. William Martin Popel, born in Bohemia in 1837, started the brewery with Rudolph Giller around 1860-61; it was Popel & Giller for decades, then after Prohibition the Burgemeister Brewing Co., and from 1938 the Warsaw Brewing Corp. By 1939 it could turn out 80,000 barrels a year. It made Burgemeister, Old St. Paul and, from 1940, Old Tavern, and it kept brewing until 1972. The old brewery building is still standing in Warsaw.

⚓ The Town

Warsaw, in Hancock County, started out in 1814 as Fort Johnson, built by a young Major Zachary Taylor - the future president - on the bank across from the mouth of the Des Moines River. It has some dark history too. In the 1840s its newspaper, the Warsaw Signal, edited by Thomas C. Sharp, was the loudest voice against the Mormon settlement up the river at Nauvoo, and in June 1844, after Sharp printed "War and extermination is inevitable!", a group from Warsaw set out for Carthage, where a mob stormed the jail and killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Sharp was tried for the murders and acquitted. The brewery that made this label came along in 1861 and outlasted all of it.

🍻 Des Moines' Hometown Beer

Old Tavern didn't start in Warsaw. It was first brewed by the Des Moines Brewing Co. in Iowa, from 1908 until Prohibition shut it down in 1917, and the name changed hands a few times after that before Warsaw brewed it right up to 1972. Des Moines never forgot it - one local historian calls it "Des Moines' hometown beer" - and in 2025 Confluence Brewing in Des Moines brought Old Tavern back. They said the old label art, with folks drinking beer on horseback, couldn't go on a modern can. This is that label.

📅 How Old Is It?

Beer labels had to carry the words "Internal Revenue Tax Paid" until March 1950. This one doesn't, so it was printed after that - the 1950s or '60s, while Warsaw was brewing Old Tavern.

Frame it for a bar or a den, or give it to someone from Des Moines or the Tri-States. You'll get one like the one shown.