Theses and Dissertations

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Frontier beer: a spatial analysis of Denver breweries, 1859-1876
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Neihart, Braden, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Archambeau, Nicole, committee member; Leisz, Stephen, committee member
American breweries in the nineteenth century offer a business-based lens to understand immigration and industrialization. For this reason, historians in recent years have turned increasing attention to the history of beer, particularly in individual cities such as Chicago or St. Louis. This study examines brewers in Denver from the 1859 Gold Rush to statehood in 1876 and attends to spatial challenges they faced as a result of ethnic and industrial conditions within and far from the city. Over this period, the brewing industry transitioned from several small breweries into a handful of high-producing businesses. Distance to necessary materials, equipment, and customers posed tremendous hurdles to brewers and elicited creative solutions. Breweries thus fulfilled cultural and industrial desires by overcoming geographic obstacles. They condensed space within Denver and the nation through railroads, replaced craftwork with industrial labor, and attempted to structure transitory labor in the American West.