28. Leveraging Brewing History: The Case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood

The United States is experiencing a craft beer revolution. There are over 7,000 craft breweries in the United States; in 1980 there were only eight. The rise of craft breweries is a response to consumer dissatisfaction with the beer offered by mega-breweries such as Anheuser-Busch. Craft breweries offer consumers a higher quality product and a wide variety of different beer styles. The growing popularity of craft beer has also resulted in a renewed interest in the history of beer and brewing. The focus of this paper is Cincinnati, Ohio. During the nineteenth-century Cincinnati was the destination of tens of thousands of immigrants from Germany. Most of these immigrants settled in what would become known as the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. By the 1870s Over-the-Rhine was one of the most densely populated German-speaking neighborhoods in the western hemisphere—German-speaking churches, German-language schools and newspapers filled the neighborhood. Over-the-Rhine was also home to 13 breweries, which provided the local population with German-style lager beer. During the twentieth century, the number of breweries in the United States declined as a result of a decades-long period of consolidation in the American brewing industry. In Cincinnati, as in other American cities, breweries closed one-by-one as national breweries, like Anheuser-Busch and Pabst, came to dominate the brewing landscape. Old brewery buildings either sat empty of were adaptively re-used for other purposes. Recognizing the historical value of these old brewery buildings, in 2005 residents established the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (BDCURC), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. The mission of the BDCURC is to “make the Brewery District a healthy, balanced and supportive neighborhood economy by preserving, restoring and redeveloping our unique brewing history and historic urban fabric.” The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Cincinnati’s brewing history is being leveraged as a part of the city’s broader neighborhood redevelopment efforts.