For over 30 years, as a food writer and very amateur historian, I've been intrigued at the prospect of beer having been made from North Saskatchewan River water. I've tasted beer from around the world, have judged homebrew, met renowned beer aficionado and author Michael Jackson (no, not that one!), and read enough brewing literature to be aswim in the possibilities of making my own. Still, I've never actually made beer, though my father certainly did as a hobbyist, mostly from kits.

So, when I first encountered information on the location of two of Edmonton's early breweries, I wrote a piece on our river "chilly and wide" for the 1984 edition of the Edmonton Access Catalogue , published by Tree Frog Press. When Tom Cairns established the Yellowhead Brewing Company in September 1894, located just upstream from the current Low Level Bridge - and technically the first brewery in Edmonton, as the town had not yet amalgamated with the town of Strathcona - I wondered how it might taste.

According to period accounts, Cairns would use river water until the North Saskatchewan became "too muddy and fragrant," at which point he would draw from a well beside the brewery. There are no records of what Cairns brewed or how it tasted, but the style for the period would have been in keeping with the Bavarian "Purity Law" or Reinheitsgebot of 1516 - water, barley or wheat, hops and yeast. These days, such basic ingredients are in keeping with hobbyist brewers, and the craft and microbreweries. Back then, given the population, which in Edmonton would have been at the 2,500 mark, such microbreweries were the order of the day.

"You have to remember that the North Saskatchewan was a lot clearer than it is today," says Barry O'Neill, who with fellow Canadian Brewerianist Society member Bill Borgwardt, researched the early Edmonton brewery scene for a project published in 1980.

Why, I asked, would anyone prefer river water beer, when across the North Saskatchewan in Strathcona was a brewery that predated Cairns' by seven months, and used pure water from a natural spring? The South Edmonton Brewing Company (whose name was changed under new management in 1907 to the Strathcona Brewing and Malting Company Limited) was located near Queen Elizabeth Park just below present-day Saskatchewan Drive. Until 1907, it was operated by Robert Ochsner, who from 1891-1893 had managed the Vernon Springs Brewery in Vernon, B.C. Ochsner was the salesman for the venture in Strathcona; his wife Elizabeth would become Alberta's only - and one of Canada's very few - female brewmasters, though the tenor of the times would never allow the existence of the obvious feminine form of the title, "brewmistress."

There is little information held in Edmonton about the Ochsners, a surprise given the eventual long history of the brewery. We learn, for instance, that Edmonton lumber baron John Walter, gave the couple wood for the brewery on credit. We read also that until 1901, the Ochsner operation was the only competition for Cairns and his partner John Kelly. After the flood on Aug. 18, 1899, when headwaters rose 35 feet and swamped the Yellowhead Brewery (or the Riverside Brewery, as one source names it), the Strathcona-based company drew Cairns' hotel customers away. The hotels had run out of beer, and Ochsner, located on higher ground, sent his beer across the river on a powerboat owned by Sid Hubbard, an engineer working on the then-incomplete Low Level Bridge. A year later, Cairns left Edmonton, chasing the Gold Rush to run a brewery in Dawson City. Yellowhead would close, then later re-open under new management in 1904 as Edmonton Brewing and Malting Company Limited, with the owners constructing a two-storey red brick plant on the Rossdale Flats. As Michael Tilleard wrote in the Strathcona Plaindealer in the fall of 1985, "This building remains the oldest unaltered industrial structure in Alberta, and still can be seen today in the river valley."

There is even less in the public record about Elizabeth, who came to Edmonton with her German-born husband Robert from the great brewing city of Chicago, and outlived him by 37 years. In fact, newspaper accounts of the period do not provide her first name, a typical situation for a time where women's status was below that of men.

We do know that Elizabeth brewed five varieties of beer: an amber, a pale ale, an export lager, a bock beer in the spring, and a porter. The marketing of the latter predated the niche focus grouping that would become familiar to some breweries during the Alberta Prohibition years from 1916-1924 when a doctor's certificate was required for a pharmacist to provide beer to a customer. Elizabeth Ochsner's porter was described as "a dark, sweetened beverage for ladies who were run down or had babies," mother's milk, perhaps, to the ill and ravaged.

Prohibition would provide another wall to history-gathering, says O'Neill. "The history from that era is hidden. Brewing had become a bad rumour, even though it had employed a lot of Albertans."

We learn slightly more about Elizabeth Ochsner in the only company history of the brewery, written by J.L Weaver, the general manager of the brewery in the 1960s, which by then was called Bohemian Maid, in honour of Alberta's first and only brewmistress.

"The Ochsners were prodigious workers, in the tradition of the frontier," wrote Weaver in his short 12-page history, currently stored at the City of Edmonton Archives. "Mrs. Ochsner was slight and pale, with blonde Germanic hair brushed straight back. Mr. Ochsner, on the other hand, was a perfect barrel of a man, with a blonde mustache and bright pink complexion that fairly shouted the praises of Ochsner's beer."

There are reasons why researchers have been stymied about Elizabeth, the spelling of the family surname being one of them. The name has often been misspelled as "Oschner," according to O'Neill, a common occurrence during the early brewing years, when Robert would make a two-day trek marketing his beer by wagon to Leduc and Wetaskiwin. "It's an easy mistake," he says. "They even had it misspelled on the kegs."

The kegs themselves had a bit of a history, according to Borgwardt. Made of 1½-inch-thick maple, the kegs often would be kept by customers after emptied of beer for aging and storing sauerkraut. Robert Ochsner, then, became of the earliest Edmonton proponents of container deposits when he charged $2.50 per keg at a time when beer was available at the brewery for 25 cents per pail.

As well, some Ochsners anglicized their name to Oxner after emigrating to North America, opening up a further field of inquiry that with the brewing Ochsners would lead nowhere.

"We have a very thin file on the Ochsners," admits City of Edmonton archivist Bruce Ibsen, "but an excerpt from a local history, The Bitter 'n Sweet: The History of Bittern Lake-Sifton District , published in 1983, is in the file."

In that 634-page book - indeed the first source to provide a first name to the Bohemian Maid - it is possible to piece together the lives of the Ochsners after 1907, when Robert traded his interest in the brewery for Canadian Pacific Railway dispatcher Col. William A. Stoughton's 2,000-acre ranch located near Bittern Lake.

By 1914, the land - officially renamed the Bittern Lake Ranch - was a diversified farming operation with several hundred acres of grain under cultivation, beef cattle, milk cows, hogs, sheep, poultry, and Percheron and Belgian horses.

Robert Ochsner would die in 1915, having left brewing far behind. None of his children - son Ernest, and daughters Elsie and Pansy - continued in the trade, all of which makes researching their industry roots quite difficult. The Bittern Lake history ends the story of Elizabeth with her moving to Richmond, California, where she died in 1952.

The brewery would continue a nomenclature that is itself a history of the city and the province, growing as the city grew, from microbrewery to a member of a national chain.

Over the years, the Ochsners' spring-fed brewery on Saskatchewan Drive would become the Strathcona Brewing and Malting Company, Northwest Brewing Company, Calgary Brewing, Canadian Breweries Limited, Bohemian Maid Brewing Company Limited, and finally Carling O'Keefe.

No family members appear to remain in Edmonton. A lead to the Ponoka area turned up nothing, and only when you encounter other local beer historians such as O'Neill, Borgwardt, Lawrence Herzog and Ed Cooke does something of a picture emerge. Cooke is most poetic as he describes the location of the workplace of Robert Ochsner and his brewmistress wife, the Bohemian Maid.

As it stands, Herbst has his heart set on re-introducing to the Edmonton market Yellowhead Beer, the popular brand from Tom Cairns' brewery on the North Saskatchewan. And his voice takes a decidedly excited jump when he learns of the prospects of Varsity Beer, which would be historically closer to his southside home base.

One guarantee Herbst can make: Neither brew will contain the river water of yore.

Beer Facts
In the published brewing annals of Canada, Edmonton barely rates a mention, thanks somewhat to the Calgary and Lethbridge corporations that bought and amalgamated this city's early breweries.

Like it or not, the historical attention had shifted to the south, reflected in the Canadian industry's most complete history on the market, Allen Winn Sneath's Brewing in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada's 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry .

That said, while the Edmonton story is given little ink in the text, this city's milestones are recorded in a 106-page chronological history that occupies a quarter of the book's length.

"Robert Ochsner's spring still runs," he wrote in the Strathcona Plaindealer in the winter of 1994. "For a couple of years after the brewery closed, it created a sort of mini-glacier across the roadway in winter. The spring has now been tamed and, unfortunately, rendered invisible by underground concrete conduits."

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