South Bend Wineries and Distilleries: Brewers, Distillers and Vintners

Wineries & Distilleries · The makers: brewers, distillers, vintners

South Bend has made drink for most of its life, but it made the three drinks very unevenly. Beer it made at scale: an immigrant brewer's ground on the northwest side, bought in 1865, grew through one family, one Canadian takeover and one Detroit merger into the largest brewery the city ever had, and was still turning out well over a million barrels a year in the middle 1960s. Spirits it did not make at all, on the record reached: the city's whiskey trade was a trade in other men's whiskey — stocked, wholesaled and, in the dry years, run — until a Notre Dame business-school graduate set up a copper pot still in a former trucking terminal on Sample Street in 2013. Wine it likewise did not make commercially until the twenty-first century: the fruit belt that made this region's wine country stood across the state line in Berrien County, Michigan, and South Bend's first documented vineyard was planted on Brick Road in 2008, ninety years after the county's commercial brewers were building at their largest. What follows is the makers' record whole — the brewers first, because they are the city's industrial drink story; then temperance's documented effect on them; then the distillers' searched negative and its 2013 end; then the wine; then the craft era that put brewing back on Michigan Street a century after the Muessel plant's mammoth brewhouse went up. The rooms these makers supplied — the saloons, taverns and taprooms — are the Bars & Nightclubs section's record; the dry years' raids and rings are the Crime section's; this section keeps to the making.