Sláinte to Oktoberfest from Columbus! While German immigrants started our city’s proud beer-brewing tradition, the Famine Irish quickly exploded the pastime, and Irish styles abound amongst Central Ohio’s craft breweries today
The German to Irish Transition
Columbus’ first brewery, City Brewery, was founded in 1836 by German immigrant Louis Hoster. Rival breweries quickly sprung up on the immediate southside of the city, creating today’s German Village and Brewery District neighborhoods downtown. The Irish pubs and bars along Irish Broadway poured those breweries’ (and Arthur Guinness’) creations until Prohibition in 1923, which killed even Hoster’s City Brewery.
The beer cans that rolled out of Anheuser-Busch’s sixth national brewery, on Columbus’ northside, in 1968 dampened the spirit for small or independent breweries in the city for decades. Columbus Brewing Company (CBC), founded downtown in 1988, shattered that national, corporate, dominance of the hops and suds market. CBC is Ohio’s second oldest craft brewery (just younger than Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing), and it serves up a delicious dry-hopped, nitro poured Irish Stout, the ‘Ol Irishman, every St. Patrick’s Day season.
The German to Irish beer brewing tradition in the city lives on at Gemut. The brewery follows German Purity Laws and has fantastic stained-glass windows depicting pre-Roman Germanic folklore. But, in October, Gemut shows its Celtic pride by offering up turnips for carving for Samhain-themed decorations.
Columbus Beers During Green Season
As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, so many of Columbus’ craft breweries get their Irish on. This year, Wolf’s Ridge Brewery added an “Irish Beer Dinner” to its monthly dinner and beer pairing for March. Getaway Brewery in Dublin, the sister brewery of Seventh Son downtown, releases Emerald Parkway, an Irish Red Ale.
Red ales also come out of Sideswipe (Saints and Sinners), Parsons North, Wolf’s Ridge (Tilt Back), and North High (the Road) breweries. Outerbelt makes an Irish Stout, Cloverleaf, just like our city’s first craft brewery, CBC.
Beyond Columbus Irish Beer
Two adjacent central Ohio breweries keep their locally made Irish stouts on tap year-round: Jackie O’s O’Hooley from Athens (with a brewpub located downtown in Columbus) and Fooster at Old Capital Brewing, in Chillicothe. Veritas, a fine dining restaurant in Columbus that routinely changes their menu to focus on the cuisine of a particular culture, served up Irish cocktails based on the offerings at real London establishments, The Connaught Bar and Swift, this past Spring. Hopefully one day we will get an Irish menu from them that brings Galway Bay flat oysters to Ohio plates!
Despite its focus, this column is not meant to be an endorsement of alcohol. The Columbus Anheuser-Busch facility is one of that corporation’s two breweries to produce alcohol-free beer. Guinness’ zero-alcohol stout is a fantastic option to offer up a sláinte with friends while avoiding the intoxicant. The alcohol-free beer and cocktails offerings at so many breweries, bars, and pubs today, brought on by the consumption habits of our current twenty-something’s generation, hopefully will save the small businesses and spaces that foster so much connection and conversation between people, both in our Irish American communities and back home in Ireland. A commitment to sobriety for one’s own health, physical or mental, also should not shut somebody out of the Irish pub, and, if we help people enjoy the pub sober, hopefully we can save pubs all over the world too!
September sees the Chicagoan Irish American comedian Connor O’Malley perform at the Columbus Funny Bone on September 10. The Shamrock Club has its Halfway to St. Patrick’s Day Party September 13. Amble, a folk trio from Longford and Sligo, make their first ever Ohio stop at the A&R Music Bar on September 17. So raise a glass to growing Irish pride in Central Ohio this September!
