Minnesota’s first brewery, which produced lager beer, was established in 1848 by Anthony Yoerg, in St. Paul. Yoerg, like many St. Paul brewers to come, was a native of Bavaria, the cradle of the German brewing industry. It wasn’t until 1871 that Yoerg moved to the location that was to be so closely associated with his name, on the opposite side of the Mississippi River.
Yoerg’s Brewery was built in a snug little cove along Ohio Street, an idyllic spot once referred to as “The City of the Birds” from all the holes that cliff swallows had dug in the sandstone bluffs. St. Paul historian Edward D. Neill was able to report by 1881 that Yoerg “has five cellars excavated in the bluffs.” The brewery prospered mightily until Prohibition came along, when it eked out a meager existence as the Yoerg Milk Company in the face of stiff competition from existing milk companies.
Many of Yoerg’s newspaper advertisements after Prohibition featured Rip Van Winkle awaking from his slumbers, showing the elves rolling the kegs out of the cave. Unfortunately, the caliber of management had declined in the interim. Yoerg stuck to its lagering caves long after other breweries had moved beyond this technology, producing its “Cave Aged Beer,” as proudly advertised on its cone-top cans—which were themselves a late adoption by the company.
Yoerg’s Brewery closed in 1952 and the lagering caves were rented to the Charles Harris Plumbing & Heating Company, which used them for the storage of plumbing fixtures. Thereafter, Yoerg’s Cave acquired an interest for the urban tourist akin to what the famous glowworm caves have become for the tourist in New Zealand. Glowworms are a sort of luminous fly larva that make a living in certain New Zealand caves by attracting other flies to their lights, trapping them in a sticky web, like a spider would do. At Yoerg’s Cave, the light was generated very differently, involving something known as piezoelectricity.
Here’s how our illuminating tale unfolds. After fire tore through the plumbing warehouse in 1958, Harris moved away, leaving toilet bowls stacked up to the ceiling in the cave passages. But by the time I explored Yoerg’s Cave in the late 1980s, nothing but broken shards were visible. Apart from the entropy of boredom, the whole reason for busting the bowls, according to eyewitnesses, was to enjoy the shower of sparks that the disintegrating porcelain emitted in the dark—a display of piezoelectricity.
By 2004, Yoerg’s Cave was ready for another glowing tribute. The cave became a lobbing ground for Molotov cocktails, footage of which appeared on the television news. Others, digging inside the cave on a recreational basis, found old boxes and burlap sacks containing gunpowder from the 1950s, which the St. Paul Bomb Squad promptly removed. According to my own tests, however, the gunpowder was degraded and incapable of ignition. That was probably fortunate for all concerned, lest the City of the Birds once again become airborne.
Excerpted from MINNESOTA CAVES.