Hibernia Brewing Ltd. was an American brewery company, the successor firm to the Walter Brewing Company, located in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Under the leadership of Michael Healy, president and chief stockholder of Hibernia, the brewery introduced several specialty brews considered innovative for their time and became one of the first producers in the American Midwest of what now are considered to be craft beers and ales. At its peak, Hibernia produced over 30,000 barrels of beer per year, employed about 50 workers, and had a market range that included Minneapolis–Saint Paul, St. Louis, Missouri, and Omaha, Nebraska, with success also in Denver and Boulder, Colorado to the west and south; and Chicago, Milwaukee, and suburban Cleveland, Ohio to the east.Scott Lautenschlager and John Keefe, “’Microbreweries’ On the Move,” Wisconsin State Journal 2 Aug. 1987 [Section 3]: 1. The brewery quickly earned a reputation for quality products, aided by the receipt of a second place award for its Hibernia Dunkel Weizen in the Great American Beer Festival of 1985. However, the release of underpasteurized beer to new markets was an economic disaster. Although the brewmaster and assistant brewmaster were fired immediately and insurance covered the recall, it was impossible to get the consumer to give them a second chance. This combined with increasing competition from the growing number of companies passing themselves off as brewers, when in fact they were sales/marketing entities that outsourced the manufacturing of their beers.
Origins
The Walter brewing operation was originally established in Eau Claire in 1878 as the Henry Sommermeyer & Co. Dells Brewery, at the corner of Hobart and Elm Streets. It was acquired by Johannes (John) Walter, a German immigrant from the Wuerttemberg area, in 1890.Dale P. Van Wieren, American Breweries II (West Point, PA: Eastern Coast Breweriana Association, 1995) 394. The firm survived most of Prohibition by manufacturing wort (fermenting malt), closing in 1931 before reopening two years later upon repeal.Jerry Apps, Breweries of Wisconsin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) 159. Walter managed to survive the most intense period of consolidation of the American brewing industry, from shortly after World War II through the 1970s, producing nearly 47,000 barrels in 1979 and a high-water mark of nearly 64,000 barrels in 1980.Apps, Breweries of Wisconsin 160-161.
Changing consumer tastes and very aggressive marketing by stronger national brewers made it impossible for a brewery like Walter, already in basic survival mode, to continue operating. In 1981, Walter's output fell to just over 50,000 barrels, distributed within a sales radius of some 30 miles, and by the end of 1984 its total production had fallen to a paltry 18,000 barrels per year. Brewing activity was down to just one day per week, and only 22 employees, most working part-time, remained on the payroll. Although brewing industry success was predicated upon active marketing, Walter's advertising budget had fallen to zero, and the company's prospects appeared so bleak that a business class at the University of Wisconsin recommended that it be shut down.Bill Richards, “One Giant Step,” Wall Street Journal 19 May 1986: 10D. The operation was within weeks of bankruptcy when Michael Healy, a Chicago businessman, bought the brewery effective May 1, 1985.Jeremy Iggers, “Forget It, Joe Six-Pack,” Minneapolis Star and Tribune [Sunday Magazine] 20 Jul. 1986: 8. Although Healy had no previous experience working in the brewing industry, he was a stranger neither to the beverage trade nor to what motivated him to take the company in a new direction. Born and raised on the northwest side of Chicago, Healy tended bar at his father's tavern, Mike Healy's Public House, and while serving in the military in Germany in the mid-1960s, he developed a taste for the more flavorful, fuller-bodied lager beers that dominated there. As Healy noted in 1985 and afterward, “That spoiled me, because when I came home I just couldn’t redevelop a taste for American beer.”Bill Stokes, “A Brewer Takes a Stand to Beat the Bland,” Chicago Tribune 20 Sep. 1985 [Section 5]: 3. See also “Specialty Brewer Stressing Quality,” La Crosse Tribune 19 Oct. 1985 [Business Section]: 11.
Changing circumstances and directions
The strengths of larger breweries, combined with a flat growth rate in the beer market, played a large role in the demise of Walter. The major national brewers—which used advertising, their economies of size, and an efficient national distribution system—essentially traded the same customers with other national brewers and grew at the expense of smaller breweries, whose dwindling market share ultimately led to bankruptcy and closure in all but a handful of cases. Through expansive and expensive advertising campaigns, the national brewers were able to convince American beer drinkers that what they were offering was what beer was supposed to look and taste like. However, an increasing number of consumers complained of a taste profile bordering on blandness. Unable to spend any money on advertising/promotion, Walter increasingly opted for discount pricing in an effort to sell more beer, joining in the failing footsteps of many small local brewers that attempted to create sales volume with low prices. They found that their products acquired a lasting reputation for lower quality, thereby harming sales still further. At the same time, Walter failed to recognize a critically important change taking place as consumer tastes were moving toward more flavorful, stylistically distinctive brews, demonstrated by the fact that the only true growth in the industry at the time was exhibited by the imported beer segment. As the 1980s progressed, the key to survival for small brewers lay in recognizing and catering to this change in consumer demand, and in turn offering products that the national brewers did not produce and could not make in limited quantities. As Healy noted at the time, “A small brewer cannot compete with the big guys on their terms. We came in with plans to do something different, and everyone welcomed us with open arms.”Stokes, “A Brewer Takes a Stand to Beat the Bland,” 20 Sep. 1985 [Section 5]: 1. Unfortunately, under Walter's management, which had continued to try to compete with the national brewers by offering identical-looking, nondescript-tasting adjunct beers, no thought was given to producing all-malt products. The firm made only lager beers, and its entire product mix contained not a single ale.
Before buying Walter, Healy made the choice of being responsible for everything carrying the Hibernia name and not joining the increasing number of contract companies pretending to have their own facilities. Healy felt that full disclosure was the correct way to present his products as Hibernia's and only Hibernia's, under the philosophy that having someone else brew, bottle, can, and keg their beer, but then put their name on the finished product, did not equate to being a brewery. Healy renamed the company Hibernia Brewing Ltd.—Hibernia being the Latin name for Ireland, a nod to his ethnic heritage—and immediately made plans to produce all-malt beers, brews consisting of only hops, yeast, malt, and water and made according to the German beer purity law (Reinheitsgebot) of 1516. Healy believed that there was no reason to drink imported beer when he could import the brewmaster, which is what he did. Armed with the fact that the beverage choices offered to beer drinkers rivaled or surpassed those enjoyed by wine drinkers, and with the knowledge that America could produce world-class brews, Healy introduced excellent, award-winning craft beers. These included the year-round Eau Claire All Malt Lager Beer and the seasonal brews Oktober Fest (fall), Winter Brau, Bock (spring), and Dunkel Weizen (summer), with a plan to release European-style stout, ale, and porter at a later date.Tim Scott, “Eau Claire Brewery Will Switch to Special Beers,” Milwaukee Sentinel (Regional News) 2 May 1985 [Part 1]: 12.
The flagship beer, Eau Claire All Malt, was brewed to a Vienna-style lager recipe and advertised under the slogans “Real Beer Is Here!” and “Real Beer Returns.” Though described in promotional literature as being “a return to John Walter’s original beer of the 1880s,” the formulation was created by Gary Bauer, a Milwaukee homebrewer, under specifications given to him by Healy and with refinement by Hibernia brewmasters.Peg Masterson, “Healy Sees Market for Rich Beers,” Milwaukee Sentinel [Tuesday Business] 29 Oct. 1985 [Part 4]: 16. The second beer introduced by Healy in 1985, Dunkel Weizen, represented the first American-brewed dark wheat beer since the advent of Prohibition in 1919.Masterson, “Healy Sees Market for Rich Beers,” 29 Oct. 1985 [Part 4]: 16. In addition to its specialty beers, Hibernia continued to manufacture several brews from the Walter product line, primarily for the traditional Eau Claire market, including the former flagship Walter's Lager Beer, Walter's Special Beer, and Walter's Light Beer.Sue Lendman, “Chuck Walter: He’d Rather Sell Than Close Walter’s Doors,” Chippewa Herald Telegram 23 Feb. 1985 [Section A]: 3. Although Walter's Lager and Walter's Special had been brewed essentially to the same recipe in the last days of the Walter brewing operation, Healy reformulated the beers upward so that each had its own distinctive formula under Hibernia.
Non-alcoholic beverages also factored into the Hibernia product line over time. Two soft drinks were created in 1985—a root beer and a cream soda—making Hibernia one of the earliest craft brewery producers of carbonated sodas. In 1987, in a further attempt to diversify, the brewery began to bottle carbonated and flavored Eau Claire Spring Water. The water was derived from a farm well near Eau Claire and in independent laboratory testing was found to be particularly pure.Maryann Mrowca, “3 Small State Breweries Plan to Stay Put, Compete,” Capital Times 15 Dec. 1987: 26.
Early success
The newness of the Hibernia specialty beers allowed Healy to penetrate markets and retail outlets that previously had been unavailable to the brewery, drawing interest from distributors in the Twin Cities, Chicago, and St. Louis, among other locations. Draft accounts were particularly receptive to Healy's sales pitch that by taking on the Hibernia seasonal beer line, they would have a different Hibernia beer on tap every three months, or four distinct beers each year—without adding new tap lines—and a corresponding increase in sales that each prompted from both new and returning customers.
The image of superior quality that Healy strove to promote with his beers received a significant start with the results of the 1985 Great American Beer Festival, in which Hibernia Dunkel Weizen took second place overall (out of 104 entries) in the Consumer Preference Poll at the competition—trailing only another new beer at the time, Samuel Adams Boston Lager, a contract brew—and Eau Claire All Malt scored first out of 45 beers in the lager competition.Results of the 1985 Great American Beer Festival Consumer Preference Poll are available online: (retrieved 15 Apr. 2014). See also “Hibernia Wins Second in Beer Competition,” Eau Claire Leader-Telegram 4 Jun. 1985: 1D. Healy expressed justifiable pride in the accomplishment, noting that “there hasn’t been a commercially brewed dark wheat beer in this country in 65 years. It’s the right idea at the right time. … I think American beer drinkers will discover Americans can make a beer that’s as good as anybody’s in the world if they take the time to do it.”Masterson, “Healy Sees Market for Rich Beers,” 29 Oct. 1985 [Part 4]: 16.