Spring is upon us at last, and to adapt a famous line from an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem: In the Spring, a beer fan’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of green beer.
Discerning craft-beer drinkers may object, of course, preferring a bock instead. After all, green beer is gimmicky stuff, fake Irish, a commercial strategy to boost business on St. Patrick’s Day at the “Irish” pubs strewn across North America. Even if you’ve never tried one, you already know what it tastes like because it’s usually a commercial light lager dosed with food coloring.
In truth, green beer’s lineage—while American, to be sure—has more than a touch of the Irish about it. Bar owners throughout the 20th century, often of Hibernian heritage, took pride in selling green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Some even claimed to source it from the Auld Sod, Ireland itself.
The real history of green beer on St. Patrick’s Day is full of interesting twists and turns. So, let’s take an excursion into the annals. I’ll note that other writers uncovered a couple of these cases—Spokane in 1910 and Curtin in 1914—while the rest come from my own research.
Pabst Green Ribbon
In 1899, Milwaukee’s Pabst Brewery already was well known for its Blue Ribbon Beer, its bottles at that time festooned with a real blue ribbon.
That year, as a marketing gambit, Pabst replaced the blue ribbon with a green one on a portion of its beer packaged ahead of the holiday. It also put a shamrock on the label in lieu of the usual hop leaf, with marketing that proclaimed, “Hibernians to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” (That’s according to Printer’s Ink, an advertising trade journal from that time.)
However, the beer itself was the usual pale lager—it wasn’t colored for the special day. Quite possibly, however, bartenders or others soon took inspiration to fashion green-tinted beers for St. Patrick’s Day.
Spokane’s Green Beer in 1910
The earliest documented reference I’ve found of green-colored beer comes from 1910. That’s when an article in The Press newspaper of Spokane, Washington, reported that the town’s First Avenue Bar served “green beer to patriotic Irishmen and anybody else who wanted to taste a green brew.”
The article claims the color wasn’t added locally but added little else because the bartender wouldn’t tell. The bar sold several kegs on St. Patrick’s Day—the article’s tenor suggests that the beer sold like gangbusters.
Notably, there is no suggestion in this article that the novelty compromised Irish honor or disrespected Irish tradition.
Manhattan’s Green Beer in 1912
In December 1912, The Morning Call of Paterson, New Jersey, published a report that a food inspector in Manhattan, New York City, stopped a Bowery bar from selling green beer on St. Patrick’s Day.
An Irishman had complained, worried about safety of the beer given the unusual color. In this case, witnesses apparently saw the bartender add something to each filled mug to make the beer green.
The report adds that the substance was suspected to be a coal tar dye, also used to color candies and believed at the time to be harmless. Despite the presumed safety, the inspector banned the green brew on “general principles.”
Oswego’s Green Beer of 1913
This example stands out because the green beer was said to be imported from Cork County, Ireland.
In Oswego, New York, 24-year-old Robert Gokey threw his own birthday party for no less than 25 companions, the “Friendly Sons of St. Patrick,” at Gokey’s restaurant. (He was likely the owner’s son or another relation.)
The article in the Oswego Daily Palladium says that the restaurant got provisions from “New York importers,” including “hams and bacon from Limerick,” roast beef and “a saddle of mutton” from Tipperary, and green beer from the “Triconnell Brewing Company, of Cork.” There’s no known record of such a brewery—it’s likely a misspelling of Tirconnell or Tyrconnell—and perhaps the restaurant or “importers” made it up, sending a tinted domestic brew.
“The latter is imported under the national pure food laws of this country,” the article says. “The brew is from Irish-raised barley, but the method of imparting its color is a secret process that can only be applied to beer of the highest standard and quality.” The Gokey family took evident delight in serving green beer, despite such a thing not being known in Ireland, then as now.
Batavia’s Green Beer of 1914
The Batavia Sunday Times on March 15, 1914, reported that several bars in that town, in western New York state, would serve a “new libation” on St. Patrick’s Day—green beer.
Teasing the readers, the paper poses the question, “How do they make green beer?” It doesn’t answer its own question. Instead, it suggests that readers who want to know should show up at the bars to find out.
Thomas Curtin’s Green Beer in New York City, 1914
On March 26 of the same year, columnist Charles H. Adams in the Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida, reports that a New York City coroner’s physician, Irish-born Thomas Curtin, had worked out a way to color beer green.
The column says Curtin added “wash blue” to standard beer whose “amber hue” became “deep green.”
Curtin reportedly presented the beer annually on St. Patrick’s Day at New York’s Scherner Club to the accompaniment of “Irish songs.” The club included business and professional figures—a different demographic than typical Irish-American saloons.
We can’t know how many bars or clubs were serving these beers without attracting the notice of newspapers, but it’s clear that green beer was being served more than 110 years ago to different social strata and in different places.
After World War I
Prohibition in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933. Some places in the 1930s were advertising green beer as a special thing for St. Patrick’s Day, and that practice continued after World War II.
In New London, Connecticut, bar owner Dan Shea served green beer on March 17,1953, and on other St. Patrick’s Days that decade. He was another who claimed to have sourced his green beer from Ireland—from County Kerry, in his case.
As a boy, Shea had immigrated from County Kerry to the United States with his parents. There’s no record of a brewery in County Kerry from that time, but perhaps a Kerry dealer was selling him green beer, made elsewhere in Ireland, colored especially for him. Perhaps.
Shea was your prototypical, self-identifying Irish-American. In 1957, a photo in The Bridgeport Herald showed him shaking the hand of a visiting Irish dignitary—Prime Minister Eamon de Valera, who himself born in New York City in 1882.
Gimcrack or Authentic Irish?
Guinness Stout was available in some American bars before and after Prohibition, so it’s not as if Americans in the bar business didn’t know what real Irish beer was. Many did, but that didn’t stop them selling green beer—wherever it was made—for St. Patrick’s Day.
The examples above show that many of the people serving it were of Irish descent—and we could infer that many of their customers were, too. They apparently regarded green beer as some small part of their Irish identity. Can we say, definitively, that they were wrong?
While a made-in-America green beer doesn’t have the pedigree of, say, California steam beer or even Kentucky common, that hardly means it is ersatz Irish. On the contrary, the available documentary evidence suggests that American green beer was an outgrowth of Irish-American culture.
Ireland famously sent large numbers of emigrants worldwide, especially to North America. It’s not a stretch to conclude that Irish-American culture represents one corner of genuine Irish tradition, and green beer along with it.
So, if you opt to brew, color, or drink a green beer on this St. Patrick’s Day, just know that even if it’s not an authentic tradition from Ireland, it’s certainly an Irish-American tradition that’s at least 115 years old.