Tap into Toledo’s brewing history

Buckeye Beer has long been enjoyed in Toledo.

It was once a staple of the city’s oldest brewery, Buckeye Brewing Company, which opened in 1838 — just five years after the city itself was established in 1833. Reproduced today by Maumee Bay Brewing Company, it’s a link to what was once a thriving industry early in the history of the Glass City.

Also offering a link to that history are several local tours that tap into this story, including the self-guided History in Hops experience and the scheduled tours aboard the 419 Brew Bus.

“People don’t realize that historically, before there was glass and before there was Jeep and the automobile industry, beer brewing was one of the largest employers in Toledo,” said Tedd Long, a local author, tour guide, and history buff. At peak production around 1900, Toledo was home to at least 14 active breweries, including the Buckeye Brewing Company.

“It was a foundational part of the community,“ Mr. Long continued. ”Not just people enjoying a beer, but it’s how a lot of people paid their bills.”

Mr. Long has spent years researching and organizing tours on prominent topics in local history, including Toledo’s brewing history. He even gives seasonal tours at the Woodlawn Cemetery, during which he shows visitors where some of Toledo’s most notable brewers are buried.

He and a close friend and colleague, Pete Schmidt, recently published a self-guided audio tour to voicemap.me, History in Hops. Mr. Long described it as “the history of beer in Toledo, and that is pretty popular.

“Pete and I actually worked together to build it for the Toledo History Museum as a bus tour, and then COVID and all that stuff happened,” he explained. “So then I upgraded it and we moved it to Voice Map.”

419 Brew Bus offers a Prohibition tour among its many other themed trips, carting visitors around town to notable locations throughout Toledo and giving them a look into the history of breweries in Toledo and the impact of Prohibition or the gangsters of northwest Ohio on the industry.

Buckeye Brewing

An integral part of the city’s brewing history lies in the Buckeye Brewing Company. Brewing one of the city’s most popular beers of the time, the company flourished over the years, making it an attractive conquest for other breweries in the area.

Like the Huebner-Toledo Breweries Co., the largest brewery in Toledo around 1903.

“Today we call it a roll-up in business terms, but back then they called it a combine. [Huebner-Toledo was] going to combine the breweries,” Mr. Long said. “Just prior to Prohibition, they were seeing that the days of stand-alone, small breweries were numbered because of people like Pabst and all these other [companies]. So they felt like combining was a way that they could still compete.”

But Buckeye declined to join Huebner-Toledo, and continued business as usual, producing 300,000 barrels of beer a year at peak production.

That decision would benefit the brewery down the road.

“The rest of [the breweries] went in and lost their shirts,” Mr. Long said. “Prohibition came, and they made the really big mistake of thinking they could sell near-beer.”

Near-beer, or non-alcoholic beer, crashed and burned as a business initiative. Locals preferred to turn to bootlegging or buying real beer under the table. Huebner-Toledo Breweries Co. was among the breweries that fell behind on sales and found itself strapped for cash.

In contrast, Buckeye Brewing Company put a hold on beer production and began to focus on the production of sodas and cider. Other breweries, like Huebner-Toledo, turned to sodas to a lesser extent, and in the end Buckeye was the only brewery in Toledo left standing after Prohibition.

“Most of the breweries, and definitely Huebner, thought that it would be short lived, didn’t think that Prohibition was going to be for the long-term,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It was 15 years, I mean it was the long haul, but Buckeye bet that it would be. So they kept their bottling operations and went to non-alcoholic beverages like soda and et cetera. So their bottling operations were always running so that they hit the ground running when Prohibition ended and they also converted their cold storage.”

Buckeye Brewing Company finally chose to sell to Peter Hand Brewing Company in 1966. Miller Brewing Company purchased the company in 1972, and ultimately picked up the label name “lite” that Buckeye Brewing Company had coined for one of its own brews. The result would be the name that many have grown to know and love: Miller Lite.

Moving production to Milwaukee, Miller Brewing Company found that Buckeye’s many years of success were not only due to the quality of the brew, but the community surrounding it.

“They endeared themselves with this community, with branding in the ‘40s and ‘50s when they had Bucky and they had a guy who personified it, I mean the perfect character, he was iconic,” Mr. Long said of the mascot who stood at 4-foot-5 and used to cart around with a goat to promote Buckeye Beer.

As sales dropped after the move to Milwaukee, Miller chose to end the production of Buckeye Beer and focus on diet or lite options for consumers.

With no known recipe and many of the original brewers having passed, the beer seemed to be doomed to remain a faint memory of the past.

It was not until the mid 1990s that Jim Appold, owner of Oliver House, which houses Maumee Bay Brewing Company, purchased the rights to the Buckeye label and with time, the famous flavor was re-created through trial and error.

“There was no real written recipe for Buckeye Beer. So our original brewers, they knew what it was supposed to taste like, they knew it was supposed to be a light, crisp, easy drinking lager, so they went from there,” said Michael Martin, sales manager at Maumee Bay Brewing Company. “They figured out a recipe that worked, what was tasting well, and we’ve actually adjusted it throughout the years with more updated ingredients and now we’ve done a refresh on the brand.”

Maumee Bay Brewing Company continues to offer the beer at its restaurant located at 27 Broadway St., Toledo, and at many local stores.

“It’s available at Bulk Beverage, Joseph’s Beverage Center, most of those. We have a couple of Kroger placements for it in the city, but mostly the local bottle shops are going to be your best bet,” Mr. Martin said.

While Prohibition wiped out many of the original breweries in Toledo, new and flourishing breweries stand tall today. With fresh brews, re-imagined Buckeye Beer, and new builds, Toledo holds its history close while embarking upon a brighter future in brewing local beer.

Contact Shayleigh Frank at

sfrank@theblade.com.