Some birthday presents get opened, admired, and put in a drawer. Mine got a screw gun, a couple of screws, and a place of honor. On Saturday, a generous friend handed me a framed Wunder Brewing Co. poster. He’s the kind of guy who does good deeds quietly and never wants the credit. The poster shows a dark-haired beauty in a crimson gown and a sweeping red-plumed hat, with roses tumbling behind her and “1907 Greetings” scrolled in gold above the brewery’s name. By Sunday afternoon she was hanging on the knotty pine wall of the U.S. Open Barn, my personal man cave. Now she keeps watch over the bottles, medals and memories from a lifetime of adventures, from my Friends Brewing days (1989–1998) to 17 years of the U.S. Open Beer Championship.
My son Cam, my longtime wingman, approved right away. Cam has been on more brewery tours with me than most beer writers, and he has a good eye for what belongs on the wall. He gave her a nod and a thumbs up, and that settled it. Now every time we sit in the barn, she looks over her shoulder at us like she’s waiting for someone to pour her a lager.
The Brewery That Started as Bavarian
The poster is gorgeous, but the story behind it is even better, because Wunder Brewing’s roots go back to the Gold Rush. The Bavarian Brewery was founded by Philip Frauenholz in 1852 at Vallejo and Green Streets in San Francisco, and later moved to Greenwich and Scott Streets. It started out as a steam beer plant, though it’s unclear whether it stayed one through its many owners and addresses, which included Vallejo and Green, Vallejo and Montgomery, and finally Greenwich and Scott. The brewery went through five name changes, usually some version of “Bavaria Brewing,” before it became Wunder Brewing in 1898.
Meet John C. Wunder
The man behind the name was a Midwestern saloon keeper with big ideas. John Christoph Wunder was born in Streitberg, Germany, came to America at 17 in 1872, and settled in Minneapolis, where he became a citizen in 1882. By 1887 he owned his own saloon. In 1895 he and a group of investors from Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis and San Diego put up the money for the San Diego Brewery of California. In 1898 he left that partnership, bought San Francisco’s Bavarian Brewery, renamed it after himself, and replaced its flagship Bavaria Lager with his own Wunder Beer.
His advertising had swagger. Wunder trays from the era carried a bold tagline claiming no beer was purer and none was better. And the poster now hanging in my barn tells you something else about the brewery: it was printed for 1907, the year after the great earthquake and fire leveled much of San Francisco. Wunder was still brewing and still sending out holiday greetings to saloons while the city rebuilt around it.
The Short, Bright Run
The good times didn’t last. Wunder ran the brewery until it was folded into the Union Brewery syndicate, the plant closed in 1909, and Wunder went home to retire in Germany. He died there on February 11, 1929, at age 73. That means the Wunder name lasted only about 11 years in San Francisco, which is exactly why the surviving advertising is so prized by breweriana collectors.
The name refused to stay buried. In November 1933, right after Prohibition ended, a new Wunder Brewing Company of Oakland bought the Koken-White Corporation plant at 26th and Adeline to turn into a brewery, but ads for it disappear after 1935. Then, in 2007, a brewpub revived the name in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset district. My favorite part of that story: its brewer, whose last name was Wonder, had grown up with a poster of the original Wunder Brewing Company on his bedroom wall because the name was so close to his own, and he and his partners bought the rights to the name to make that dream real.
Why She Belongs in the Barn
I started Georgia’s first craft brewery back in 1989, so I have a soft spot for brewers who put their own name on the label and bet everything on it. John Wunder did that more than a century ago, with a lager, a slogan and a lady in red. Prohibition, consolidation and an earthquake couldn’t completely erase him. Today, his brewery lives on in collections, in beer history blogs, and now on a wall in Oxford, Ohio, where Cam and I raise a glass to her.
To my friend who gave her to me: thank you. She’s home.
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