Stroh’s
Our Take
The beer that, for generations, simply meant Detroit. In 1850, 28-year-old Bernhard Stroh stepped off the boat from Germany with — as the story goes — a suitcase in one hand and the family beer recipe in the other, and started brewing a Bohemian-style pilsner for the city’s German immigrants, selling it door to door from a wheelbarrow. He named it the Lion’s Head Brewery after a crest from a castle back home; that lion still rides on every label.
The company grew over 149 years and five generations into the third-largest brewer in America, famous for its “fire-brewed” method — a direct flame on the copper kettles — and a million-square-foot plant on Gratiot, just east of downtown near Eastern Market. The Detroit plant closed in 1985 and the family sold out in 1999, and for a while Stroh’s was just a memory in a cheap can. But in 2016 it came home: Stroh’s is brewed in Detroit again, at Corktown’s Brew Detroit, from the original 1850s recipe. The brewery grounds are now Brewery Park, but the beer — and the pride — never really left.