Bottle Washing On The Graveyard Shift

The Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company has received more publicity in the last couple of months than it ever achieved in the nine decades of its existence throughout most of the twentieth century.  Located just southwest of downtown St. Paul on West Seventh Street, Schmidt survived the Prohibition Era to emerge as the seventh largest brewery in the United States.  During Schmidt's heyday, virtually every neighborhood tavern on that side of the city hung a Schmidt Beer sign over its door, with another Schmidt neon sign glowing in the window.  Better not ask for a Grain Belt if you knew what was good for you.  

Since Schmidt ceased brewing operations in 1990, the brewery premises has undergone a handful of transformations, from an unsuccessful run by the Minnesota Brewing Company (makers of short-lived Landmark Beer), to an ethanol production plant, to the 2012 conversion of the bottle and brew houses into the Schmidt Artist Lofts.  

The reason for the latest hubbub surrounding the old brewery grounds has come in three waves, aftereffects of the September 2018 opening of the Keg & Case Market, a food hall which occupies what used to be Schmidt's keg house; hence, the name.

In mid-January USA Today crowned Keg & Case as the country's best food hall, the result of a nationwide poll.  Lest you think there was a dearth of competition, be advised there are approximately 180 food halls across most regions of this country.  What sets K & C apart is the quality of the more than two dozen vendors in business there.  That leads us to the second headline emanating from West Seventh. 

Also in January the Star Tribune selected K & C's anchor tenant, In Bloom, as the 2018 Restaurant of the Year, quite a feat considering the competition resulting from the surge in Twin Cities fine dining establishments over the last several years.  The paper's chief food critic, Rick Nelson, was impressed with In Bloom's emphasis of cooking over burning wood in their eighteen foot long hearth.  Citing the menu's choice of five different preparations of venison as an example, Nelson loved the establishment's strategy of operating on a large scale.  That seems fitting for its food hall backdrop.

Proving that good things come in threes, last week the James Beard Foundation announced their semi-finalists for its coveted awards, referred to by some as the "Oscars of the food world."  One of the Foundation's several categories is the Best Chef Award for each of ten regions across the U.S.  The Midwest Region includes eight Plains and Great Lakes states, stretching from Kansas to Wisconsin.  In Bloom's Executive Chef, Thomas Boemer, is one of the semi-finalists for the honor of Best Chef: Midwest.

In view of the hoopla surrounding those three big stories following the repurposing of Schmidt's former bottle house, brew house and keg house, is it possible the old brewery itself will soon be forgotten?  For logical and personal reasons, I hope the answer is no.  Schmidt was one of St. Paul's major employers, and produced thousands of barrels of the nectar of the gods annually.  Its lager was superior in taste to its Twin Cities rivals, Grain Belt and Hamm's.  Who can forget the long necks and the Big Mouths?  The buildings on Schmidt's campus were a classic and familiar landmark.  But beyond all these reasons, one stands out for its historical significance, cementing the memory of Schmidt until well into the future: it was where I worked during the summer of 1973.

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One of my teaching colleagues at Most Holy Trinity School was a former Christian Brother named Jack Dienema.  A married father of four, Jack taught language arts in the morning, then headed off to Schmidt later in the day to work the second shift.  Most importantly, Jack held a high ranking position in the labor union at the brewery. A favorite memory of mine was listening to Jack recap some of the strange events filled with colorful characters he encountered at Schmidt.  He made the place sound like it should be the setting for a television comedy.  [Note: This was three years before the beloved show Laverne & Shirley, whose hilarious title characters worked at a fictitious Milwaukee brewery, began its eight season run.]  As he waxed eloquent, Jack would often have a cigarette perched in his hand resting atop his partially amputated middle finger.  Somehow he managed to hold the heater in place by gently pinching its sides with his index and ring fingers.  That little mannerism seemed to make Jack's stories even more delightful. 

In the spring of '73, Jack surprised me with the news that Schmidt's sales were booming to a level that required them to add a third shift.  It obviously wasn't the first time a third shift was needed, but it had been awhile. He thought he could call in a favor or two and land me a summer job if I was willing to work those hours. Are you kidding me?  To appreciate fully my reaction, you have to realize that I was only four years removed from college, where beer drinking was pretty much a way of life. What twenty-five year old would not jump at the chance?

A few months later there I was, operating the bottle washing machine on the Schmidt assembly line. I was no stranger to assembly line work. A couple of summers before I'd held a line job at Lakeside Industries, a Bloomington manufacturing plant.  At Lakeside I was lucky enough not only to work on the creation of a number of different products, including electric signs, games and toys, but to do so on the first shift.  A little variety on a daylight shift is really all an assembly line worker can ask for.  By contrast, at Schmidt my east-of-midnight job remained the same for the entire summer.  I may not have been a cook, but I was the chief bottle washer!

The job of a bottle washer was probably different from what most people would imagine.  Picture a huge metal cylinder, about ten feet wide with a circumference of five or six feet, lying on its side right up against the assembly line.  The inside of the contraption was somewhat like a ferris wheel, only instead of seats revolving around the center there were steel trays.  Empty beer bottles would make their way down the line on rollers, and get pushed on to a tray as they entered the cylinder.  Once a tray inside the cylinder was filled to capacity with the bottles, the tray began to revolve through the machine as the bottles were doused by torrents of fairly hot soapy water, not unlike an automobile passing through a car wash.  After one revolution, a bar would push the rinsed, wet bottles out of the machine and back on to the line's rollers.  My job was to visually examine the bottles when they exited the machine to make sure there was nothing like a cigarette butt in the bottle and that the bottle was not chipped or cracked.  (The guy who trained me claimed that once in awhile there'd be a dead mouse inside the bottle.  I was not gullible enough to believe him, and I'm happy to report that I never discovered any such creature during my tour of duty.)  On the very rare occasion when I did spot a butt, a chip or a crack, I simply deep sixed that bottle before it could make its way down the line to the next station.

Some assembly line jobs, like the one I had at Lakeside, carry a high stress level, because the workers are forced to keep up with the pace of the products coming toward them.  In other words, it's imperative that before the product goes down the line from Station A to Station C, the worker at Station B has to perform his task, almost always in quick fashion.  The job I held at Schmidt was not like that, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you why.  Inside my machine was what is sometimes referred to as an "electric eye."  The "eye" cast a beam of light through the bottles right before they exited the washer.  If the beam was obstructed, that meant something was imperfect with one or more of the bottles on the tray.  In that case, a buzzer sounded, the machine temporarily stopped, and I had to pluck the defective product from the tray.  This might happen once or twice during an eight hour shift.  Thus I did not have to be fully alert, as the electric eye was helping me out.

If that seems unexciting and boring, it gets worse.  Most of the guys working the third shift were people like me who, notwithstanding the decent wages, were just interested in seasonal work; over half were teachers. The other common thread was inexperience. Production-wise, we were no match for the veteran crews on the first and second shifts, comprised mostly of men who had been there years if not decades.  Accordingly, if the line had to be shut down because there was maintenance to be performed on the line's mechanisms -- practically a nightly occurrence -- or if the beer recipe had to be changed, it made sense that the honchos preferred to get that accomplished during our shift. There'd be less loss of production versus shutting things down during the day. 

So, what to do, other than stand around, while waiting for the engineers and technicians to do their thing?  That leads me to the greatest perk of the summer.

As Jack had correctly informed me, there was only one rule regarding the consumption of beer on the premises.  The workers could drink as much Schmidt Beer as they wanted for free(!), but the liquid refreshment had to stay in the break room.  Given the fact that we were entitled to a half-hour lunch plus two fifteen minute breaks, what this amounted to on a typical shift would be the opportunity to consume four, and at times five or six, twelve ounce bottles every night, depending on how many times the bosses shut down the line.  If the foreman estimated that the line would be down more than ten minutes, we'd bide our time in the break room where more of our favorite malt beverage awaited us, should we be so inclined. This was better than having a 401(k) which, of course, did not exist in those days!

For the first week or two I was pretty excited.  Sure, the job itself was a snoozer but the fringe benefits were outstanding.  The lunch breaks resembled college dormitory bull sessions, only we were being paid for our time and there was no rector to break up the party.  But then, the combination of my body clock wearing down from the overnight hours plus the fatiguing effects of the alcohol caused me to down shift to the point where I drank, at most, only one beer at lunch, usually at 3:00 a.m., and relied on caffein the rest of the time.  Without that change of M.O., I would not have lasted on the third shift much longer.  [Note: One big problem for working the third shift on any job is that it's tough to know when to sleep.  Should you try to get seven or eight hours of solid slumber when you get home at, say, 7:45 a.m., or wait to sleep until the afternoon so that you're fresher when you start your job?  I tried both approaches and was equally unsatisfied with the results from both.  I was coaching a Babe Ruth baseball team that summer, so chose morning sleep more often than not.]

The summer of '73 almost ended tragically for me, but -- Spoiler Alert! -- thankfully it did not. One rainy and foggy morning as I was driving down West Seventh on my way home from work, I was totally exhausted.  It had been a struggle to finish my shift, mostly because I'd been unable to get much sleep the day before.  A smart guy would have looked for a Mac & Don's or any cafe where a cup of coffee might have helped, but I just wanted to get to my own bed and stay there for as long as possible.  Once I'd made it to the Crosstown I felt like there was no turning back.  About a mile west of Cedar Avenue, straining to see through the deteriorating weather conditions, I fell asleep at the wheel.  It is the only time in my life that's ever happened. Luckily I was in the far left lane, and going only about 55 m.p.h., so as my car gradually meandered to the left, it side-swiped the concrete median.  The jolt from the impact startled and awakened me, and I somehow managed to right the ship without crashing into another car or having one from behind crash into me. If not for that median a head-on collision with an eastbound vehicle would have been inevitable.  Such a disaster would have given new meaning to the term "graveyard shift."  Maybe the nuns back in Libertyville were on to something when they taught us that we each had a guardian angel. 

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I have not paid a visit to Keg & Case yet, but my curiosity can only remain unsatisfied for so long.  I'd definitely like to check out In Bloom to determine if I'm as impressed as Mr. Nelson, the Strib food critic.  Another draw is the brew pub, Clutch Brewing Co., overlooking the market and promoting its product as "craft beer of a slightly different ilk."  I'm curious to find out whether the architects and interior designers of K & C have paid any homage to the old brewery.  Some artifacts like Schmidt barrels, signs, coasters, coolers, pictures or posters would be nice.  I suppose a commemorative plaque reading, "Johnny Rock worked here during the summer of '73" would be too much to ask.