by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
It’s October and our thoughts naturally turn to beer. And Halloween. And the upcoming holidays. And the very last chance to file federal taxes. And, again, beer, and what a long and hearty history New Bern has of brewing and appreciating the golden libation with a head of foam.
It’s good to know that today’s lively downtown scene of breweries, pubs, speakeasies, taverns, and restaurant bars is based firmly on local tradition more than 300 years in the making.
North Carolina settlers were brewing the stuff by 1585. One proud Roanoke man said they “brued as good ale as was to be desired.” And that’s 125 years before the Swiss settlement on the Trent and Neuse. But New Bern co-founder John Lawson tells us that Native Americans were at it even earlier. Writing in 1709, he said the Indians had always used cedar berries and corn to make their beer. Others used molasses and its lighter cousin, treacle. But in the end, a brew’s a brew, right?
Beer is mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times in New Bern newspapers beginning in the 1700s. Beer was brewed, sold, and happily consumed from the earliest days. In 1831, the Newbern Spectator quoted a printer saying: “My fellow pressman drank every day a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with bread and cheese for breakfast, one between breakfast and dinner [lunch], one at dinner, one again about six o’clock in the afternoon, and another after he finished his day’s work.”
The Civil War didn’t slow consumption in occupied New Bern. One Union soldier wrote that the bar of the Gaston House on Craven Street “is well-patronized.” The product morphed from local brew to beer brought by New York City steamships but no one complained, at least not in print. In 1865, New Bern aldermen prohibited the sale of beer not only to active-duty soldiers and sailors but also to those “recently discharged.” The ordinance was published in the New Berne Times … over a couple of beer ads.
By the late 1800s, we have a long list of bars, taverns, and grocers selling the stuff but New Bern’s most predominant purveyor of beer was James Redmond. Called “the Champion of Bergner & Engel Bottled Beer,” Redmond was a big-time merchant, steamship owner, and man about town. The New Bern Daily Journal in 1883 said, “Here in New Bern … large quantities are brewed and bottled by our clever townsman, James Redmond, who keeps two wagons running to supply the heavy demand for his excellent beverage.”