‘Tacoma needs its own beer’: How Heidelberg Beer came home after a 40-year vacation

Any place is right for Heidelberg beer.

So goes a 1960s-era promotional tune for Columbia Brewing Company’s most enduring contribution to the Pacific Northwest. From 1912-1979, the Tacoma manufacturer of those “golden drops” resided over several downtown blocks, near 21st and Jefferson south to Pacific. Today, only one of its many buildings remains: a warehouse, built in the 1950s and now home to 7 Seas Brewing.

“The beer was marketed as having ‘that velvet tang,’” said 7 Seas co-founder Mike Runion, “and that is just such a wonderful, textural way to describe a beverage.”

He’s sporting a Heidelberg T-shirt, fresh out of the box, perched on a chrome bar stool in front of mountains of empty aluminum cans, most emblazoned with the company’s refreshed No. 7 logo but some with the 21st-century edition of the curved Heidelberg triangle.

On Oct. 12, 2021, 7 Seas re-introduced Tacoma to this “decidedly different” lager in 16-ounce cans, available that day at the taproom for $0.35, exact change only. (It’s now $4 on-site, or $8 for a four-pack to-go). Despite a quiet, basically day-of announcement, the launch party was well-attended. Earlier that day, the first delivery landed on the doorstep of The Parkway Tavern, one of the city’s longest-running taverns. Later that week, cases made their way to select bars around the city — “the places that would have served Heidelberg,” according to Runion.

“We brewed, like, a batch,” he laughed. It was gone in three days. “We brewed a double-batch the next day, but it takes four weeks — it’s a lager. You know, you don’t rush it. It is what it is.”

As his team packed the new Heidelberg for just the second time, the scent of fermented barley in the air and beer foam whizzing from the canning machine, we discussed the significance of bringing the brand back to life.

“We’ve always been inspired by the brands that came before us — the Rainiers, the Heidelbergs, the Olympias — that market themselves right to people in the Northwest’s heart, with nostalgia,” said Runion, nodding wryly to the shrouded truth behind that trio of classic Northwest lagers.

While Heidelberg disappeared in 1979 following a decade of ownership transitions, Rainier, which dominates the cheap beer scene in the Puget Sound today, and Olympia eventually succumbed to Pabst Brewing Co. The conglomerate discontinued Olympia last year due to lagging sales. Heidelberg, on the other hand, lived and died in Tacoma.

HOW HEIDELBERG BECAME TACOMA’S BEER

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” said local historian Michael Sullivan in reference to a Mark Twain quote. “I think it’s a big deal to have it come back. It’s such a cool thing for anybody who knows about beer and Tacoma’s history with beer. It probably wasn’t the most refined or high quality of beer, but Heidelberg was certainly the most fondly remembered.”

Columbia Brewing Co. formally changed its name to Heidelberg in 1953 after anti-German sentiment dissipated in the postwar years.

Around the same time, the brand leaned into advertising focused on its mascot, The Student Prince, based on a novel and subsequent silent film about an Austrian royal who, while attending military college, falls for the “barmaid.” 7 Seas has skipped this imagery.

The brewery benefited from Tacoma’s railroad, explained Sullivan, which offered a two-fold advantage.

First, the railroads wooed immigrants from the Germanic areas of Europe to bypass the East Coast and settle on the West, buoying the beer-making industry. The South Sound attracted Tyrolians, from the German-Czech border. At one point, about 1 in 10 Tacoma households made a living in a beer-related business.

Second, he said, “You could get ice here. You could make vastly more beer than any population our size could drink, but the railroad made it possible to distribute beer. They were drinking Heidelberg all the way back in Yakima and Spokane, and all around the routes of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads.”

On spec, the company was smaller than its Northwest competitors, but they “could compete toe-to-toe with Rainier and the other big breweries because it had that geographic advantage,” added Sullivan. It also maintained a sort of offbeat workingman’s allure, using different bottles (including one known as the “stubbie”), sponsoring minor league teams over the majors, and hosting their salesmen’s wives at the Winthrop Hotel every December for a weekend in the big city.

Thanks to a clever initiative with Washington state farms, it also inadvertently saved dozens of barns from destruction in the 1970s to ‘80s, according to Sullivan: “They would pay farmers to let them paint ‘Heidelberg’ on their barns,” replacing the roof or the siding in the process.

When I mentioned this historical nugget to Sean Jackson, The Parkway’s manager, he gasped and said that among many pieces of Heidelberg memorabilia in their possession, they had an old framed photograph of that precise scene.

‘TACOMA NEEDS ITS OWN BEER’

Since accepting that first delivery in mid-October, the 85-year-old Parkway and its loyal customers have embraced the power of Heidelberg’s return.

“I think they’re gonna be spending a lot of time making Heidelberg,” laughed Jackson.

People are curious to try it, and after one, they aren’t reverting to their faithful Rainier — and that’s the point.

“It’s huge for Tacoma,” he said. “I think it was imperative, if the brand was gonna be brought back, it had to be done by a local company. Being that they’re in the building, everything came together just absolutely as it should’ve. It’s delicious, too.”

The recipe is simple: water, barley, yeast and basic hops — the kind very few craft brewers buy these days, joked Runion. But simple beers, noted Jackson, are the true test of a brewer’s true skill — you can’t hide behind bitter hops.

As brewed by 7 Seas, he said, “It’s really clean, it’s beautifully crisp, it’s got a nice subtle touch of hops. It’s missing that sort of big domestic corn syrup crappy adjunct flavor, and that’s my favorite thing about it.”

At only 4 percent alcohol by volume, Heidelberg — and other highly quaffable lagers of that era — was originally brewed to be a refreshment, plain and simple. Labor union contracts even included clauses allowing brewery workers to drink five or six pints during a shift, Sullivan has found in his research.

“I think about beer as being a real sort of iconic aspect of the working class, the wage-earner’s lifestyle,” he said. “You’re not drinking champagne with your caviar. Beer was a certain amount of fuel. The social life kind of revolved around the taverns and beer-drinking. It was just part of the culture of the city.”

When Prohibition hit Washington state in 1916 — four years ahead of the national constitutional amendment — then-Columbia Brewing Co. stayed afloat producing sodas and near-beer, but it was common knowledge, according to Sullivan, that the facility continued to surreptitiously supply the city’s underground bars with the real stuff. Meanwhile, many of its competitors folded.

FROM IDEA TO CAN, WITH A BEAUTIFUL ANGLE

Runion and Guterson launched 7 Seas in Gig Harbor in 2008; they bought the Columbia warehouse building and opened the Tacoma taproom in 2015.

“Immediately, it became the conversation of: Wouldn’t it be cool to bring the brand back?” said Runion. “They had some beautiful taglines and history that we were just drawn to.”

They incorporated some of those elements into their own beers over the years, but it wasn’t until the tumult of 2020 that they thought, “Let’s go with Heidelberg. That sounds like fun,” he recalled in between sips straight off the canning line, old photos and tap handles strewn across the table. “It just felt like, really energizing and exciting. We wanted to try to do something real for the community, not just for Tacoma but for the whole South Sound.”

The 35-cent launch stemmed from fatigue — of COVID, of rules, of ho-hum beer releases with raffles or “meet the brewer” nights. What they loved most about Heidelberg, and what they most wanted to honor with its revitalization, was its history by and for Tacoma.

Sara Kay and Sierra Hartman, the duo behind the handbound Grit City Magazine dedicated to Tacoma stories, featured a spread in their winter issue, distributing copies at the launch. Runion also connected with Lance Kagey at Rotator Creative, hoping he would create a poster; the artist decided to create not just any old poster but one under his and Tom Llewellyn’s wildly popular Beautiful Angle, a guerilla art project that for 19 years has spread more than 200 designs around the city for anyone to collect. They are printed in Kagey’s basement with handset wood or metal plates on a hand-crank press.

“When there was rumblings of the Heidelberg launch, I’m like, we gotta be on that because it’s such a classic, such a working man’s beer. It’s so Tacoma,” he said in November, the posters already distributed and scooped by Beautiful Angle’s rabid followers. “It really fits with Tacoma’s blue-collar aesthetic and the way that art in Tacoma works.”

Posters at their core are a marketing tool, he explained, “but now it’s an art form.” In Tacoma, glass and metalworking were functional industries that became artistic pursuits. The same could be said of beer.

The Heidelberg poster — easily one of Kagey’s favorites, he said, made with custom plates — centers on the can itself. Along three borders is The Tacoma Toast, the lyrics written by Kagey and Llewellyn several years ago:

I’m not above ya

I’m not below ya

I’m right here with ya

in Old Tacoma.

“Tacoma needs its own beer,” said Runion. “Heidelberg is here to stay. This is our beer. We’re proud and humbled to be the ones that make it.”

Sullivan, who knows Tacoma’s history better than probably any living being, sees Heidelberg’s renaissance as a corollary to the city’s broader rebirth. Pointing to the restoration of Union Station, the warehouses now home to the University of Washington-Tacoma and McMenamins Elks Lodge, he said, “It’s that sense of an elder city that is aged but not broken. That’s why it’s a bit of a tonic for the whole city … and it may seem weird to people that it’s good for a city just to start remaking a beer. In some ways, it’s just as important as restoring a building.

“It sure makes you look at that building differently, doesn’t it?”

WHERE TO FIND HEIDELBERG BEER

▪ HQ: 7 Seas Brewing, 2101 Jefferson Ave., Tacoma + 2905 Harborview Dr., Gig Harbor ($4/can on-site, $8/4pk to-go)

▪ North End: The Parkway Tavern, 313 N I St.; Terry’s Office Tavern, 3410 N Proctor St.; Hank’s Pizza, 524 N K St.; Cole’s Bar & Grill, 5811 N 51st St.; Peaks & Pints, 3816 N 26th St.

▪ Central Tacoma: The Red Hot, 2914 6th Ave.; Broken Spoke, 1014 Martin Luther King Jr.; Beer Star Tacoma, 4328 6th Ave.

▪ Eastside: Dusty’s Hideaway, 723 E 34th St.

▪ South & West Tacoma: Pint Defiance, 2049 Mildred St. W; Edison City Alehouse, 5602 S Lawrence St.; The Mule Tavern, 5227 South Tacoma Way

This story was originally published November 24, 2021 at 5:05 AM.