How did small-town Saskatchewan hotels serve beer in the early 1900s? It started with the shipment of wooden beer barrels by train to the hotels, unloaded on the railway station platform. The Bulyea
local history book, Between Long Lake and
Last Mountain (1982), recounts a story about two local farmers who
crawled under the train platform “armed with a brace and bit, a washtub, and
several buckets.” When the hotel owner arrived to pick up his delivery,
he was dismayed to find an empty barrel.
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| Barrel terminology. Source |
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| Source |
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| Star-Phoenix, June 1, 1948 |
Opening the beer barrel presented a challenge to
many a hotel barkeep. They used what was called a “bung starter” – a heavy
wooden mallet – to drive the wooden plug, bit by bit, up and out of the bung
hole. Bill Graham, head bartender at the Great West Hotel in Davidson during
the pre-1915 days, told the Star-Phoenix
on June 1, 1948 that he had driven many a faucet pump into a keg of beer with a
bung starter. Unless you were quick, Graham recalled, beer sprayed all over the
place. “I got pretty good with
that old bung starter,’ he said. “People would stand around and watch me with
their mouths open.” The heavy bung starter also served as an excellent weapon
for a beleaguered bartender.
To keep
beer cool, many small-town hotels used ice that had been cut from local lakes
or rivers. For the hotel at Fairlight, for example, this meant replenishing the
ice in the draft beer cabinet on a daily basis and checking the storage of beer
kegs in the basement cooler two or three times a week. Other hotels kept ice in
an icehouse, packed in layers of sawdust.
During Prohibition, it was not unusual for hotel
owners to keep a barrel or two of booze hidden away in the basement of their
establishments. In 1925, police raided the Cecil Hotel in Moose Jaw. As the officers entered the hotel, they saw the
man behind the bar pull a string. “The officers darted to the basement and
attacked a lock cabinet, where they found a small keg overflowing with water
driven into it at high pressure,” the Regina
Leader-Post reported on February 3rd. “There was, of course, a smell of
beer about the place.” The hotel had installed a beer keg apparatus – alleged to
have been invented to defeat liquor enforcement methods – consisting of a
double spigot connected to the water main. The pulling of a string flooded the
keg and removed the beer within seconds.
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| Regina Leader-Post, February 26, 1935 |
In 1935,
when the Government of Saskatchewan permitted hotels to sell beer by the glass,
Saskatchewan’s hotels scrambled to reopen their beer parlours. This required a
major outlay of cash for the hotel owners to meet the government’s rigorous
architectural and regulatory standards for licensing. In addition to building renovations
and new furniture, hotels had to install new drawing systems for beer, refrigeration
equipment, and draft beer cabinets. “A 25-table beer parlour will require the
most modern beer pumps, a cooling system, and cabinets,” the Leader-Post wrote on December 4, 1934. “It
will need 100 chairs, at least 400 glasses and an insulated storage cellar.” This
equipment cost thousands of dollars per hotel. Saskatchewan suppliers did well.
The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported on
April 8, 1935 that Sterling Millwork Company and Cushing’s Limited had many
orders for tabletops and refrigerators, and the John East Foundry was
manufacturing $8,000 worth of table bases.
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| Ad in the Star-Phoenix, April 30, 1935 |
1935 was also
a boom year for beer keg manufacturers. The Leader-Post
reported on May 4 that one Regina brewery acquired 2,900 kegs for its new draft
beer business. Of these, 800 were steel, “the newest wrinkle in the keg business.”
The remainder were wooden kegs which cost the breweries about $8 apiece; the
steel kegs, which had an insulated aluminum lining, cost around $12. “Handling
of the empties by the breweries entails a lot of work, the newspaper wrote. “They
must be sterilized and repitched each time they go back to the brewery.”
With the
outbreak of the Second World War, metal beer kegs were prohibited due to the war effort, but metal
hoops and fittings were still allowed on wooden kegs.
Eventually, bottled beer became popular and draft beer sales declined. Today, draft beer is enjoying a comeback thanks to craft breweries.
Eventually, bottled beer became popular and draft beer sales declined. Today, draft beer is enjoying a comeback thanks to craft breweries.
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| A 1980s bar set-up, with bartender serving draft beer. Leader-Post, July 2, 1987. |
©Joan Champ, 2019
