Sergeant John Spring arrived at Tucson’s Camp Lowell with Company E at the 3rd Battalion of the 14th U.S. Infantry on April 28, 1866. That evening, he recorded the following incident in his diary: Private Lutje “protruded his broad German features through (my) tent flap and announced, ‘Sergeant there is beer in this town; there is a brewery here.’”

Since beer was hard to come by on the frontier, the men quickly laid plans to acquire some. The price, they discovered, was a dollar a bottle, but none of the soldiers had the “needful.” Undeterred, the men decided to sell some ammunition to pay for the beer.

Sergeant Spring set off for town but fell into a pool of water on the way and ruined the cartridges. On his second try, he managed to sell the ammunition and buy six bottles of beer, but commented in his diary, “the less said about the quality the better.”

Spring’s supplier was Prussian-born Alexander Levin, who had arrived in Tucson a few months earlier and, seeing a need, had begun brewing beer. Levin went on to build an amusement park in the area of Pennington and Main Streets and, in the early 1870s, added the Park Brewery at the southern edge of the park. The brewery and a sign for the amusement park appear in this photograph.

Levin apparently always had problems finding good water for brewing. Wells quickly turned alkaline, and although he used Santa Cruz River water for a time, the results, as Spring indicated in his diary, were frequently unsatisfactory.

Of the other ingredients needed to make beer, only barley was readily available in Tucson, and it was not of the best quality. Acquiring brewer’s yeast for the mixture was difficult, and sometimes baker’s yeast had to be substituted.

For a time, Levin imported hops from San Francisco, but finally planted his own crops—“…two thousand hop sets, male and female, the rows extending in regular order across the whole length of the west side of the (amusement) Park,” according to an article in the April 1, 1876 edition of the Citizen.

Early commercial brewers made between 50 and 200 gallons of beer a week. Some were bottled, but most were stored in barrels. It wasn’t until the early 1870s when pasteurization and improved brewing techniques made bottling more common. In 1879, Levin’s Park Brewery boasted “rock cellars for storing beer and for malting that are unequaled in Arizona.”

When the railroad arrived in Tucson in 1880, imported national brands with a better shelf life began to replace locally brewed beers. About 1882 however, Levin began to use water from an artesian well at Simpson and Main for his brewing. He continued to provide beer for Tucson for many years.—

— Arizona Capitol Times archive. Photo courtesy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.