It’s National Beer Day! If you were living in Los Gatos around 1900, you might have celebrated by pouring yourself a drink out of a bottle like this one. This bottle in our permanent collection was previously identified as a wine bottle, but upon further investigation, we found that it is, in fact, a beer bottle! This particular bottle was made by Rudolph Scherf, a San Jose resident who ran his own beer-bottling and distributing business out of his house on N. Sixth Street. Scherf worked with a variety of breweries, including the Fredericksburg Brewing Company, one of the earliest “craft” breweries in the South Bay.

Prevailing public sentiment toward beer, at the turn of the 20th century, was very different from today’s. In 1904, The Ladies’ Home Journal endorsed beer as a more suitable substitute to patent medicines, stating “A mother who would hold up her hands in holy horror at the thought of her child drinking a glass of beer, which contains from two to five per cent of alcohol, gives to that child with her own hands a patent medicine that contains from seventeen to forty-four per cent of alcohol.”

Although The Ladies’ Home Journal was partial to Budweiser - as it “contains only 3 89/100 per cent of alcohol. It is better than pure water because of the nourishing qualities of malt and the tonic properties of hops” - San Jose and the surrounding areas had a number of their own “healthy” brews, including the ones Rudolph Scherf bottled and distributed.

-Alexandra Schindler, Collections Registrar