In 1956, a New York election drew 23 million votes. Only the presidential race pulled more. The contest was run by a beer company from Brooklyn named Rheingold, and for 25 years, more New Yorkers voted for Miss Rheingold than for most of their own elected officials. By the time the phenomenon peaked, the company behind it was already heading toward collapse, not because of a worse product, but because of corporate distance from the Brooklyn ground that built it.
The story began in 1799 in Württemberg, Germany, with the birth of Samuel Liebmann. Along with his brother, he ran a centuries-old castle inn with a small brewhouse attached, serving travelers and local soldiers. Samuel was also a political liberal in a Germany still ruled by inherited crowns, and his inn became a gathering place for reformers. When revolutionary sentiment swept the German states in the 1840s, men who spoke too freely found themselves watched.
The Liebmann family decided to leave. In 1850, Samuel’s eldest son, Joseph, sailed first and landed in Brooklyn, New York. He bought a modest brewery large enough to establish a foothold, and soon Samuel and his other sons, Henry and Charles, joined him. The family understood lager, a cold-fermented, slow-brewed style that German immigrants had brought to New York and that the city’s existing ale breweries were not built to make.
The Liebmanns built a second, far larger brewery on the corner of Forest and Bremen Street in Brooklyn, positioning themselves to compete in one of the world’s hungriest beer markets. Samuel Liebmann died in 1872, before the family’s greatest success. After his death, his sons took over the brewery, known as S. Liebmann’s Sons Brewery.
In 1883, during a dinner after a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, the family raised a glass of the new lager to the light, matched its color to the gold of the Rhine, and named it Rheingold. Most breweries still carried the founder’s surname, but the Liebmanns chose a name that sounded like a legend. By 1914, the brewery was producing more than 700,000 barrels a year, among the most established in New York City. World War I brought anti-German sentiment, and prohibition soon shut the entire industry down.
Of roughly 1,300 breweries operating in America in 1915, no more than 100 survived the 13 dry years. Rheingold survived by making near beer, a low-alcohol malt beverage that kept the equipment running and the workforce employed until repeal in 1933. When prohibition ended, the family brought in a refugee brewmaster from Munich, Dr. Hermann Schülein.
His family had overseen two of Munich’s largest breweries under the Löwenbräu name until Hitler’s persecution of Jews made staying in Germany impossible. Working alongside Philip Liebmann, Samuel’s great-grandson, Schülein rebuilt Rheingold as a modern, dry, European-style beer aimed at a New York audience hungry for sophistication. The strategy was not national expansion but regional saturation. By 1950, Liebmann’s Brewery ranked as the sixth-largest brewing company in the United States, outproducing national competitors while still headquartered in a single Brooklyn neighborhood.
The company blanketed nine northeastern states with dense distribution. Through the 1940s, 1950s, and into the early 1960s, Rheingold held as much as 35% of the beer market in New York State alone. At the production peak in 1965, the brewery produced more than 4. 2 million barrels in a single year, roughly ten times the output of Löwenbräu in Munich.
The marketing machine became legendary. In 1940, a printing salesman named Bob Wexler brought Philip Liebmann a stack of sample photographs, including a picture of model and tennis player Jinx Falkenburg. She became Miss Rheingold 1940, chosen entirely by the company. By 1942, the company opened the vote to the public.
Celebrity judges narrowed a field of hopefuls to six finalists at an open audition inside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. For six weeks, the finalists’ faces appeared on 35,000 point-of-purchase displays in bars, delicatessens, grocery stores, and subway platforms across nine states. Anyone could vote as many times as they wanted, and every ballot cast was another customer standing in front of a Rheingold display. The scale defied belief.
In 1948, about 2. 5 million New Yorkers cast ballots in the presidential election between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey. That same year, more than 3 million people voted for Miss Rheingold, despite the presidential campaigns’ combined New York advertising budget of roughly $400,000 against Rheingold’s nearly $4 million. By 1956, the vote total passed 23 million ballots.
At its peak in 1952, the count reportedly reached 25 million. One contemporary observer said that in American elections, only the presidency itself pulled more votes than the annual selection of Miss Rheingold. The contest also became a talent pipeline. Tippi Hedren appeared as a finalist in 1953, years before Alfred Hitchcock cast her in The Birds.
Rheingold also sponsored Nat King Cole’s national television show when most advertisers stayed away, a decision that put the brand in front of an audience its competitors were too cautious to reach. The ground beneath the company began to shift just as it reached the top. In 1964, the fourth generation of the Liebmann family sold majority control to Pepsi-Cola United Bottlers Inc. for $26 million.
The name on the building changed from Liebmann Breweries to Rheingold Breweries Inc. , and control passed out of the bloodline for the first time in 114 years. In 1967, the company acquired Dawson Brewing Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, adding a second plant outside Brooklyn. In 1973, PepsiCo bought a controlling interest in Rheingold Breweries for $57 million for 83% of the operation.
Industry observers noted that PepsiCo was not buying the company for its beer but for its soft drink bottling operations in California, Florida, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The beer brand came bundled along. By then, sales had slipped below 3 million barrels a year, down from the 1965 peak of more than 4 million. In 1974, the company temporarily shut the Brooklyn brewery down for six weeks.
New York Mayor Abe Beame and City Council President Paul O’Dwyer intervened personally, working to reduce the brewery’s tax assessment in an attempt to broker a deal that would keep the plant open under new ownership. That same year, William Black, founder of the Chock Full O’Nuts coffee company, stepped in and bought the brewery. The structural problems did not disappear. In 1976, less than two years after buying it, Chock Full O’Nuts closed the Brooklyn brewery for good.
There was no farewell parade. Twelve days after Rheingold’s closure was announced, Brooklyn’s other surviving brewery, Schaefer, announced its own shutdown. Together, the two breweries had employed close to 2,000 people and had produced nearly 40% of all the beer consumed in New York City. Within a single month, that entire local industry was gone.
The Brooklyn plant was torn down in 1981, ending 122 years of continuous brewing on the same patch of Brooklyn ground. Production shifted first to Orange, New Jersey, then in 1977 Chock Full O’Nuts sold what remained of Rheingold Breweries to the Christian Schmidt Brewing Company of Philadelphia. The New Bedford plant closed that same year, and the Orange, New Jersey plant followed. In 1987, Christian Schmidt sold the Rheingold brand to G.
Heileman Brewing Company, which continued selling the beer but dropped Rheingold Brewery from the corporate name. Four owners in 23 years, each further removed from the ground the story started on. Rheingold effectively disappeared from shelves for most of a decade. In 1996, Walter Liebmann, a descendant of the original founder, helped relaunch it alongside brewmaster Joseph Owades.
For a stretch, it was the official beer of the New York Mets, and a version of Miss Rheingold returned, but the relaunch did not connect. In 2005, Drinks Americas bought the brand and tried again through the same Metro New York market. More recently, trademark filings for the Rheingold name were registered under Brewing Brands LLC, and a new relaunch has been publicly announced. The living memory of Rheingold remains in private collections and archives.
Novelist Wally Lamb built a Miss Rheingold memorabilia collection large enough that the Brooklyn Museum invited him to speak alongside the director of Beauty and the Beer, a 2016 documentary chronicling the contest’s 25-year run. Original 1953 Miss Rheingold posters and photographs of forgotten winners are preserved in the Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History. A 1957 flat-top beer can bearing the face of that year’s winner, Margie McNally, sold at auction for $840. Vintage trays, coasters, and cone-top cans from the Liebmann brewery era circulate constantly among collectors.
A corporation can buy the Rheingold name, the recipe, the trademark, and the can design, and it has now happened five separate times. What none of those corporations have ever been able to buy is the memory of a kid running store to store after school with a fistful of ballots, or a novelist’s personal collection built out of genuine affection for a piece of New York that vanished. The brewery is gone, but the name keeps coming back anyway.