In 1952, a beer brewed in a single Brooklyn neighborhood was the sixteenth largest producer in the United States, turning out more than a million barrels a year. It was not Budweiser or Schlitz. It was a family-owned brewery on Liberty Avenue in East New York, run by the grandsons of three German immigrants who had bought a failing brewery with almost nothing. Its commercials were among the most talked-about on American television, starring two bickering cartoon brewers named Bert and Harry.
The beer was called Piels. Today almost no one remembers it. The cartoon survived. The brewery did not.
The story began in 1883, when Godfried Piel, a thirty-year-old export trader from Düsseldorf who had spent years learning how goods moved through American ports, was joined in New York by his older brother Michael. Michael was not a merchant but a mechanic, an inventor who had already won recognition in Germany for designing a centrifuge used in honey processing. After his military service, he had apprenticed in the subterranean breweries of Dortmund, where lager was made with stone, ice, and patience. But Michael understood something most brewers of his generation did not.
Mechanical refrigeration was about to change brewing forever. A brewer who controlled cold could scale production in ways the old ice-dependent methods never allowed. Together the brothers raised what little money they could and bought a struggling brewery called the Lanzar Brewery, located on Liberty and Georgia Avenues in East New York, then a rural edge of Brooklyn half a day’s journey from city hall. In their first year they produced 850 barrels.
By the standards of a city already crowded with German-founded breweries, they were the smallest operation on the map. But their refrigerated plant could deliver the same beer, glass after glass, year-round, a consistency that older cellar brewers could not match. For decades the growth was slow and built on reinvestment. The original building expanded through the 1890s with new fermentation halls and storage cellars to serve the surrounding German-American neighborhoods.
In 1912, the family made a revealing decision. They closed the beer garden attached to the plant, a direct echo of the Rhineland taverns their fathers had known, because the space was worth more as production capacity than as tradition. It was expansion over nostalgia, capacity over comfort, and it defined the company for the next four decades. That instinct was tested almost immediately by the greatest threat any American brewer had ever faced.
When national Prohibition took effect in 1920, hundreds of breweries simply closed and never reopened. Piels survived by pivoting to near beer, a low-alcohol malt beverage that kept the plant running, the equipment maintained, and a skeleton workforce employed through the dry years. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the brewery came back with its infrastructure intact, a real advantage over competitors who had sold off their equipment for scrap. In 1936, the company mounted what was then one of the largest illuminated beer signs in the world atop its complex, visible across the East New York skyline.
It was a declaration that the brewery had survived and intended to grow. The real acceleration, however, came from an event Piels did not control. In 1949, an 81-day strike paralyzed New York City’s brewing industry. Out-of-town brewers rushed into the gap and captured drinkers who would never have switched from their hometown labels under normal circumstances.
The strike cracked open a market that had been effectively closed to outsiders for decades. Piels read the shift correctly and chose to grow through acquisition. In 1951, it purchased the Trommer’s Brewery in Bushwick, another old German-founded Brooklyn neighbor that could no longer keep pace. In December 1953, it bought the Rubsam and Hormann Brewery on Staten Island along with the rights to its label.
In less than three years, Piels had moved from a single plant to three breweries across two boroughs. By 1952 it was ranked sixteenth in the nation, distributed in roughly forty states, producing more than a million barrels a year. Scale bought through acquisition carried a quiet liability. Every dollar spent absorbing rivals was a dollar not spent building the national advertising and distribution network that larger companies were about to deploy.
Piels had grown enormous by regional standards. It had not grown untouchable. In the mid-1950s, the advertising agency Young & Rubicam pitched Piels an idea that broke every rule of beer advertising. Instead of a jingle or a mascot, they proposed two animated cartoon brewers, presented as the fictional owners of the company, bickering and undercutting each other on camera.
They were named Bert and Harry Piel. The agency brought in the radio comedy duo Bob and Ray to voice them, not as scripted pitchmen but as two brothers arguing their way through the commercial in real time. Harry was anxious, constantly worried the ad was going badly. Bert was smug, reassuring Harry while quietly undermining him.
The beer was almost incidental to the joke, and that was the point. Audiences in the 1950s were used to being sold to directly. Bert and Harry felt like eavesdropping on two brothers who happened to be terrible at their jobs and happened to sell beer. The campaign was debated inside the advertising industry, where some found its success genuinely unsettling.
But drinkers responded to the familiarity. Two guys from Brooklyn, bumbling and affectionate, selling a beer that cost a nickel less than the national brands. Piels was never marketed as premium. It positioned itself inside the daily economics of the neighborhoods it came from, East New York, Bushwick, the working-class blocks of Brooklyn and Queens, where a brewery worker might drink the very beer he had just bottled.
The campaign bought Piels a decade of outsized attention relative to its size. But by the late 1950s, the company’s own advertising decision makers grew uneasy. The joke, they worried, had become bigger than the beer. So Piels walked away from Bert and Harry.
In their place, the company brought in the newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, a legendary New York voice with no background in television performance. The campaign never generated anything close to the cultural traction the cartoon brothers had built. The real crack, however, was not the loss of a mascot. It was the arithmetic underneath.
National brewers were pouring advertising budgets into television at a scale no regional brewery could match dollar for dollar. A beloved cartoon could not buy a permanent seat at the same table as Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, and Pabst. In 1962, the company the Piel brothers had built no longer belonged to their descendants. Piels passed into the hands of Drewrys Ltd.
, itself merging into a larger holding company out of Detroit called Associated Brewing Company. By 1963 the merger was complete. A beer brewed in the same Brooklyn neighborhood for eighty years by the same family was now one line item inside a Michigan-based conglomerate that also controlled Jacob Schmidt and Sterling Brewers. The R&H plant on Staten Island, the label Piels had absorbed less than a decade earlier, was closed in 1963, the very year the merger was finalized.
The East New York plant kept running under Associated ownership, but the pattern was already set. Consolidation was dismantling what consolidation had built. In 1972, a brand-new modern office building went up on the Piels complex, a physical statement that the company intended to keep operating in Brooklyn. It did not.
On September 20, 1973, the gates of the Piels plant in East New York closed for the last time. Ninety years of continuous brewing on the same stretch of Liberty Avenue came to an end. The brand-new building stood empty over an operation that no longer existed. Within a few years, most of the complex was torn down.
What remained was the old original building at the corner of Liberty and Sheffield Avenues, its windows bricked up, eventually repurposed as a garage. For a brief period, a satellite plant in Williamsport, Massachusetts kept brewing Piels for the New England market. It too was shut down. The brewing rights to the label were sold to F&M Schaefer Brewing Company, fittingly another old Brooklyn-founded brewer.
Schaefer kept Piels alive through its own plants in Brooklyn and later Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the late 1980s, Schaefer was bought by the Stroh Brewery Company of Detroit. Under Stroh, Piels sales stabilized for a time, but the company could not keep pace with the advertising power of Anheuser-Busch and Miller. In 1999, Stroh was acquired by Pabst, and the Piels name was folded into a portfolio of once independent regional brands, brewed under contract wherever it made financial sense.
In 2015, Pabst quietly discontinued the Piels label. There was no farewell campaign. A beer that had once been the sixteenth largest in America simply stopped being produced. But in 2018, a man named Shannon Deegan acquired the rights to the Piels name and began brewing it again, not as a contract product inside a conglomerate, but as an independent revival close to the beer’s original Brooklyn home.
Drinkers noticed a real hop character, a flavor identity Deegan’s team called the Bushwick kick. Bert and Harry came back too, now appearing on coasters and posters rather than on screen. The label is being brewed again by people who chose to bring it back on its own terms. A corporation could buy the name, the recipe, the trademark, and the rights to Bert and Harry’s likeness.
It could not buy the commitment it takes to make a regional beer taste like it belongs to the neighborhood it came from. Piels never lost because it thought smaller. It lost because the distribution war in American brewing was never being fought on the terms Piels was good at. It needed more trucks, more warehouse space, more television markets bought at once.
The founders were not fools, and the product was not inferior. What decided the outcome was who controlled the pipeline.