Coming home from a hard, day-long job, it’s likely that you want to sink onto your couch and pour yourself a beer. The loggers of Mendocino felt the same way 150 years ago. After chopping, milling, and shipping tons of redwood trees, sipping a cold one was a perfect way to relax and forget about the limbs you almost lost. Luckily, the area was not short on breweries, and the two largest, Mendocino Brewery and Pine Grove Brewery, produced beer for the town until Mendocino’s early prohibition law took effect in 1909. But for a little over 40 years, the actions of Mendocino’s brewers gave rise to gossip juicier than the fermenting hops used in their beer.
Martin Brinzing and Fritz Waschter in front of Pine Grove Brewery.
Mendocino’s first brewery was established in 1867 by an Austrian immigrant named Mathias Brinzing. He built it on the bluffs north of Mendocino where the Agate Cove Inn is now located. Advertised in the West Coast Star in 1874 as “brewing a superior article of beer,” Brinzing was able to fulfill the growing demand for alcohol in the town. Mathias’s niece, Maria Crezentia, had come to take care of his house and in 1874 she married a logger by the name of Johannes Christoff Sarowski. Martin Brinzing, Mathias’s nephew, also worked at the brewery. When Mathias died in 1877, the family members sold the brewery for $1800, then bought it back just four months later for the same $1,800. This odd series of transactions may have been inspired by a desire to avoid inheritance tax.
J.C. Sarowski had an ongoing inclination to avoid paying taxes, and in 1882 he was added to a delinquent tax list; again in October of 1887, he was arrested for “defrauding the government out of the tax on 150 barrels of beer.” When, in 1903, he was fined $500 for reusing revenue stamps (that indicated taxes had been paid), Maria decided to allow their business licenses to lapse, hoping that “Mendocino would soon be noted as a place of sobriety and safety.” Maria died in January, 1910, and four months later, J.C. married Amanda Sjolund; he died two years later and Amanda lived to the ripe age of 95 and died in 1951.
But, we digress. In 1873, five miles north of Mendocino in the small community of Pine Grove (at the current entrance to the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse), a man named Charles David Ferdinand Sass established the Pine Grove Brewery, providing beer to Mendocino, Fort Bragg, and the saloon and dance hall in Pine Grove itself. In 1878, the 37-year-old Sass built a home alongside the brewery to share with his new wife, 15-year-old Margaret Jane Gordon. Margaret’s first three children with Sass died before the age of seven. She had two more children while married to Sass; the first, from an extramarital affair; was given up for adoption. That prompted Sass to write Margaret out of his will, but Margaret gave birth to one more of his children before he was committed to the Napa Insane Asylum in 1888. After his death a year later, Margaret and the child inherited the brewery and surrounding land.
After a respectable period of mourning, in October of 1890, Margaret married Martin Brinzing, Mathias’s nephew, and the brewer at the Mendocino Brewery. Being in the same line of work, Brinzing and Sass had known each other and even worked together, but apparently Brinzing was also acquainted with Margaret as the rumor spread that he had fathered the child she gave up for adoption.
After their marriage, Brinzing took over the Pine Grove Brewery, calling it “the best beer on the coast.” He was not totally law-abiding himself, and in 1903 the same man that had fined Sarowski also fined Brinzing $100 for using uncancelled revenue stamps. That didn’t slow Brinzing down much, though, and he then rented the closed Mendocino Brewery and began to produce beer at the business his uncle had created over 30 years before. Unfortunately, just one year later Martin died from pneumonia. His brewmaster, Fritz Waschter, continued brewing at Pine Grove until 1908, when he died from an overdose of laudanum. The Pine Grove brewery was torn down in September of 1909, soon after both Mendocino and Caspar voted to go dry.
The Kelley House Museum is open from 11AM to 3PM Thursday through Monday. Haunted Mendocino Walking Tours – every Saturday in October at 1:30 pm and at 7 pm on Halloween. $25 adults, $15 under 12. Purchase advance tickets.