Shauna Steigerwald

ssteigerwald@enquirer.com

"How awesome is this?" Greg Hardman said as he watched little green bottles roll down the bottling line Thursday in Christian Moerlein Brewing Co.'s Over-the-Rhine brewery.

It was the brewery's first full run of Little Kings Cream Ale. The beer hadn't been produced locally in nearly 15 years.

"It's emotional," Hardman, who owns Christian Moerlein, said over the whir of the machines and the clanking of bottles. "So many people wanted this to happen."

People started asking him about bringing other Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Co. brands, including Little Kings, back to Cincinnati as soon as he bought Christian Moerlein in 2004, Hardman said. He got letters and emails. People came up to him in bars. It wasn't just fans of the old beers: Children and grandchildren of former brewery workers were also deeply interested in the historic brands' fate, he said.

And it wasn't like the idea had never crossed Hardman's mind. In fact, the seeds had been planted there years before.

Back in 1986, he watched from the distance of Athens, Ohio, where he ran a beer distributor company, as Hudepohl Brewing Co. (founded 1885) and Schoenling Brewing Co. (founded 1933) merged. A little more than a decade later, he watched from a closer vantage point – he was living in Cincinnati and working for Warsteiner by then – as Hudepohl-Schoenling sold its brewery at 1625 Central Ave. to Boston Beer Company, and the Samuel Adams parent company took over production of Hudepohl-Schoenling's brands. And he watched in 2001 as the last Hudepohl-Schoenling beers were brewed there and production left the city altogether.

An Enquirer story at the time called Hudepohl-Schoenling beer "the oldest surviving link to Cincinnati's German brewing past."

"I always felt that Cincinnati lost something at that time," Hardman said. "I thought Cincinnati lost some of its brewing soul.

"I thought, if I could ever right that wrong, I would."

So he prepared. When he bought Moerlein, his attorney suggested he negotiate rights of first refusal to buy the other old Hudepohl-Schoenling brands if they came up for sale. He exercised that right in 2006, acquiring more than 60 brands. He sold Little Kings to an investment company but was able to buy it back on New Year's Eve 2008.

If he could have brought production back from day one, he would have. He just didn't have the resources. But that's changing.

Moerlein started brewing Hudepohl Pure Lager, which replaced its Hudepohl Amber Lager, in Over-the-Rhine back in September. Hudy Delight bottles and draft followed. (Hudy Delight cans and Burger cans are still brewed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Hardman said he can't brew those price-sensitive beers here as inexpensively just yet, but he hopes to bring them back someday.)

And now, the brewery is making Little Kings.

"This is your grandfather's beer," Hardman said. "And your grandfather was really cool."

Little Kings: Roots in ribs

Little Kings Cream has its roots in 1958. Its creation can be traced to another local icon – Mongomery Inn – and a broken draft system.

As it happened, "Ribs King" Ted Gregory's draft system broke down and was too old to fix. A new one would have cost more than he could afford at the time. But his customers, many of them construction workers, balked at paying for a full-size bottle of beer to pair with a shot for their boilermakers.

So he approached Bill Schoenling, Sr. about putting Schoenling Cream Ale in 7-ounce bottles, something he'd seen in bars around his native Detroit and Windsor, according to his son, Dean Gregory.

"They called him the 'father of Little Kings,'" Gregory, Montgomery Inn's vice president, said.

It grew from there: At its peak in the late 1980s, the brand sold approximately 8 million cases a year, Hardman said. And it won a lot of fans along the way.

"There's a real cult following for Little Kings Cream Ale nationwide," he said.

Part of that could be an emotional connection, particularly for people who tried it as their first beer. "It's kind of like (how) you remember your first date," Hardman said. "That's what Little Kings is to people. Everybody has a Little Kings story."

And some people just really like those little green bottles, he said.

Now that the beer is no longer contract brewed, Hardman expects its margins to improve enough that he can invest more in its marketing and distribution. He said it's sold in about 20 states now, but with limited distribution. He hopes to expand on that, starting by establishing full distribution in Ohio and its 10 closest states.

"This is the start of the rebirth of Little Kings," he said.

He's already trying new things with the brand, including a new 16-pack, the "cube," to join the eight-pack and 24-pack ("king case") previously offered. Hardman thinks the cube is a desirable price point for consumers (it retails at about $15.99, he said) and that it fits on the shelf and in the fridge better.

The bigger picture

Bringing back the old brands only became possible as part of a $5 million expansion in progress at Christian Moerlein's Over-the-Rhine brewery.

"We were at capacity from the day we opened this production brewery," Hardman said. "We had nowhere to grow or go."

In recent months, the brewery has added 12 new 120-barrel fermenters, with two more on the way. There's a new, faster bottling line, with special equipment that can fill Little Kings' smaller bottles as well as 12- or 22-ounce ones; a new canning line; a new lab; new safety equipment, even a new automatic case erector for the Little Kings boxes.

Before the expansion, the brewery's capacity was 15,000 barrels per year. Today, it can brew 50,000 barrels, a number the brewery could easily up to 100,000 or even 150,000 barrels with additional equipment, he said.

Aside from bringing the production of the old brands to the brewery, the increased capacity has allowed Moerlein to try other new things. Hardman has been shepherding the brewery's evolution for a while. The addition of Eric Baumann as vice president of brewing in early 2015, for example, has led to an expansion of the brewery's portfolio, particularly where IPAs are concerned.

"We have really changed our product mix," Hardman said.

More recently, the brewery released 15-can packs of its updated and new core beers: Third Wave IPA, Purity Pils and OTR Ale. That size is something that Hardman has seen big domestic breweries carry for years.

After all, Hardman sees the changes he's been making as a way to compete with big beer. That's why he wanted to have beers in multiple categories, from budget Burger to craft Christian Moerlein.

"We felt it was important to be a very diverse beer company appealing to a lot of different palettes," he said. "(We) have a lineup to rival what the big breweries have."

At a time when the beer giants, particularly Anheuser-Busch InBev, are buying up small craft breweries, Hardman is particularly determined.

"In the sea of the global corporate beer environment, we are executing on our independent niche," he said.

"Small craft breweries need to take it to the big guys," he said. "We're mighty and we have a lot of heart. I know we can win."

Would he ever consider selling to one of those big guys? Not for any amount of money, he said.

"My plan is to always make sure that these beers have proper local ownership," he said. "Guys like me don't retire."

Enquirer archives contributed.