A History of Whiskey Production in Reading and Berks County

For more than two centuries, whiskey was woven into the agricultural, industrial, and even criminal fabric of Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania. From colonial-era farm stills converting rye into ready cash, through tightly regulated brownstone distilleries of the late 1800s, through the explosive (sometimes literally) Prohibition years, and into the post-repeal era of mob-run “giant stills nobody noticed,” the story of Berks County whiskey is the story of the region itself — its German farming heritage, its industrial muscle, and its long, complicated relationship with vice.

I. The Farm-Distillery Era: When Rye Was Cash

Berks County’s earliest whiskey industry was inseparable from its agriculture. An article prepared in 1917, summarizing Berks County farm crops of yesteryear, made the point bluntly: rye was a principal crop here, but it was not grown for bread — it was grown for whiskey.

Wheat, corn, and potatoes were most often grown for personal consumption; rye, distilled into whisky, could readily be sold for a good price. Accordingly, many farms had a distillery. It was estimated there probably were in excess of 200 in our county.

At first reading, 200 distilleries in a single Pennsylvania county sounds like exaggeration. But once you add in the legions of farmers also producing applejack by distilling cider, the figure becomes entirely believable.

A neighborly custom grew up around the practice. A farmer who had no still of his own would haul a load of rye to a neighbor’s distillery in the fall “for winter use.” The arrangement mirrored custom milling: the distiller kept a portion of the finished whiskey as payment for the service. That informal barter economy was eventually killed off by tightened federal controls.

The Tax that Shaped an Industry

Whiskey production in Berks was always shadowed by federal revenue policy:

• 1790 — At the urging of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Congress passed the first excise law, taxing whiskey 9 to 25 cents a gallon. After public outcry the rate was trimmed.
• 1794 — The Whiskey Rebellion erupted in western Pennsylvania, where hundreds of farmers made their living turning rye into liquor.
• Under Thomas Jefferson — The excise was abolished, and whiskey could be sold tax-free.
• 1862 — Civil War revenue needs reactivated the federal liquor tax.
• By the early 20th century — The tax stood at $1.10 per gallon leaving a bonded warehouse, and “by World War I, all but eliminated the small distilleries.”

Each licensed Berks distillery was overseen by a federal “gauger” — a government employee who measured every barrel.

A 1901 Reading Eagle snippet captures the routine of compliance:

“Deputy Revenue Collector Fred W. Cranston made an inspection of I. B. Stein & Son’s distillery at Liscum. While there he gauged up the packages, etc., and found everything in first-class order… This is one of the busiest distilleries in his district.”

II. The Berks Distilleries of Record (1903)

A filed federal report from 1904 documents Berks County’s commercial whiskey output for the previous year — 6,400 barrels in total, broken down as follows:

Another notable operation — Allen Dunkle’s distillery at East Berkley — burned in 1901 and “probably never was rebuilt.”

The most striking 19th-century distillery building still standing in Berks is in Albany Township, on a farm fronting Pine Creek Road near Vole Hollow Lane. Visible from the public road, it is a substantial brownstone structure converted to farm storage more than a century ago.

III. The Stein Dynasty: Four Generations of Berks Rye

If one family deserves to be remembered as the face of Berks County whiskey, it is the Steins of Greenwich Township — four generations of farmer-distillers whose label read, with justifiable pride, “A PRODUCT OF FOUR GENERATIONS.”

The story begins with Adam Stein, who emigrated from Germany in 1742 and settled in what was then Richmond Township. His son Jacob Stein (1791–1872; m. Sarah Sunday) gradually accumulated more than 500 acres, divided into five farms. It was Jacob who first combined farming with distilling, beginning in 1832.

News releases to the Reading Eagle between 1901 and 1905 give the distillery’s address as “Liscum P.O.,” during which time P. B. Burkert was postmaster. Before and after that four-year period, the location was designated as “near Three-Mile House,” named for the landmark hotel—converted in recent times to an apartment building—that stands at the Y where Route 737 and Kohler’s Hill Road connect. Jacob Stein had it built in 1850 (as Stein’s Tavern) and personally paid for the erection of Stein’s one-room schoolhouse that stood nearby on Stein-owned property. Jacob also built Stein’s Tavern in 1850 at the Y where Route 737 meets Kohler’s Hill Road (later converted to apartments) and personally paid for a one-room schoolhouse on Stein-owned property nearby.

Route 737 and Kohler’s Hill Rd

Current view shows the Stein home and remains of a small structures that was part of the original distillery complex. – Kohler’s Hill Rd.

Exterior of Stein’s Distillery…..Fermenting Room…..and A United States Bonded Warehouse.

The distilling business passed down:

• Adam Stein (1819–1897), Jacob’s son, reactivated the family distillery in 1872 — it had lain dormant since 1846 — to produce both rye and apple whiskey.
• Isaac B. Stein brought the operation to its zenith. Trading as B. Stein & Son, he tore down the old works in 1894 (the year his father retired) and erected a state-of-the-art steam-powered plant. In 1906 he added a third bonded warehouse.
• Charles A. Stein carried the fourth generation — until Prohibition arrived in 1920 and ended the Stein distillery for good.

The Stein product was marketed as “Stein’s Pure Rye Whiskey, 1830–1914,” sold from “Distillery No. 78, First District of Pennsylvania, 207 Main St., Kutztown, Pa.” Their advertising stressed government supervision, steam-heated bonded warehouses, and the purity of the rye-and-malt mash:

IV. The Wholesale Trade in Reading

Beyond the farmhouse stills and the rural rye distilleries, Reading’s role in the liquor economy was as a wholesale distribution hub. A representative example was the firm of Daniel A. Yoder, “Wholesale Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Wines and Liquors,” located at 635 Penn Street (Telephone 32) and established in 1867.

His establishment occupies a large and well-fitted up store, 95 x 20 feet in dimensions, and his stock contains a complete variety of the most popular wines, whiskies, brandies and other liquors, both imported and domestic… All the brands he carries are thoroughly guaranteed and have stood the most searching tests.

Yoder’s was strictly wholesale, supplying the saloons, hotels, and corner taverns that gave Reading its enduring reputation as a hard-drinking town.

V. Prohibition (1920–1933): The Industry Goes Underground

The Eighteenth Amendment did not so much eliminate Berks County whiskey as drive it underground and make it more dangerous. Ed Taggert, in When the Rackets Reigned, frames the era plainly:

“The production of alcoholic beverages was a profitable cottage industry in Berks County long before Prohibition. Many farmers and immigrants made their own wine or moonshine at home. The practice became even more pronounced when the 18th Amendment took effect in 1920… Stills, large and small, dotted the landscape, often blowing up, occasionally causing loss of life and considerable damage.”

The numbers are striking. In 1923 alone, an estimated 1,145,644 gallons of illegal liquor were produced in Pennsylvania — and a sizeable share of that ran through Reading-based operations financed by out-of-town mobs.

The Gray Iron Foundry Still (1923–1924)

When residents of the 1400 block of Mulberry Street began complaining about the smell of fermenting mash, federal agents pinpointed the source: the old Gray Iron Foundry, set up as a major distillery by New Jersey bootleggers. In a pre-dawn raid, agents slipped through an open garage door as a delivery truck was leaving. (Reading Towne, page 118)

The Gray Iron operation was not unique. Federal pressure mounted through the 1920s:

• August 3, 1924 — A four-still complex at 37 North 7th Street erupted into a major fire. Twelve barrels of mash and 125 gallons of moonshine were hauled away; the resulting scandal led to demotions in the Reading Police Department.
• Two months later — A still exploded near the Central Abattoir Company on Grape Street. Two men escaped with their clothes ablaze. A truck holding 1,800 gallons of alcohol was seized; nobody came to claim it.
• 1925, hills near Mertztown — Federal agents arrested eight men and seized a distillery capable of 150 gallons of moonshine per day.
• October 2, 1928 — The Gray Iron Foundry plant on Mulberry Street was raided again. The distillery equipment was estimated to have cost $250,000 to install; alcohol seized was worth $18,000.
• 1929 — Federal agents shut down Tip Top Products Co., 205 North 9th Street, which sold home-brewing and home-distilling kits. Its customer list reportedly included “many of the city’s prominent professional men.”

Tragedy on Bootleg Road

Berks County’s most horrifying Prohibition-era moment came on July 9, 1927, when a Bern Township farmhouse was demolished by a still explosion, killing a mother and six children.

Farmer Mark Fehr had rented his cellar to racketeers who installed a 100-gallon still. He was outside when it erupted in flames. Reading and Philadelphia bootleggers were held responsible. The road where the catastrophe occurred — several miles east of Bernville — was forever after known as Bootleg Road. The fire was so intense that only unidentifiable bones remained; Fehr was severely burned and was charged, with four others, with involuntary manslaughter.

Wildcat Stills in the Final Years

Even as Repeal approached, Berks County’s hills kept producing illicit liquor:

• October 1931 — Pennsylvania State Police seized a 1,000-gallon still on an abandoned farm near Leesport.
• October 1932 — Federal agents uncovered a large still on a Friedensburg
• Summer 1933 — State troopers caught four men servicing an open-air, 1,000-gallon still near Shartlesville.

VI. The Cultural Cost: “Getting Drunk Quickly Became Normalized”

Prohibition did not reduce drinking in Reading; it changed how people drank. Reading retained roughly 75 percent of its saloons during the dry years, not counting speakeasies.

Prohibition enabled this so-called John Barleycorn. He was forced underground, where liquor that did its job quickly and brutally became the norm. With the constant risk of raids… getting drunk quickly became normalized, as did losing control. In 1923, for example, the Reading police charged three times as many people with drunkenness as they did in 1920.

Reading’s German immigrants had brought with them — “wine as life,” consumed slowly, with food, with company. That cultural inheritance never fully recovered.

VII. After Repeal: Whiskey Rationing, the Mob, and the “Giant Still Nobody Noticed”

Repeal in December 1933 legalized retail sales but did not dismantle the underground. Even after legal whiskey, rum, and wine returned to the counter, untaxed hooch remained profitable because there were always speakeasy operators willing to buy it. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, still raids continued in Berks County.

World War II briefly revived a quasi-Prohibition atmosphere in Reading. The Reading Newsweek of the early 1940s reported “PRE-RATION RUSH — Crowds jammed the 17 state liquor stores in Reading and Berks on the eve of whisky rationing,” even as bootleg “ratgut and bathtub gin” began making a comeback at “fancy prices — as high as $60 a case.”

The Greasers and Abe Minker

By the mid-1950s, Berks County had largely shifted from bootlegging to gambling — but the metropolitan mobs were still scouting the countryside. On February 22, 1955, county chief detective Mike Reilly, with two county detectives and two state agents, raided an isolated barn in Richmond Township, about three miles west of Kutztown. Inside they found a brand-new 1,600-gallon-a-day still, in operation only a few weeks. It had been built by the Greaser mob of Philadelphia and South Jersey. Two men were arrested; a third escaped into the hills.

The Richmond Township raid was a warning. The decisive episode came in 1956, when Philadelphia racketeers — assured by Reading vice boss Abe Minker that “Reading was a safe place to invest in a large distillery” — chose a site in the southeastern section of the city. The decaying Penn Hardware Company complex had recently been sold; the surrounding neighborhood already contained a tannery, a slaughterhouse, a cannery, and a chemical plant. Residents had long since stopped noticing strange smells.

The mob’s industrial-scale still ran for roughly 18 months before federal agents broke it up. According to U.S. Attorney testimony, in that time it had the potential to produce 375,000 gallons of 180-proof alcohol, on which the federal tax alone would have totaled $3,935,000. Assistant Regional Commissioner Louis DeCarlo of the ATU Division estimated that erecting a column still of that size cost $40,000 to $50,000, and called the Reading operation “ONE of the largest illegal stills raided since Prohibition.”

The product never reached licensed bars. It went, DeCarlo testified, to speakeasies — “unlicensed joints operating in the shadows where strong drinks at low prices were served” — across southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. In 1958 alone, 163 illegal stills were raided in that region.

VIII. What Was Lost — and What Endures

Berks County never again hosted a commercial rye whiskey operation on the scale of Neversink Distilling, Miller Pure Rye, or I. B. Stein & Son. Federal taxation, World War I, and Prohibition together extinguished a farm-to-still economy that had operated continuously since the 1700s. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board created after repeal — and the state-store sales monopoly that lasted until the Limited Winery Act of 1968 — made small-scale local production of wine or spirits effectively impossible for decades.

What remains in the landscape today is mostly archaeological:

• The brownstone distillery building in Albany Township, off Pine Creek Road.
• Remnants of the Stein homestead in Greenwich Township at the junction of Route 737 and Kohler’s Hill Road.
• A road in Bern Township still informally called Bootleg Road.
• A handful of vintage Stein’s Pure Rye and other Berks distillery advertisements preserved in archives like The Passing Scene.

Whiskey production in Reading and Berks County is, in the end, a story in three acts: a colonial and 19th-century farm economy that turned rye into ready cash; a Prohibition era that killed the legitimate industry while making the illicit one infamous; and a postwar mob-run epilogue that put Reading, briefly and disastrously, back on the national map of organized illegal distilling. The legal industry never returned in the form it once took — but the rye fields, the brownstone walls, and the place names remain, telling the story to anyone who knows where to look.

Key Sources from the GoReadingBerks Archive

• George M. Meiser IX & Gloria Jean Meiser — The Passing Scene, Vol. 18 (Berks distilleries, the Stein family, Daniel A. Yoder)
• Ed Taggert — When the Rackets Reigned (Prohibition-era stills, the Bern Township tragedy, the 1956 Penn Hardware operation)
• Daniel J. Brennan — Lost Mount Penn (Cultural impact of Prohibition; PLCB era)
• Reading Towne, Volume 1 (1923 Mulberry Street still)
• Reading Newsweek, Vol. I (WWII whiskey rationing in Reading)