The saga of JE Siebel’s grave in Chicago
Here’s the remarkable story of how JE Siebel, a feisty German immigrant and founder of one of the most renowned international brewing schools, finally received a marker on his grave, nearly 100 years after he died. The story is told by Keith Lemcke, Vice-President of the Siebel Institute, in his typical humorous fashion (iv).
As with so many of my stories, this one starts at a bar. Well, actually, it really started about a century before that, but let’s just move forward.
At Goose Island Clybourn around August 2010, while sitting with my great friend, co-worker and fellow beer assessment consultant Lyn Kruger [she is actually President & COO of the Siebel Institute], I blurted out “I wonder where JE is buried”. Lyn offered “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask the Siebel brothers?” The investigation began. Within seconds I began mashing (brewing reference there…) the keypad on my then state of the art Blackberry, posing the question “Where is JE buried?”
So now I must fill in the blanks, given most of you do not know who the above people are. Most important in this tale is JE. That stands for Dr Johannes Ewald Siebel, “John” in the U.S., the “founder of our school”. I put that phrase in quotation marks due to the simplistic nature of the phrase. Dr Siebel was far, far more than just the founder of a brewing school. True, Siebel Institute of Technology stands as an achievement that almost defies belief, given that we have survived so long to remain a leader in worldwide brewing education in the face of so many tidal changes in what exists as brewing today. This is about his story.
The Siebel brothers are Ron and Bill Siebel, the last of the Siebel family members to have ownership of Siebel Institute. As with several generations before them, Bill and Ron kept the Institute torch fully ablaze through decades of challenge and change. They shepherded the school through some of its most prolific times from the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, exiting from ownership when Lallemand of Canada took ownership in 2000.
Back to our story…within just a few days of my inquiry both brothers replied that they weren’t positive of JE’s location, but Ron suggested I should check Graceland Cemetery on Clark St. at Irving Park in Chicago.
Not having traced the whereabouts of long-deceased people before, I did the obvious, which was to send an email to Graceland asking if there was a way to trace people in their property with only a name and day of death. It was not difficult to find the date of JE’s passing. It was reported widely in local newspapers and brewing industry publications. Such was the legacy of Dr Siebel. If many of the best-known brewers through American history have risen tall by standing on the shoulders of giants, one such giant was JE Siebel.
As a German immigrant he arrived in the 1860s, establishing the Zymotechnic Institute in Chicago as the first Western laboratory dedicated to brewing science. JE was not simply a brewing technician, but rather he was fully an engineer, chemist, and pioneer in the science we have since come to understand as biotechnology. At a time when breweries were benefiting from the emerging field of mechanical refrigeration, Dr Siebel literally wrote the textbook on commercial-level refrigeration amongst volumes of other research papers and articles.
The death of Dr Siebel in late 1919 was of great import to the brewing industry that year, yet it barely registered as a tremor compared to the earthquake that had occurred earlier that year. In 1919, the U.S. ratified national Prohibition of alcohol production, and the Siebel Institute could no longer teach brewing in America.
It took little time for Graceland Cemetery to return with positive information. Dr Siebel and his wife Anna were both buried in Graceland. On a sunny spring day, after a week of torrential rain, I visited the cemetery where I was given a copy of the burial records for JE and Anna, along with a map indicating the location of their resting places. Their burial records were so odd to see … hand-written on a small index card. What was most shocking was seeing that his wife Anna died in 1897, fully 22 years before his death. She died at 48 before the first major courses were to be launched at what would become Siebel Institute. As well, Dr Siebel would have been left to face the oncoming state-by-state threat of Prohibition on his own until the eventual closure of the brewing school.
I walked to the site of the plot around the outside of this massive, historic graveyard. The rains of the days before filled the property with a fresh aromatic of new grass while the visuals of the stunning monuments and markers offered an amazing experience of seeing some of the most opulent structures you can imagine. This being Chicago, there were also mosquitoes. Lots of them. I reached the Siebel burial site and looked for marker #256. I saw no marker by that number, with many of the stone number markers eroded to illegibility by years of exposure to the elements.
I spent almost an hour looking for JE and Anna’s headstone to no avail, giving up after 45 minutes of being a mosquito snack bar. A week later I went back. Nothing. So I went to the office and told them of my inability to see their headstone. The woman at the counter went into their burial records. There was never a headstone ordered. Their graves were unmarked.
At the time of Dr Siebel’s death, Prohibition was the law of the land. There was no longer a market for brewing industry research and education as there was no longer a brewing industry. It was said that Dr Siebel died heartbroken, and that is understandable. He had built an institute that represented the best of science, technology and education only to see it vanish through the changing currents of culture. Alcohol was destroying families, compromising commerce and undermining the morality of the nation. While his death was lamented by an entire industry, there was no posthumous recognition of a man who was a true legend. He was beloved in his neighbourhood. In 1933, a bust of Dr Siebel was commemorated at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry with a ceremony documenting the many achievements over his lifetime.
Yet in 1919, at the time of his death, his grave went unmarked. Was it that the brewing industry was in tatters, or that the collapse of the Siebel Institute, which employed several family members in a range of roles, had left them all destitute? All we know is that until five years ago, the last resting place of Dr Siebel was unknown to those who stood on his shoulders.
The Siebel family would have none of it.
Since the death of JE in 1919, the Siebel family, employees, students, customers and practitioners of brewing technology worldwide have benefitted from the works of Dr Siebel, the entity he established and the philosophy he espoused.
The Siebel brothers put in motion the creation of a marker to pay tribute to the late Dr Siebel and his wife. With only a small footprint provided by their humble burial plot, the marker is simple in nature. Yet consider … how would you possibly create a monument worthy of such achievement? The very nature of how we brew beer around the world has been affected by the works of JE Siebel, from the understanding of the effects of high-gravity brewing on fermentation to the process of counter-pressure racking, for which Dr Siebel holds the patent?
The grave marker for Dr Siebel and his wife Anna was put in place a couple of weeks ago. It lies beneath the shade of three trees, one of which may have been just a twig 96 years ago and now casts brightly coloured leaves onto their resting place. The elevated Red Line passes not 100 feet away, giving legions of passengers a rapidly-moving view of the final home of a true pioneer in brewing science, technology and culture.
In the coming weeks, before the snow falls, a few of us will go visit. I am not sure if they allow a brew onsite, but given that it may offer the Good Doctor his first taste in almost a century, maybe a can or two will sneak their way past security.
From a grateful brewing industry, and from those lucky enough to carry on your vision, thanks, Dr Siebel.
