The Way Cowboys Drank Beer In The Wild West Isn't Something You'd See Today

The thrill of starting fresh, the danger of hardships and disease, outlaws and gunslingers, and raucous saloons — the constant threats of bad harvests or smallpox aside, there's something romantic about the adventure of the Old West. It's no wonder that we still watch old Westerns and seek out historic restaurants where we can still get a taste of the Wild West. Learning firsthand what it was like to live out on the frontier is endlessly fascinating — and that extends to the type of alcohol folks once consumed.

If you'd like to experience some Old West thrill without leaving home, we've got a super simple suggestion: Drink your beer warm. It may not sound appetizing, but it's how cowboys would have thrown it back in those saloons. You might wonder what kind of beer you'd find in Old West saloons, and the answer is that it varied. Early on, it was whatever grain or sugar source was left over, fermented, un-hopped because hops were hard to come by. It spoiled quickly. With Czech and German immigration came lager-brewing traditions, which included using hops and keeping beer cool underground pre-refrigeration, but even those beers weren't as cold as we have today with modern refrigeration.

So, no matter what kind of beer it was, from malty molasses ales to German-style lagers, it was pretty warm. Consider, too, that much of the American West — Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and the likes — has warmer climates. Beer in these regions was served at around 55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Compare that to the temperature most beer is served at today, around 38 to 55 degrees.

To put it mildly, beer was less delicious in the Old West. With the influence of German and Czech lager-brewing, American breweries like Yuengling, Pabst, and Anheuser-Busch were founded in 1829, 1844, and 1852, respectively. But American pioneers moving out west from the 1840s onward were heading far away from industrialized breweries that had access to hops, harvested ice on a large scale, and used refrigeration as early as 1873.

The saloons that popped up in new settlements, by contrast, mostly brewed their own beer with whatever they had — and what they had was not refrigerated. The often unhopped beer was sweet, warm, and maybe even a little sour if it was going bad. So, when did all that change? When did cowboys start to be able to enjoy good beer, nice and cold?

In the 1880s, more breweries were popping up and beginning to operate their own saloons in the west, and independent saloons started gaining access to beer from breweries who were able to use refrigerated train cars, developed in the 1890s, to ship beer. While most saloons wouldn't have been able to implement their own refrigeration, local towns and cities began harvesting their own ice to keep beer cool. By the end of the 19th century, you could get a pretty crisp, cool, lager; balanced between malt sweetness and hop bitterness, from a brewery like Miller or Budweiser.