Piels Beer

Piels Beer, aka Piel Bros. Beer and Piel's Beer, is a regional lager beer, originally brewed in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York, at 315 Liberty Avenue.

Piels was founded in 1883 by the Piel brothers: Gottfried, Michael and Wilhelm Piel. Michael (born in Stoffeln, Düsseldorf am Rhein, Germany, 29 March 1849; died at Lake Parlin, Maine, 12 June 1915) was the brewer. He was the son of Heinrich Hubert and Gertrud (Gispé) Piel, and descended from an old Rhenish stock of farmers. To the original and extensive Stoffeln Farm, his father and uncles had added large tillages in Mörsenbroich-Düsseldorf.

Michael saw military service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The impressions on the country boy of his years of service at Berlin, which had already begun to modernize its industries, lingered and served constantly to stimulate his natural gifts of invention. For several years after the war, Michael worked at Mörsenbroich with his elder brother.

Gradually, Michael moved away from the family calling of farming. In the breeding of roses, and in the development of a new and highly productive breed of bees, for both of which, after but two years of experimentation, he was voted the government's highest awards, he found the encouragement he needed for the growing determination to carve out his own future. It was, however, his invention of a centrifuge for the extraction of honey, awarded special governmental recognition and immediately adopted into general use, that decided him. As the protégé of a machine manufacturer, he visited the industrial centers of the progressive Rhineland and soon chose the ancient German industry of brewing as the one offering the best opportunity for his talent of applying machinery to natural processes.

The new science of modern refrigeration had just come into practice, and Michael was fascinated by the possibilities for applying it to brewing. He began his apprenticeship as a brewer in the old-style subterranean cellars at the breweries of Dortmund, Westphalia. In 1883, when his apprenticeship ended, he joined his younger brother, Gottfried, then already established as an export merchant in New York City. Together they founded in East New York a typically German brewery, to be conceived on modern and scientific principles.

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