Golden Age

One Czech immigrant helped build a brewing empire—and the city of Yukon.

BY CAROL MOWDY BOND

AROUND THE TURN of the twentieth century, Czech immigrant John F. Kroutil began pushing Yukon toward modernization. He and his family created a monster milling operation with global ties—the Yukon Mill and Grain Company. An entrepreneur and innovator, Kroutil crafted Yukon’s infrastructure, including electricity, a bank, and massive job opportunities while using Yukon’s railroad system to propel new ideas forward.

Amid Yukon’s growth, a national paradigm shift took place on January 16, 1919, when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. Though it legally prevented the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the U.S., the situation didn’t change many Americans’ taste buds, which still hankered for spirits. So bootlegging went viral. he incorporated Oklahoma’s first legal, post-Prohibition beer brewing operation with the assistance of experienced, oldschool, German brewmasters. Kroutil named his endeavor Progress Brewing Company as a nod to their innovation and forward-thinking attitude.

Prohibition aside, Kroutil and a partner experimented cooking their suds in a barn located near the former’s $75,000 mansion ($1.31 million in today’s dollars) in the heart of Yukon, and local rumors still circulate that Kroutil was brewing in his home basement. But what was he doing with his beer during Prohibition?

“When John started brewing, family, friends, and employees enjoyed the fruits of his labor,” Kroutil’s great-grandnephew Ray Wright says.

Then on December 5, 1933, the TwentyFirst Amendment uncorked Prohibition and allowed states to write their own laws governing alcohol. Oklahoma’s tight leash on alcoholic beverages only allowed production of nontintoxicating, lowpoint beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content. But Kroutil knew the sweet spots. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1933. Then in 1934,

Progress Brewing Company

Progress Brewing Company’s historic taproom is located inside NewView Oklahoma. Tours are available by appointment only.

> 501 North Douglas Avenue in Oklahoma City

> (405) 232-4644

A Depression-era price tag of $500,000 launched Progress’ six-story, eighty-thousand-square-foot Oklahoma City brewhouse, which showcased medieval castle merlons and embrasures lining the roof. Located at 501 North Douglas Avenue, the facility was strategically situated near railroad tracks and atop an aquifer. Kroutil channeled water into a well house, then pumped it into the basement into concrete-lined cinder block tanks. A conveyer belt moved grain to the sixth floor. Then gravity moved the process to the floors beneath. At ground level, where workers bottled the beer, the train car rolled into the building and carried away the product. With a thousand employees, Progress eventually produced about a hundred thousand barrels annually, initially selling beer in cone-top cans and then in bottles. Kroutil was so proud that he even stamped his name on the beer labels.

Progress Brewing Company is long gone, but its impact still is evident today.

“When John started brewing, family, friends, and employees enjoyed the fruits of his labor.”

The enterprising entrepreneur promoted his liquid gold through televised wrestling matches. Ads appeared on buildings, baseball game scorecards, and Future Farmers of America livestock and rodeo programs.

After Kroutil’s 1954 death, San Antonio’s Lone Star Brewing Company purchased Progress and produced the beer from 1959 into the 1970s. Of the initial post-Prohibition Oklahoma breweries, Kroutil’s was the longest-lived.

Lone Star sold the Oklahoma City building to the Oklahoma League for the Blind—now NewView Oklahoma—in 1973. NewView’s COO Damon Swift is proud of the building’s history; in fact, he gives tours of the Alpine-themed taproom along with the rest of the property by appointment.

While shelves haven’t held Progress beer in a long time, Oklahomans like Wright recall those days fondly.

“When I was young in the 1960s, after the Lone Star buyout, my job at Yukon’s mill was to offer farmers either a Grapette or a Lone Star Beer when they brought their wheat in,” Wright says.

And Wright is carrying on the Kroutil family legacy. He and his wife Cathy, a winemaker who owns Farfalla Wines not far from the founding patriarch’s historic Yukon mansion, are still filling glasses with the spirit of progress and inspiring exclamations of na zdravi—or “cheers” in Czech.