The Rhinegeist beer complex north of Findlay Market on Elm Street has been undergoing some serious renovations.
"This building's been through a lot," says Rhinegeist Creative Director Mike Gertz. "It's over a hundred years old. It was originally the Christian Moerlein bottling facility and the facade's falling apart. It's old. So, we're repairing it. You gotta do it historically accurate in this neighborhood."
That's because Over-the-Rhine is a historic district, and there are rules about what can be built, and how to renovate.
Company Vice President of Finance and Hospitality Ben Castle says much of the building was brick, and they assumed the whole thing was just brick that had been painted red.
"The contractor came in and said 'Hey we found something here,' " he says. "They pressure-washed or stripped maybe one tile, and they're like, 'This could be really cool.' So we started trying to find out what could have been there."
Castle says in the Cincinnati History Museum's archives they found a high-resolution black and white photo of the front of the building. The photographer is up and across the street a bit, but a tile mural is visible.
Mike Gertz says across the top of the mural, there's a banner reading: Moerlein Bottling Department, with a date: 1896.
"It has an illustration — quirky illustration of this man and woman dressed in, I guess, full German garb, serving a beer and it has the gorgeous Christian Moerlein logo; that version still exists today with the crown," Gertz says.
Castle says the contractors carefully stripped the paint off the rest of the mural and he was shocked at how well it was preserved. He says they started wondering where the tiles came from.
"Is this Rookwood? It doesn't look like Rookwood. It looks very different," he says. "When we were up on the scaffolding, you could see up close it's really pixelated. We were like 'This is like a Minecraft drawing. This is bizarre.' "
"It's amazing. It's amazing that it's still there, that it was simply just painted over."
Beth Johnson is the executive director of Cincinnati Preservation. She says the mural's existence isn't a complete surprise, but the condition of it is.
"There's some publications that talk about it. But there was the question if it was still intact, or if they had painted it because it had started falling into disrepair and pieces were missing, but so far, it looks like it's pretty intact."
The Heritage, a magazine dedicated to the history of tile in America, has an article and photos of the mural. According to the author, Michael Sims, a company from Zanesville created it.
"Zanesville became kind of this tile center for this artistic tile," Johnson says. "The Mosaic Tile Company, which this one is, was founded in 1894. There's three men that founded them, all German. And so the theory is that that's how Christian Moerlein got connected with them because the German community was really tight."
Many members of Cincinnati’s German community were involved in the brewing industry, which ground to a halt after Prohibition began in 1920. Ben Castle says after that the building had different owners.
"I would imagine this was painted over in 1920, when this became a men's coat company, because you wouldn't have wanted that on your coat factory," Castle says. "So it's been hidden for 105 years. And I'm sure that paint helped protect it."
Rhinegeist CEO Adam Bankovich says they're excited to share it with the community. He says they've told CinBev, which owns the Moerlein label now, about the mural.
"Clearly they know this is part of the Moerlein legacy. It's part of our tour, it's part of the Brewing Heritage Tour as well, so they're aware of this too," he says. "It's going to proudly show the history of Christian Moerlein brewing in Cincinnati, and as part of that I said 'Well, we should make a pre-prohibition style lager.' "
That lager will be called Tip of the Hat. Bankovich says it's a nod to the history, and it's because the man in the mural is tipping his hat. There's one tile on the tip of the hat that's set incorrectly from some long-forgotten repair.
Beth Johnson says the mural is the only one of its kind in Cincinnati — that she knows about.
"Preservation can be full of surprises. It's kind of a treasure hunt when you're working on old buildings, sometimes you just don't know what you're going to discover," she says. "Even though we've been doing preservation stuff here in Cincinnati for a long time, there's still more to uncover."
Johnson says as the Cincinnati Hamilton County Library and the Cincinnati Museum Center continue to go through their archives, finding records and photographs, she's confident more treasures will be found.
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