Carling Brewery Was Once a Cleveland Beer Giant

The Canadian-owned brewery was the eighth-largest beer maker in the United States, making nearly 5% of all beer consumed in the country. Its sales had exploded by more than 600% in the preceding seven years, earning a somewhat derisive nickname: The Giant From the North.

Plans were underway for a new brewery in Baltimore, and the company bought a brewery in Frankenmuth, Michigan, that year. Carling sponsored a PGA tournament and was the official beer sponsor of the Browns and Indians.

In Cleveland, the operation kept chugging along. Carling came to America in 1934, just a year after Prohibition ended, and found an unlikely home at the corner of Quincy Avenue and East 93rd Street. It had formerly been the home of Peerless Motor Co., a maker of luxury cars, and was able to be adapted for reuse as a brewery. Vestiges of its old life remained, with carvings of wheels and tires in the building’s masonry.

By 1956, Carling employed 1,300 people and moved 600 cans a minute. The company bought 14 nearby houses for a planned expansion to the brewery. But the era of local breweries was coming to an end, as the 1960s saw the rise of megabreweries like
Anheuser-Busch, Pabst Brewing Co. and Miller Brewing Co., massively scaling up national production and far outspending local breweries on marketing and sponsorships.

In 1971, Carling announced that its corporate headquarters would be moving to Massachusetts, and the East Side brewery would close. At that point, Carling was a distant third in sales in its American hometown, dwarfed by Stroh’s and Duke. Schmidt’s Brewery moved in, and beer was produced at the plant until 1984. The building itself was torn down in 1994, but the site remained an eyesore for years after. It’s now the site of the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Justice Center.  

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