Charles Voegtle was born in Rothweil, Baden, Germany.  He came to America in 1865, just as the Civil War was drawing to a close.  He settled in Quincy, Illinois, where he found employment at the brewery owned by Matthew Dick and his brothers John and Jacob, and within five years he had risen to the position of foreman. In 1869 he married Johanna Weisenhorn.  Their union would produce three children. 

Voegtle's brother-in-law, Frank Sales Weisenhorn, was the son of a well-to-do farmer and saloon operator.  In 1873, Franks's younger brother August moved his family and business out to Montana, where he quickly found success making wagons for miners who had plenty of gold and nothing to purchase. 

Frank decided he might try his own luck in a boomtown, and in 1876 he persuaded his brother-in-law Charles Voegtle to pack up their families and move west to Boulder, Colorado.  There they purchased the Crystal Springs Brewery from Keller & Zuelfehofer.  Frank's father had likely provided the funding, and Charles provided the skill, as the firm was christened with Frank's name first, "Weisenhorn & Voegtle."  Their brewhouse was situated on the picturesque Boulder Creek, near where the Boulder County Library is today.  The creek was both the source of the water used to cool the brewing beer and the source of the gold that fed the quickly growing town.

Weisenhorn and Voegtle ran the brewery as partners for eleven years, after which Voegtle sold his partnership to Weisenhorn.  At age 45, Voegtle retired from the rough and tumble occupation of a brewer in a mining town. He, Johanna, and their children moved away from the rowdy brewhouse to a then-rural plot of land under the shadow of the Flatirons.  There they grew flowers and sold fruit.  

Charles Voegtle died on September 27th, 1917, at the age of 76 years.  The brewery he and Frank had run in the early days of Boulder had shut down years before, a victim of America's ever-encroaching Prohibition laws.

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