Carl Georg August Fitger was born of a well-to-do family in Delmenhorst, Niedersachsen, Germany. He was the younger brother of famous German painter and poet Arthur Fitger. His older sister lived in Wisconsin and asked young August to come too. He did, and on December 26, 1871 he arrived in New York City. He was seventeen years of age. Fitger made his way to his sisters home town of Kiel where he got a job in a brewery. He interrupted his career in 1877 in order to return to Germany and get a brewmaster's title from the Weihenstephan School in Munich. He then returned to America and brewed for the A. Leisy Brewery in Cleveland (1881), then the Samuel Wainwright & Co. Brewery in St. Louis (1882). In 1882 Michael Fink hired Fitger to be brewmaster of his Lake Superior Brewery in Duluth, Minnesota. Less than six months later Fitger paid Fink $18,000 for half-interest in the brewery. Fitger was just twenty-eight years old. In 1885 Fitger's friend Percy Shelley Anneke purchased Fink's interest and the new partners renamed their brewery A. Fitger & Co., Lake Superior Brewery. The friends ran the Fitger Brewery for the next 35 years until National Prohibition shut them down. Fitger and Anneke then retired to Santa Barbara California, where Fitger took up an interest in mining. He made another fortune when he sold his mining interests to the Johns Manville Company in 1928. Carl Georg August Fitger died on August 14, 1933 at age 78 years.

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