Wilhelm Lenz was born in Baden, Germany.  He came to America in around 1848 and settled and found work as a cooper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Here he married a Hessian emigre named Marie Elizabeth Hamm in a union that would be blessed with ten children.  The 1860 census shows William and Marie in Honey Creek, Wisconsin where he described himself as a Mechanic.

Some time before 1870 he started a brewery along the Wisconsin River in Prairie du Sac, a village just north of Sauk City.  He ran the brewery until his death at the age of 56 on the 29th of May, 1881.