May 20 is one of the several claimed birthdays of Johann Adam Lemp, who was born in Grüningen, Landkreis Gießen, Hessen, Germany.

Adam was introduced to the art of brewing by his father, Wilhelm Christophe Lemp, who operated a brewery in Eschwege, Germany.  Unfortunately his intimate apprenticeship ended too soon when his father died in 1806.  It was a tragedy that sent young Adam down a tumultuous path.

Adam was ambitious.  After attaining his majority he took his inheritance and opened a restaurant, and then a second, all this while operating a brewery (perhaps his fathers?).  But he was too inexperienced, and his attention was stretched too thin.  His businesses lost money, and in time his inheritance was gone.  In 1836 Adam, pursued by creditors, abandoned his wife Justina, daughter Johanette, and infant son William, and boarded a ship bound for the United States.

Lemp eventually found a new life in St. Louis Missouri, which was at the time was America's western frontier.  There he started a grocery store/brewery in around 1840.  His beer was popular among the boatmen and cowboys.  Perhaps having learned from his past mistakes, Adam abandoned his less successful endeavors and focused his attention on that which was most profitable, and in the mid 1840s Lemp sold his stock of groceries to concentrate on beer-making full time.

Meanwhile Adam's son William was still living with his mom in Eschwege.  At some point in the mid 1840s, as his fortunes rose, Adam sent for William, but his mother refused to let him leave.  Then in 1848 William, now age 12, was allowed passage to America and joined up with his birth father, a person of whom he assuredly had no memory.  It is possible that his mother Justina accompanied him on the trip, which would have been awkward.

William already had the beginnings of first hand brewing experience, as his mother had remarried another master brewer (Georg Ludwig Aulepp) after Adam's abandonment.  William was to complete his training in the intimate setting of his birth father's brewhouse on Second Street, learning both the brewer's art and the sales side of the business.

Adam gradually passed responsibilities off to his son William, who would over the succeeding decades bring the Lemp brewery to a prosperity unimagined by his father.  Johann Adam Lemp retired from brewing in the mid-1850s and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 23, 1862.  He was 69 years of age.

For the definitive history of Johann Adam Lemp please see Chris Naffziger's 2017 article in St. Louis Magazine.

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Associated Breweries