When I became a folklorist, writing for Dr. Alfred Shoemaker’s Pennsylvania Folklife magazine, I naturally relied on my native background, my Bieber ancestors farmed in the Oley Hills of Rockland Township. They were a group of one horse farmers who never became familiar with the Industrial Revolution, still farming on the one horse farms with dairy cows to meet their families household needs in the backwoods of the Oley Hills where automated John Deere modern tractors were first becoming fashionable.
However, since the majority of their farmland was still in virgin forests, they did not see the advantage of modern-day plowing. In fact, native farmers often sold their black birch trees to thin out their forest, just to allow their hardwood trees room to grow. Birch Mills bought the sweet black birch trees by the ton. The Kemmerer family near Barto not only distilled birch oil, but also trimmed the black birch branches which were then sold for firewood to heat their homes in winter.
Since my Bieber relatives sold tons of black birch trees to the birch oil factories, they were familiar with the soft drink that was made from the native birch oil distilled from these black birch trees. In fact, when our Bieber families had picnics with a barrel of beer, most often there was a second barrel of homemade birch beer that was consumed by elders and their grandchildren, during the heat of the summer months.
Coming from the Allentown area, we often stopped off at the Fredericksville Hotel near where we had a large picnic grove inherited by my grandmother, Mary Bieber Hilbert. Operated by Russell Stahl, this country hotel always had birch beer on tap! It was a favorite of Pennsylvania Dutch people who sometimes mixed it with their favorite brand of beer in the hot summer months. In the early folklife days, Coke and Pepsi were unheard of in the backwoods of the Oley Valley.
On occasion, I would bump into the famous birch oil distiller, Larry Kemmerer of Barto, who had a practice of buying young birch trees from natives in the Oley Hills and would then distill these trees for birch oil which was then sold to soda companies that would include this natural flavor in their commercial soda mixes. A gifted birch oil distiller, Larry could tell if the birch drink he was drinking contained natural birch oil. Many of the old timers in the Fredericksville area knew Larry, because he asked them to show him the boundary lines when he cut down the birch trees.
While realizing the number of inhabitants who sold their black birch trees to native oil mills from this early American folk practice, Dr. Shoemaker and I decided to set up a birch oil distillery at the Kutztown Folk Festival. True to folklife practices, an old distilling shack near to Fredericksville was chosen and an early Americana copper still was acquired to distill birch trees with a large wooden barrel filled with water. This was not unlike the setup used by the original bootlegger in the Oley Hills!
But, by chance, when we contacted the Kutztown Bottling Works to acquire a birch beer soda, I met with the founder Barney Bieber and his brother, Ellie, who knew exactly the quality of birch beer we desired. Thus, this native drink popular with the natives far outranked the commercial drinks of the 20th century at Kutztown.
Richard H. Shaner is director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
