Schade Brewery

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Spokane was a town of working men--and a town of breweries when the Schade Brewery was built in 1903. Bernhardt Schade, who owned the building, was brew master at the locally-owned and operated New York Brewing Company. The brewery was designed by Lewis Stritesky to replicate a European brewery. Schade Brewing company was originally built to produce between 35,000 and 40,000 barrels of beer per year, enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool twice over. In 1907 the Schade Brewery expanded their capacity to 100,000 barrels per year and built a bottling plant SE of their main building. During this time Spokane was a working mans town flush with mine workers. These workers were the embodiment of the 'work hard, play hard' and spent much of their time above ground in one of Spokane's many beer halls to relax.

On June 16th 1916 Spokane enacted Prohibition of alcohol. The Shade Brewery had been vehemently opposed to the act and began producing soda and non-alcoholic beer or "near beer," which at 0.5% alcohol by volume was not nearly as popular as beer. In 1921, Bernhardt Schade succumbed to his illness and the Brewery died along with him.

During the depression years the Brewery sat empty, eventually becoming vagrant housing, known as "Hotel de Gink." In 1933 M. Rosauer, of Golden Age Breweries Inc., bought the Schade Brewery for the purpose of brewing. The brewery had fallen into disrepair during the depression, and Golden Age restored and upgraded the brewery so that it could produce up to 200,000 barrels of beer per year, doubling the previous capacity. In 1948 the operations were sold to Bohemian Brewing company, who later sold it to Atlantic Brewing company.

By 1959 the Schade Brewery was sold to Inland Metal, who used the building as a warehouse until 1977. Since then the Brewery has had a variety of tenants since Inland Metals, including antique stores, public marketplace, credit unions, carpet stores and eateries.