Fitger's Brewing Company was a beer manufacturer in Duluth, Minnesota, United States, from 1881 to 1972. The surviving brewery complex stretches for along the Lake Superior shoreline and East Superior Street, one of Duluth's main roads. The majority of the ten-building complex was constructed between 1886 and 1911. Fitger's, as it is now known, has undergone adaptive reuse as an indoor mall with shops, restaurants, nightclubs, a hotel, and a museum on the brewery's history. Fitger's Brewing Company grew directly out of a brewery established in 1859, making it the first commercial brewery at the head of Lake Superior and the oldest continuously operating brewery in the state of Minnesota until going out of business in 1972. Fitger's was a major local employer, producing 100,000 barrels of beer annually. It stayed open during Prohibition by diversifying into soda and candy bar production. Brewing history Origins A nationwide financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, had caused most of the Duluth's early pioneers to leave. A history of Duluth written in 1910 relates, "Of the handful remaining in 1859 four men were unemployed and one of those was a brewer. Capital idea; build a brewery. The absence of malt and hops and barley did not at all embarrass those stout-hearted settlers." The men rented property on a stream that emptied into Lake Superior and owned by Sidney Luce. The stream became known as Brewery Creek, as it still is today. While the original brewery "was not a pecuniary success", a few decades later it was to become the Fitger Brewing Company. The original brewery was purchased in 1881 by Michael Fink, who decided to build a larger brewery a block and a half away and down the stream on Superior Street. Construction of the new building began on September 19, 1881, and was completed the next year. Dubbed Fink's Lake Superior Brewery, it included offices, sleeping quarters for employees, brewing facilities, and its own drinking establishment, the Brewery Saloon. Lake Superior Brewery sold its first beer in August 1882. The brewery was very successful from the beginning and sold beer as far west as Aitkin, Minnesota, and as far east as Thunder Bay, Ontario. On November 11, 1882, Fink hired a young German brewmaster named August Fitger, a graduate from a premier German brewing school, Weihenstephan Brewing School in Munich (now part of Technical University of Munich). Just months later, in April