German immigrants made Chile and the United States the pioneer lager brewers of the Americas, although, unlike elsewhere in the hemisphere, the indigenous peoples of these territories had limited alcoholic beverages of their own. Whereas Spaniards encountered native brewers of pulque and chicha in Mexico and Peru, English and Dutch founded the first breweries in their North American colonies. Even then, most settlers drank rum, gin, whisky, or hard cider.
By 1810 only about 150 breweries operated in the United States for a population of 7 million. In the southern states, enslaved and free women of color adapted African brewing traditions to New World ingredients, selling beers made of molasses and sarsaparilla root. Spanish settlers in Chile and California founded vineyards to satisfy their needs for sacramental wine and daily consumption. Chileans also made a version of apple cider called chicha, using the same term as the indigenous fermented corn beverage. British ale became fashionable during the wars of independence in the 1810s, and the inaugural banquet for President Manuel Bulnes in 1841 served Burton ale alongside Bordeaux wine.
Lager beer arrived in the Americas in the 1840s along with German migrants fleeing economic change and political unrest. Early arrivals were often farmers and artisans from Bavaria, Baden, and Wurttemberg, followed by political refugees from the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Most settled with their families in the Midwest’s so-called German triangle between Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. Much smaller numbers, about 80,000, moved to Chile with official encouragement, founding colonies at Valdivia and Llanquihue, on the indigenous Araucanian frontier.
By the 1880s, proletarian migrants from northeastern Germany had largely replaced the earlier agrarian arrivals from the southwest, and the newcomers usually searched for industrial work in cities such as New York and Chicago. Nearly 5 million Germans came to the United States in the century after 1820.
Finding relatively cheap food and high wages, migrants generally improved their standards of living in the Americas, although they were not always welcomed at first. Chicago’s Lager Beer riot of 1855 resulted not from a shortage of beer but rather from Nativist attempts to ban the beverage enjoyed by the newcomers. German service in the Union Army during the Civil War created a positive view of the immigrants among northerners, many of whom learned to drink beer while serving alongside German units. Beer gardens became a conspicuous center of German American social life. Likewise in South America, settlers gathered in social clubs to eat, drink, sing, and play sports, and Chileans soon acquired a taste for “German chicha.”