Inside the doors and down the elevator of Iowa City’s Brewery Square Building, there’s a basement. And at the back of the basement is a locked hatch. Through it and past some pipes and cinder blocks, the ceilings get low. It’s around this point that Doug Alberhasky, the owner of nearby John’s Groceries, points to an extender ladder reaching up a 150-year-old shaft.
“We call this the ladder of death for a reason,” he says, half-joking.
A century ago, workers of the Union Brewing Company would have surfaced great barrels of beer up from these depths. Today, archeologists at the University of Iowa are searching the depths for just how deep these tunnels run.
Alberhasky leads tours of these “beer caves.”
“In order to make beer back in the 1850s you needed to have it be cold,” he said to a tour group. “Lagering literally means to store cold, and…
