This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
Far below downtown Cincinnati, you'll find large stone- and brick-walled caverns with dirt-strewn floors. Their great arched passageways loom over piles of century-old rubble, vast vats that once overflowed with beer, and recently added stairways to assist tourists passing through.
As with so much in Cincinnati, we can chalk up these places to beer-loving German immigrants. The caverns were built for storing lager back before refrigeration was widespread. Unlike ales, lagers must be aged and stored at temperatures below 40 degrees. For the city's burgeoning German population to make the sorts of lagers they had known back home, they had to dig deep.
