‘I think we have a winner here’: A cream ale story

This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.

Somewhere on a brewhouse floor in 1960, a man tasted what he’d made and hollered. Legend has it the words were: “I think we have a winner here.” Sixty-six years later, you can buy that same beer at any gas station in Rochester. Most people don’t think twice about it.

Here’s a Rochester story.

Cream ale is one of the few beer styles that belongs entirely to this country. Not a variation on a German lager or an English ale—something genuinely American, born from the particular conditions of 19th century brewing on this continent. Along with California common and Kentucky common, it’s part of a short list of styles that couldn’t have come from anywhere else, because the ingredient that defines it—corn—wasn’t part of the brewing vocabulary anywhere else.

The style grew up partly as a response to the Pilsners flooding American markets via immigrant brewers from Central Europe. Brewers here used what they had, fermented with ale yeast, cold-conditioned to Pilsner-like smoothness, and arrived somewhere entirely new.

The Beer Judge Certification Program puts it at category 6A: pale, clean, crushable, with a subtle sweetness from the adjunct grain balanced carefully against the bitterness. Smooth like a lager. Crisp like an ale. The BJCP lists a single commercial example first, before any others, as the clearest expression of what the style actually is.

That example is Genesee Cream Ale. Brewed here since 1960.

Founded in Rochester

Clarence Geminn came from brewing stock. His grandfather had been a brewer in Illinois, his family’s commitment to the craft serious enough that when bootleggers approached his father about brewing during Prohibition, the answer was no. Geminn trained at the Siebel Institute in Chicago, apprenticed in St. Louis, and eventually made his way to Genesee, where he spent eight years as assistant brewmaster before taking over the top job in 1959, according to a 1980 profile in the Times-Union newspaper.

By then, he understood both the history he was inheriting and the problem he needed to solve. In the late 1950s, Geminn was working with two offerings that each had a ceiling: Dickens Dry Ale, available between 1956 and 1958, which consumers found too spare; and 12 Horse Ale, popular but heavy in a way that limited how much you wanted to drink of it. He needed a middle ground.

The influences pulling at him were multiple. Genesee had deep German roots, but brewery owner Louis Wehle had long been drawn to English ales and Burton-style brewing systems.

“Clarence was looking for a lighter-drinking traditional ale,” says Tyler Muhs, Genesee’s brewing manager. “We had that German heritage, but Wehle was infatuated with those English ales, Burton systems. So, I think that’s what they were looking for when they came up with it.”

Paul Constantine, the Brew House’s retail manager and in-house historian, frames the broader context plainly: “Lagers were kind of taking over the world. Not every brewery could do one—lagers ferment at colder temperatures. So, the answer was to come up with an ale that mimicked a lager.”

What Geminn built was layered and deliberate. Ale yeast, but fermented and cold-aged like a lager. Then one more step—kräusening, where the finished beer is primed with actively fermenting wort for natural carbonation, giving it a clean, lively finish. No cream anywhere in the recipe; the name nods to the texture, that particular smoothness of the blend. As for the exact formula, Geminn held it close his entire life.

“As my father always said,” his son Gary Clarence explained to the Democrat and Chronicle in 2004, “keep it under your hat. It’s just a unique process to give it that ale flavor and still have it smooth.”

One detail anchors just how unchanged the recipe has remained: Genesee has been using the same English ale yeast since 1966. Brewmaster Matt James, who once ran the brewery’s yeast room, doesn’t treat that as a trivia footnote. “We’ve been taking care of it for many, many years,” he says, with the quiet reverence of someone who understands exactly what continuity costs to maintain.

A U.S. best seller

The beer debuted in 1960 and found an audience immediately. Constantine reaches for the brewery’s own advertising history to describe what it was: In its early years, the tagline said it plainly—it was something different. Fuller-bodied than a Pilsner, with a touch more sweetness.

“It’s just so unique,” Muhs says, “because it drinks like a lager and has those esters an ale would have.”

By the late 1970s, Genesee Cream Ale had become the best-selling domestically produced ale in the United States, a title it held from 1978 to 1984. At its peak it accounted for nearly a third of the brewery’s entire annual output—roughly 1 million barrels a year. The brewery and the beer became, in the minds of many, the same thing.

James grew up inside that cultural fact.

“It was very different from most of the mainstream stuff out there at the time,” he recalls. “For this community, it’s been here forever. I’ve got a picture of me as a child with my uncle holding a Cream Ale.”

He pauses, offers one of his trademark dry chuckles. “That’s probably something that wasn’t supposed to happen to a 5-year-old. Different times.” The memory isn’t just personal—it’s representative. “Every time I go to a function anywhere, someone talks about Cream Ale, or their dad or their grandfather or their uncle. There is more of a nostalgia about it today, and people are going back to it. It’s a very stable barrelage that we put out every year.”

Muhs has his own version of that loyalty. “My grandfather wouldn’t allow any other beer in his fridge. That was it. Cream Ale only.” That kind of devotion, replicated across generations of Rochester households, is not something you can manufacture. It accrues over decades, one six-pack at a time.

Clarence Geminn died in 2006 at age 92. Gary Geminn succeeded his father as brewmaster in 1978 and held the role for 27 years. The recipe Clarence Geminn built on that brewhouse floor, the one he told his son to keep under his hat, is still the one in the can.

“Rochester is basically the founder of the style,” says Bob Charboneau, president of the Upstate New York Homebrewers Association, one of the oldest homebrew clubs in the country—founded in 1979, the year after Genesee Cream Ale began its run at the top of the national charts. “If you look up the BJCP standard for cream ale, Genny is the first one mentioned. It’s the reason cream ale exists.”

Paul Leone, longtime executive director of the New York State Brewers Association, doesn’t complicate it. Ask him why cream ale is a Rochester staple and he gives you one word before he explains it: “Genesee.”

“When that style came out, no one really knew what it was,” he says. “A lot of people thought it had cream in it. It’s really one of the most easy-drinking beers in the world, but the name is a misnomer.”

Leone spent years watching breweries out west win the cream ale category at major competitions. “I got tired of it,” he says. “New York should own this. It’s a New York style.”

The NYSBA now covers entry fees to send the state’s gold-medal cream ale to both the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup. It’s worked—New York breweries have taken home medals at both in recent years, including gold for Buffalo’s Resurgence Brewing at the most recent World Beer Cup.

The competitive recognition means something to the people who make it. James looked up the numbers before our conversation.

“It’s won nine or 10 World Beer Cup and GABF medals,” he says of Genesee Cream Ale. “The historical value of it, the community value of it, the recognition of the name—it’s a big deal. It’s very important for us to keep it going, to keep it tasting just as good as it has for the past 60 years.”

He has a particular soft spot for the way craft brewers have absorbed the beer into their own culture.

“That’s my favorite—when I go to a craft brewery and I see some Red Eyes and Cream Ales in the cooler, and that’s what they drink after they’re done making beer,” he says. “That’s really awesome.”

Keeping tradition alive

Andy Cook, who owns and brews at Swiftwater Brewing in Rochester, runs one of those breweries with Cream Ale in the cooler. He puts it the way a brewer would: “Genesee is the original cream ale. No doubt about it. It’s our native style. Genny is fully supportive of making this Rochester’s beer.”

Cook has thought carefully about what actually defines the style beyond the history.

“The base needs to have corn. It needs to have enough bitterness to balance the residual sweetness from the corn. It just needs to be a super crushable lawn mower beer.” He co-pitches ale and lager yeast together, winding up with something he describes as super chuggable and balanced. “It’s also a really good platform for dry-hopping or fruit. You can really go in a lot of different directions with it.”

That openness to interpretation—that blank canvas quality—is part of what makes cream ale such a natural vehicle for community. You start in the same place and end up everywhere.

Nick Mesrobian is from Bath, Maine. He came to Rochester to attend Rochester Institute of Technology, stayed to brew beer, and spent years as head brewer at Roc Brewing. He’s the person who fell hardest for this city’s relationship with its beer.

“Being from Maine, we didn’t have anything like Genny,” he says. “The Cream Ale is very unique. It’s like the original lawn mower beer. It’s a hybrid. But also, it’s delicious. You want an alternative to a light lager? Here’s essentially an ale that drinks like a light lager. It’s great.”

Mesrobian wanted to throw a party around that. He brought the idea to Roc Brewing co-founder Chris Spinelli, and in 2017, the Celebration of Cream Ales was born. The concept was simple: get Rochester-area brewers to each make a cream ale, buy a keg from each of them, keep a couple of Genny kegs in rotation for the purists, and let the afternoon happen.

“The first year I think we had eight or nine cream ales on draft,” Spinelli says. “We kicked them all by seven o’clock. It was an instant hit.”

Over the next several years the event expanded to include 40 breweries from across New York.

“No rules, other than it somehow had to be a cream ale,” Mesrobian says. “There were some pretty fringe beers there. It was great.” He thinks about what drew him to the idea in the first place. “It’s about the community. The city’s unofficial beer—or maybe official by this point.”

Or as Spinelli puts it: “It’s one of the only truly American beer styles. It became such an interesting counterpoint to the German-style lagers that had started to dominate American palates. And it’s just something that brought our community together around a beer that is pivotal to what Rochester beer is.”

The last Celebration of Cream Ales was held in 2022. Then Roc Brewing closed, and the event went quiet.

When Cook came to Spinelli about carrying the tradition forward at Swiftwater, the answer was easy.

“The highest form of flattery is imitation,” Spinelli says. “I want to see them succeed. We all know what the industry is nowadays.”

Cook made sure Spinelli, Mesrobian, and former Roc brewer Ashley McCaffrey were on board before moving forward. Before the festival itself, the Upstate New York Homebrewers Association held its first-ever cream ale homebrew competition—60 entries across four categories, judged at Swiftwater by a panel that included professional brewers, with winners to be announced at the Celebration.

The resurrection of the Celebration of Cream Ales comes to Swiftwater on Saturday, June 27. It runs from noon to 10 p.m. Cook is aiming for 24 different cream ales on draft—with a half barrel of Genny available all day.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].