"Life Behind Bars" is the unique and colorful story of Milwaukee taverns: how they came to be, how they dominated Milwaukee neighborhoods and culture, how and why they faded from view and how some of the traditions that began in tied houses endure to this day. From the mid-1800's right up until prohibition, selling draft beer in saloons and taverns was the brewing industry's biggest retail outlet. Bottled beer accounted for only a fraction of sales, and canned beer was still several decades in the future. Saloon sales were critical, and the breweries set up thousands of barkeepers in business by supplying them with everything they needed... glassware, advertising, decoration, furniture and backbars... on the condition that the tavern could only serve his benefactor's beer, thus becoming "tied" to the brewery.

Kupferschmidt discovered that except for anecdotes and some photographs, tied houses had no "official" history. "I live near the old Schlitz Tivoli Palm Gardens on Fifth and National in Milwaukee, and what I wanted to do was preserve the history of the tied house, because when I was looking into this, there was nothing... very little... written about them."

Beginning in 1988, Jim collected stories, artifacts and photographs to piece together this overlooked part of history. He discovered that it isn't just about beer.

"The brewery's second largest business was real estate. They owned corner lots, many times all four, at most intersections in the city. It's hard to overestimate how important - economically and socially - they were to Milwaukee," said Kupferschmidt. Indeed, from the German-dominated north side to the predominantly Polish south side, tied houses boomed in the late nineteenth century. Jones Island, even before it has official city streets, had a Schlitz tied house and many other taverns.

"The best preserved example I can think of is the Holler House at 21st and Lincoln Avenue. Even the dust is from 1903! They have political pictures from the 1920s that they just never took down," said Kupferschmidt."

"Many of the stories I have I couldn't get directly, because people who ran tied houses or drank at them just aren't around anymore. Years ago when I ran the White House on South Kinnickinnic," said Kupferschmidt, "old timers in their 80s and 90s would still come in and tell stories - and they were there before prohibition. In listening to them I got the original idea for the book. Tied houses stopped 1907 when a gentleman named Barker on Milwaukee's common council proposed the Barker Law, which prohibited the construction of new tied houses until the city's population reached 500,000." But with prohibition, tied houses really came to an end.

Jim is thinking about and researching his next book, tentatively entitled "In the Shadows of Giants," about the smaller Milwaukee breweries - such as Falk, Jung, Obermann, Hustings, etc. - that operated thrived when Pabst and Schlitz vied to be the world's largest brewery.

"Life Behind Bars" will have an initial run of 500 and will be available in early 2004 for $14.95; distribution has yet to be determined. Jim Kupferschmidt is a former member of the Museum of Beer and Brewing's board of directors. He is the owner of Metropolitan Garage Doors and Grove Street Antiques.