A visit to The Walter Brewing Co. comes with a taster flight of Steel City history, viewed through the lens of a Victorian-era beer legacy revived in modern times.

Several decades after Adolph Coors founded his eponymous beer empire in Golden, a German immigrant named Martin Walter alit west from Wisconsin to expand his family’s brewing traditions, and to tap his own existential keg, in California.

En route, Walter stepped off the train during a stop in Pueblo to check out the booming industrial center that then was the state’s second largest city.

As the legend goes, he never got back on.

“He decided this was where he wanted to stay and start his brewery,” said the brand’s co-owner in modern times, Mia Sanchez.

Walter paid $7,000 for an existing operation on Santa Fe Avenue known as The Pueblo Brewery, and The Walter Brewing Co. opened in 1898. At a time when “beer” meant whistle-wetting, room temperature (or, if you could get it, cellar- or icebox-chilled) pilsner-style lagers, the brewery provided jobs and quenched generations of thirst with “Mountain Dew” and its flagship “Walter’s Beer.”

“Over the years, it’s been distributed into 21 states … California, Nevada, Wyoming and, of course, up in Wisconsin, where the original family had settled,” said Sanchez, gesturing toward one of the taproom walls adorned with framed, mostly black-and-white photos showing family members, old ad campaigns and other tokens from more than a century of brewing archives.

“Isn’t it cool, the horse and wagon with the wood barrels on the back of the wagon,” Sanchez said, pausing to absorb the time warp before moving on to a similarly dusty image capturing an everyday occupational moment that wouldn’t fly today. “That one, there are some kids working at the brewery when it was still on the east side of town … probably early 1900s.”

The Walter Brewing Co. survived Prohibition by selling anything that wasn’t nailed down — “furniture and fixtures,” Sanchez said.

Like many breweries that struggled to stay afloat after their main source of income was outlawed, The Walter Brewing Co. pivoted to the production of other beverages, including nonalcoholic sodas. “Soft” drinks were a hit, so much so that such offerings remained on the menu after the repeal of bone-dry liquor bans in the 1930s.

For much of the 20th century, the brewery continued to be a major employer and beverage producer, as well as the epicenter of a tight-knit neighborhood.

The brewery holds a special place in Shari Trivisonno’s heart and in her family annals. Her father, Frank Straziscar, and her grandfather, also Frank Straziscar, worked there.

“My grandpa … retired from Walter’s. He ended up as the ‘beer finisher,’ and my dad started as a delivery truck driver and night watchman,” Trivisonno said.

Her father’s tenure at The Walter Brewing Co. actually began years before he could legally drink or operate a vehicle — or, for that matter, walk or talk.

“It says right on the birth certificate, ‘Born at Walter’s Brewery,’” said Trivisonno, who noted that her grandfather’s family lived for a while in a house on the grounds of the brewery’s Santa Fe Avenue campus.

Just a few years after The Walter Brewing Co. celebrated its 75th anniversary in Pueblo, the Santa Fe Avenue building sold and the brewery closed. Almost 20 years later, in the 1990s, the main structure was demolished.

Fast forward a decade or so — and add then-Boulder residents Mia and Andy Sanchez to the mix — and a renaissance was in the works.

A “wild hair” idea — to revive the local beer brand — soon became a business plan with wide community support, financial backing and the blessing of the city as well as the original Walter family in Wisconsin.

The newer version of Walter’s Brewery opened in 2012, at 126 Oneida St., in a building with its own ties to local beer history.

“One of our employees’ wives was doing a grad program, and one of their projects was to pick a building in Pueblo and research its history. She picked ours,” Sanchez said. “In this building’s history, Miller and Coors have owned it, (and) she found out that one of the Walter family members had owned it during Prohibition.”

Over the past 14 years, Sanchez’s firsthand “research” has taught her just how deep Pueblo’s personal connections with The Walter Brewing Co. run.

“Everybody has an old can or an old bottle, still full of beer, that they would tell us stories about,” she said. “Almost everyone in Pueblo has a personal story connected to the brand. It was their first beer when they were 13 years old, or their dad or granddad worked there for years.”

Trivisonno was one of those patrons who shared her Walter’s story. She’s glad her father got to see the revival of a Steel City icon that played such a big role in the family’s narrative.

Frank Straziscar died in 2025 at age 82, and his memorial brought things full circle for loved ones who gathered for the final goodbye.

“On the day of the funeral service, we all decided that afternoon to go to Walter’s to celebrate him,” Trivisonno said. “I think he would have appreciated that.”