HOUGHTON – The Copper Country’s first brewery was in Copper Harbor, a non-commercial operation set up in the 1840s to supply soldiers at Fort Wilkins with their daily ration. Copper Harbor is also home to the area’s most recently opened brewery, the Brickside Brewery, according to historian and Red Jacket Trolley Company owner Wil Shapton.

Coincidentally, that’s just where Jeffrey Charles and Sarah Koldewey, both of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were sitting when they read an advertisement for Tuesday’s Carnegie Museum brewery tour, which explored both the past and present of Copper Country brewing.

“We’re huge craft beer fans. I work in the industry,” said Koldewey, explaining why the tour immediately got penciled in on the summer vacation calendar.

The tour, which coincided with an ongoing historical brewery exhibit at the Houghton museum, began with a talk by Shapton on the historical brewery and a drive-by tour of Houghton’s one-time Brew Street, a block on what’s now Lakeshore Drive between Huron and Dodge streets.

Along the way, he picked up Library Restaurant & Brew Pub brewer Bob Jackson, who explained the basics of the brewing process. The final stop was at the Keweenaw Brewing Company brewery in South Range for a tour of a larger-scale operation and sampling, both of the beer and some raw brewing grains used to make it.

Elise Nelson, director of the Carnegie Museum, said while brewing might be a slightly unconventional topic for a history museum, she sees it as historically significant.

“I think of beer as very traditional,” she said. “In the cultural history of the area, there was a huge amount of alcohol.”

“We’re trying to interest a broader range of people,” she added. “Beer seems big right now.”

Shapton was able to trace the roots of the Bosch Brewing Company, the last of an earlier era of breweries, from 1857 to 1973, when the last barrel of beer was delivered from what’s now the Upper Peninsula Power Company Houghton Service Center on the Houghton Canal Road to Schmidt’s Corner Bar in Stanton Township.

Along the way, he noted, Bosch built the Michigan House Hotel in Calumet, largely as a place to sell its beer. Today, that building is the home of the Michigan House Cafe & Red Jacket Brewing Company.

Mike Shira, of Boston Location, transferred to Michigan Technological University in 1973, just in time to get a taste of Bosch before the brewery closed its doors.

“It was cheap beer, OK cheap beer,” he remembered. These days, he said, he appreciates both multinational megabrews and the wide variety of local craft beers.

“It’s nice to see (local) beer come back,” he said. “It’s nice to see it come full circle and create jobs.”

Another local who remembered Bosch noted that it had varieties, too. Along with the its standard and premium brews, he remembered Bosch marketing “sauna beer.”

In the beginning, said Jackson, most Keweenaw beer was lager, the style most popular in Germany, and with the early German brewers in the area. By the time Prohibition hit, when there were 14 breweries in the area, there were all sorts of ales and lagers available, much like today.

Prohibition ended much of that variety, with only the Haas and Bosch companies surviving the booze ban by temporarily switching to other products.

“They did other things … like sweetened malt extract for cooking,” Jackson said. “But people would take that malt extract for cooking, take it home and make their own beer out of it.”

The Carnegie Museum exhibit Beer UP will be on display through fall. For more information, go to carnegiekeweenaw.org.