In 1929, just months before the Great Depression, Harry and Alta Carle opened a neighborhood grocery store in the north central Ohio city of Bucyrus. Generations later, the store — and the city — has developed a reputation.
“Bucyrus is definitely on the map for bratwurst,” said Carla Koepke. Granddaughter of Harry and Alta, she now operates Carle’s Market with her sister and a number of their kids.
Together, they serve up sausages in a city that calls itself the “Bratwurst Capital of America.”
Bucyrus’s bratwurst history
Bucyrus’s bratwurst roots go way back, after a wave of German immigrants settled there in the 1830s.
Fast forward about a century later, and their food was popular with more than the locals. As tourists from central Ohio traveled north to the Great Lakes via Route 4, some would stop in Bucyrus for a bite to eat.
“The Hoezel brothers had Bob's Sandwich Shop downtown on the main drag and they would grill out bratwurst sandwiches most weekend nights and I think that's where people got used to Bucyrus bratwurst,” Carla said.
Shortly after Bob first started selling brats in 1928, her grandparents started their one-room grocery shop.
“In 1929, nobody [in Bucyrus] drove,” Carla described. “You walked to a little store and had a tab running.”
Eventually, the store started making and selling bratwurst, too. Carla held up a newspaper article with a photo of two women hand cranking sausages into links.
“This is my Aunt Dorothy and my mom Ruth in the back room at the old store where we would make the bratwurst,” she said.
Other families in the area were already on the bratwurst bandwagon. By the 1960s, the small Ohio city had eight bratwurst businesses.
Around that time, festivals in Ohio were taking off.
“Bucyrus was thinking about having a festival,” Carla said. “And they looked around and saw Bratwurst. People kind of know Bucyrus is that place you stop for Bratwurst.”
The Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival is still around today. But only one of the eight original businesses remains: Carle’s.
And they make a lot of sausage.
Making Bucyrus bratwurst
Inside the market’s processing room, Koepke’s daughter, Ella, ground more than a hundred pounds of pork shoulder in a matter of minutes.
Bratwurst, as defined by the USDA, is a German sausage made with pork, plus maybe a little veal or beef, that's seasoned and bound. But Carle’s traditional recipe has a few more ingredients.
“We use cracker meal and eggs in our bratwurst, which is different,” Ella said. “So actually we can't even call it bratwurst. We call it original links. That's why.”
Ella poured a bucketful of cracker meal into the meat, then six pounds of freshly cracked eggs.
She added a secret mix of seasoning, blended everything together and packed the mixture into a stuffer, which turns the globs of pork into quarter pound links of sausage.
“We'll either put them out fresh in the case, just like this, or we'll package them to put in the freezer,” she explained.
Ella makes several hundred pounds of Bucyrus bratwurst like this every day. They fill up the counters of the small grocery store, along with cans of sauerkraut, specialty condiments, and occasional offerings that bring back memories of times past.
“We made pickled heart and tongue the other day and everybody was like, ‘Wow, I haven't had that in years,’” Carla said.
Since she and her sister took over the shop from their mom and Aunt Dorothy, they led the construction of a new USDA-inspected building, and they added a popular dine-in deli to the marketplace.
Now, Ella, her sister and cousin all work at Carle’s market too. As they start planning for the future, Ella’s thinking of expanding the wholesale side of the business. So someday Bucyrus bratwurst could be found in supermarkets across the state.
