Albert Gottschalk is one of Baltimore's great distilling success stories. When he arrived in the city in 1855, he was a 21 year old immigrant from Germany with barely the clothes on his back. By the time he died in 1898 he has been described as "a one-man Baltimore conglomerate." Gottschalk owned a distillery, an alcohol rectifying plant, a wholesale liquor business, a North Charles Street fancy grocery, and a brewery.

An 1864 Baltimore city directory lists Albert Gottschalk, just nine years after arriving in the U.S., already the co-owner of a liquor distributing company with a partner named Spillman. Their establishment was at 46-48 Light St. By 1887, Spillman was no longer in the picture, and the firm now was Gottschalk & Co., still at the same address. By 1890 the firm had undergone a further name change to The Gottschalk Co., as it would be known until its demise. It also had moved down the street to 106-108 Light St. and had opened a second outlet at 21-23 Balderston. In 1894 Gottschalk moved to cut out the middlemen and opened his own operation, calling it the Maryland Distillery. Its address was North, Saratoga and Davis Streets, with the office back at the 108 Light St. address. Albert Gottschalk died in 1898 only four years after founding The Maryland Distillery. His heirs ran the business in alliance with the Fleischmanns of Cincinnati (yeast and liquor) following a marriage between the two families.