Clay County Histories

Beer drinkers in Hawley, late 1800s

Markus Krueger | Program Director  HCSCC

Our historical society has a lot of great old pictures of people boozing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, like this one from the Hawley photography studio of Sylvester Wange. Looking through these photos, I have long noticed something odd. Everyone’s beer is black. 

There certainly are black-colored beers. Porters and Stouts (Guinness, for instance) are styles of beer that are dark or even black in color. But is everybody in Pre-Prohibition Clay County drinking a Porter? Other sources say that can’t be the case. 

Porters and Stouts are ales, made in the British tradition. The color comes from roasting the barley malt extra long, like a dark roast coffee, making a rich brew sometimes described as “chocolatey.” In America, these were the beers of the 1700s. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both fans of Porter. But by the 1870s, when our communities around here were founded, Porters, Stouts and all British-style ales were an endangered species in America. Why? Because America is a nation of immigrants, and those immigrants brought beer. Refreshing, light, crisp new styles of beer that, to recall an old ad campaign, won’t fill you up and never let you down. Americans fell in love with lager beers of Central European immigrants, forsaking our former love of British ale styles. 

At the time this photograph was taken, if you wanted to get a dark Porter or Stout in the Red River Valley, you’d probably have to go to British-owned Manitoba. In the USA we were drinking straw-colored Bohemian Pilsners (think Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc.), amber-colored Vienna Lagers (Sam Adams Boston Lager is the most famous example today), and copper-colored Bavarian Marzens (better-known today as the Oktoberfest style). All the local beer ads, newspaper accounts, and saloon price lists tell me that the beers in these old photos should range in color between pale yellow and orange. So why does it appear that everyone is drinking black beer? 

I asked that question to Clay County Archivist Mark Peihl, who knows quite a bit about old time photography. Mark explained to me that the light sensitive chemicals used in the wet plate photographic process of this era were insensitive to yellow light, which means yellow objects appear black in photographs. To illustrate, he showed me an old photograph of a black streetcar driving through Moorhead. Our streetcars were yellow. 

I ran the same question by Shane Balkowitsch, the world famous artist in Bismarck who works with the wet plate photography process. Full disclosure: I trusted Mark Peihl wholeheartedly, but this was a good excuse to talk with an artist whose work I love. Shane confirmed and elaborated on how this old process translated colors into black-and-white in funny ways. Blues can turn white and, because the chemicals are insensitive to light on the infrared spectrum, reds and yellows can appear black. “I can assure you,” Shane said, “that the drinks in those guys’ hands would look like a Budweiser.”