By Tim King
In the good old days a young man could give his little sister a couple of quarters and send her out to get a pail of beer.
That, at least, is something my mother said she did for her brothers. When I first got ahold of Doug Hoverson’s “Land of Amber Waters: The History of Brewing in Minnesota,” I turned to the section on local breweries. Hoverson has histories of nearly 300 Minnesota small, and large, town breweries.
I wanted to find out what the name of the Perham brewery was that filled the beer pail for my mother. I learned that Peter Schroedor, and various associates, brewed beer in Perham’s Northern Pacific Brewery between 1878 and 1915. I also learned that Schroedor was already bottling beer by 1905. But my mother didn’t get beer from Schroedor. She was born in 1916. She, no doubt, got her brother’s beer at a local tavern.
There were seven breweries on what is now U.S. Highway 10 between Wadena and Moorhead during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By digging into old tax and brewing records Hoverson has unearthed the histories of all of them.
For instance, in the 1880s Fred Eberline brewed the first beer sold by Wadena’s King and Ebner brewery. The Wadena and Perham breweries didn’t close because of Prohibition. Hoverson writes that they closed because of the enforcement of provisions in the Indian treaties.
Among the other small town brewery histories Hoverson includes are breweries in Canby, LeRoy, Madelia, Mantorville, Browerville and Ortonville. Before the age of Hamm’s, Grain Belt and Bud, small-town breweries were indications of prosperity and progressiveness.
Hoverson’s chapter on “Patronizing Home Industry: The Glory Days of the Small Town Brewer,” highlights the economic and cultural importance of the local brewery. The chapter also adds more detail to the histories of the more prosperous breweries.
“The local brewer frequently demonstrated community spirit by building a hall (or sometimes a biergarten) that served as a meeting place for the community,” Hoverson writes. “An early example was built in 1862 in Mantorville.”
Hoverson goes on to quote the Mantorville Express on the glories of the Dodge County Brewery and hall. In addition to the newspaper quote, Hoverson found a drawing of the building in the 1874 Atlas of Minnesota. Any town would have been, and would be today, improved by such a handsome building.
“Land of Amber Waters” takes the reader through home brewing by the early settlers, the heyday of small breweries, the early industrialization of brewing and up to Prohibition. Throughout these chapters the book is beautifully illustrated with historical photographs, attractive labels and even the various styles of bottles that the early bottlers experimented with.
The chapter on the effects of Temperance and Prohibition tells the story of how the larger industrial brewers like Schells, Fitgers and Schmidt’s struggled to survive. If you think non-alcoholic grain beverages are something new, you may be interested in learning about Fitgers’ Pickwick. It was a near beer from the 1930s.
Hoverson doesn’t stop with near beer’s creation. As a lover of truly good beer he would have to have a chapter called “Sky Blue Waters, Bland Yellow Beer.” For those who are too young to remember the Hamm’s bear this chapter is history. For the rest of us it’s nostalgia.
But time marches on. Hoverson has an interest in the low point of brewing and high point of creative advertising for Minnesota beer. But it’s a passing interest. This book is really a celebration of the new awakening of home and micro brewing in Minnesota.
To that end Hoverson, who took a brewery tour on his honeymoon, has an extensive section on how beer is made and what makes a fine beer. His section on the brewing process will help readers appreciate the growing number of local beers that are now available. Perhaps they will even get daring and try making it at home just like great grandma.
“Land of Amber Waters” is published by the University of Minnesota Press and is available in bookstores. It retails for $39.95. It was a 2008 Minnesota Book Award winner.
