Blue Label Beer Advertisement Sioux Falls Brewing and Malting Co.

 

The Sioux City Journal. June 9, 1907.

Blue Label wasn't brewed locally, but it was widely available in Western Iowa in the early 1900's. The Native American warrior gives it a unique look. As the add says, "Order a trial case," from the Sioux Falls Brewing and Malting Co., Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Budweiser Beer Advertisement Jos. E. Rosenfeld Council Bluffs

 

The Evening Nonpareil.April 29, 1913.

I really like this early Budweiser advertisement. It shows the Anheuser-Busch Plant in St. Louis, and references the local distributor - Jos. E. Rosenfeld in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Black Hawk Beer As The Medicine of Choice?

The Daily Times. April 15, 1914.

If you stood on Davenport’s west side a hundred years ago and caught a whiff of warm grain, smoke, and something vaguely cheerful in the air, congratulations—you were downwind of a brewery.

One of the big names was Black Hawk.

Black Hawk Brewery opened sometime around 1865, when America was finishing a civil war and apparently decided the next order of business was beer. Julius Lehrkind, a German-born brewer, was an early owner. That made sense. Germans all over the Midwest were quietly improving local life one lager at a time.

Davenport was the perfect town for brewing. It had river traffic, railroads, factories, and a healthy population of people who’d worked all day and didn’t need to be talked into a drink.

Like many old businesses, Black Hawk never sat still. Names changed. Ownership changed. Buildings were added whenever money appeared.

The Independent Brewing and Malting Co. plant near 1801 West 3rd Street was a serious operation. It had cellars, bottling works, rail connections, wagons moving in and out, and all the machinery necessary to dominate the local market.

They kept selling Black Hawk beer. Customers already liked the label; only a fool would toss it aside.

Early Iowa Breweries

 

An early Iowa brewery, circa 1850-1860

Here’s a snapshot of Iowa’s early brewing days, pulled from One Hundred Years of Brewing (1901).

Davenport got in early. Mathias Frahm opened the first brewery around 1848 or 1849. After that, things picked up fast. The Pacific Brewery went up in 1853. The Severance Ale Brewery followed. The Eagle Brewery showed up in 1858. Around the same time, the Arsenal Brewery opened its doors. For a while, it felt like everybody in town was brewing something.

After the Civil War, it kept growing. Julius Lehrkind built the Blackhawk Brewery, lost it to a fire, then turned around and built another one.

By the 1890s, things shifted. Bigger operations took over. Smaller breweries faded out. The Zoller Brothers built a new Black Hawk Brewery in 1892, and a lot of the earlier names quietly disappeared.

The Union Brewery and Iowa City Beer

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.