Will the Real Jacob Leinenkugel please Raise his Glass......

OK, nobody every convinces anybody of anything on the Internet.  But I've been in a couple of "discussions" in the last six months that have to do with this photo:

Not much to get excited about really, its just two guys in sort of matching caps, work shirts and boots enjoying a beer.  This has been put forward as being a picture of Jacob Leinenkugel and his business partner John Miller.

I am highly skeptical of this identification but as this has appeared in various publications and seemingly is even accepted by the Leinenkugel family it has become "true".  So lets dig in and do a bit of historical detective work.

Without question the brewery was established in Chippewa Falls in 1867.  Leinenkugel bought out Miller in 1884, and while it is in theory possible that they could still be drinking buddies after that date it seems unlikely.

Jacob Leinenkugel was, to put it plainly, a stout fellow.  Here is an unquestioned photo of the man with his family.  Based on the known birthdate of his oldest son this would appear to have been taken in the late 1870's and so contemporary with his partnership with Miller.

I am by no means convinced that the sturdy guy in the first picture is the same fellow shown in the very stern second one.  He looks many years younger and many pounds lighter.  One other photo purporting to be of the Leinenkugel's brewery at an uncertain "late 19th century" date looks like this:

It is not that helpful.  There are several portly men shown.  Usually the owner/brewmaster would be featured in the front row and examining a glass of the goods, so perhaps we have old Jacob sitting on the front step.  He has a mustache in this photo and I'd say looks very little like our guy in the first image.  He's a lot heavier for one thing.

So, could the first picture show Leinenkugel and Miller early in their association?  Say in the late 1860's?  There is a huge problem with that theory.  The beer bottle.

It is made of clear glass.  With the clarity of the shirt showing through this well I can't even claim it was aqua.  And prior to 1900 beer bottles were never made of clear glass.  In fact, in the 1867-1884 time frame we are considering, the majority of beer was sold in kegs and bottles were uncommon.  Most beer bottled in the 1860's and 1870's was put up in squat pottery bottles.  With improved mold making and better transportation methods glass bottles started to be used in large numbers in the 1880's, but most were amber or aqua.  The manufacture of glass involves melting down sand.  This always contains impurities that make a clear color impossible unless you add certain chemicals to it.  This expensive trick has been known since ancient times but would be used for specialty items like perfume bottles and drinking glasses.  Besides, colored bottles kept light away from your beer and helped it remain stable longer.  This got better when Pasteurization and modern refrigeration came along, also in the 1880's time frame except perhaps for a few very large breweries that adopted new technologies earlier.

The shape of the bottle is also a tell.  My best match from a published source would be along the lines of this page from a 1906 catalog:

They offered these in green, amber or "flint" which meant clear.  Note the fairly straight shoulders on the specimen in lower right.  The top was offered in either the delicate "blob" shown, which nested a porcelain stopper, or a crown top which is the kind you've all taken off with a bottle opener.  The photo could be of either.  When you ordered these you could spend a bit extra and have your name embossed on the merch but this was optional.  Here is one of the earlier Leinenkugel bottles to have the company name embossed.  Definitely post 1900.  This one is amber but it also comes in aqua.  Not clear glass even by this circa 1910 date.

So having gone on at considerable length I will wrap up by saying the photo purporting to be Leinenkugel and Miller does not strike me as plausible.  The partnership was in an era when a bottle like that was 20 years in the future.  And comparing it to both the known photo of Jacob Leinenkugel and the probable one.....I can't make the first one work.  Furthermore, brewers were generally businesspeople of some prominence in their communities.  Both the guys in photo number one are wearing caps and plaid shirts typical of working men.  The boots they both have on suggest lumberjack to me but I have no particular way to explain this theory.

So who were they?  The quality of this photo is much better than most of what you see pre 1900, and frankly looks like a posed studio view.  In the era before widespread adoption of "Kodaks" you could not snap a photo just anywhere.  A couple of lumberjacks circa 1905 down from the woods for a good time might have stopped in at a studio.  And how did the picture get labeled as being a couple of local beer magnates from say, 1870?  Not a clue, but once a thing like that gets accepted as True it is very hard to undo this.

My opinions on what beer bottles looked like in that era is informed by a hobby of my younger days.  My brother and I used to dig for old bottles.  Between broken and intact ones I've seen thousands dating from 1850 to last week!  Trust me on this, the bottle shown in photo number one does not fit the dates of the Leinenkugel Miller partnership.  In fact with old Jacob dying in 1899 it probably was not a type he ever saw in this life.  We can however hope that beer is to be had in abundance in the next one.

Post script.  Although the catalog bottle I show above is a fair fit (super nerd level fact it may show a Baltimore loop stopper circa 1900) if you want a better one here's a 1908 bottle from the Fred Miller Brewing company of Milwaukee.  Miller is a very common German name so I don't think there is any extra help here, but 1908 for this style bottle is about right.  And even this one is aqua not clear, but just maybe you could see through it that well when it was new....