Lost a bit in the ubiquity of social media in today’s world, Routson was the first social media influencer in the beer space. She was an influencer long before that word attracted both cachet and ridicule. Armed with a background and talent for marketing, Routson built her own brand, The Beer Wench, into a powerful and well-placed voice in an industry long dominated by men. She blogged, posted on social media, and wrote a book called The Beer Wench’s Guide to Beer: An Unpretentious Guide to Craft Beer. In addition to gaining followers, the social media maven and author also promoted craft beer as a self-described “evangelist” at every opportunity. And she saw a chance to do just that with a day dedicated to craft beer’s most popular beer style, IPA. But, in this case, promoting beer starts with a little bit of theft.

“I actually stole it from the wine industry,” Routson notes with a laugh about her idea for IPA Day. “The wine industry was inspired by the food industry and there would be like some random days, like Donut Day and Taco Day or Pizza Day, and it became kind of a trendy thing to like have one day to celebrate something.”

Routson had spent time living in both Napa and Sonoma and was connected to the California wine industry. “I do credit a lot of my social media skills from the wine industry because the wine industry acknowledged social media marketing way before the beer industry did,” she recalls. “And they actually were the very first in the alcohol realm to start hiring people to work at their companies as social media marketers, they were the very first alcohol segment to create a position for social media. So I kind of watched what my friends in the wine world were doing and I tried to mimic it in the beer realm.”

The idea was based on Cabernet Day, which had been started by Rick Bakas at Napa Valley winemaker St. Supéry. The day was designed as a way to get people around the globe to focus on Cabernet and hopefully drink more of it. “A lot of it had to do with him promoting his Cabs, you know, but in a way it was to unite the world to celebrate one style of wine and all just drink and tweet about it,” says Routson.

It was 2011 and social media was simpler. “It was before Instagram. Twitter was the platform and you started a hashtag, so everyone can follow the same conversation and you can see everybody post about Cabernet. And I thought that was really cool. And so I got together with a few other people via email and I was like, “we have to do something like this. This blew up and beer is so much cooler and Cabernet it’s big, it’s bold, whatever, you know, but I bet you that we can get a lot more people than they did to drink beer. But we’ve got to pick something that’s more accessible.”

Routson settled on the obvious choice, the trendiest style, the leading category at the Great American Beer Festival, and one that everyone knew: IPA. “So we had all these factors of like, ‘how can we make this a big worldwide party?’ It’s gotta be an accessible style. A lot of breweries have to be able to have one because we didn’t want it to be like something small like sours, because what, then you’d have 10 breweries participating. And people in rural areas or in some states that don’t have a huge amount of craft beer available, they’re not going to find a sour.”

Routson and her friends, including Ryan Ross of Karl Strauss Brewing, then focused on how to maximize the buzz for the first IPA Day. They decided to reach out to some of the biggest breweries in the country to help coordinate a timed promotion of the day. “We we’re all gonna post and make the announcement about IPA Day together on Twitter at like 10:00 AM on a Thursday, we’re going to announce the date of it. And then everyone’s going to see this blow up, if you had like 50 breweries that you’re following or, you know, a bunch of it was beer bloggers, breweries. I forget how many people were involved total, but then, the announcement itself was coordinated and everyone scheduled their tweets. And we had such a huge amount of people doing it at the same time. And it was like the larger breweries, like Founders and Dogfish Head and New Belgium. And if everyone saw everyone post at the same time, they knew something was up.”

The Brewers Association joined in and created a link that was ready to go live with the timed tweets so people could read about the day and the significance of IPA.

Routson coordinated with bars and breweries around the country so they could set up events to correspond to IPA Day. In her outreach, Routson called on “all craft beer evangelists, brewers, bloggers, and suds-savvy citizens!” She told them that on Thursday August 4, 2011, they were invited to “participate in the largest international craft beer celebration and virtual conversation the world has ever seen.” She described International #IPADay as “a grassroots movement to unite the voices of craft beer enthusiasts, bloggers, and brewers worldwide through social media.” She predicted that “craft beer drinkers across the social sphere and across the globe will raise pints in a collective toast to one of craft beer’s most iconic styles: the India Pale Ale. This celebrated style represents the pinnacle of brewing innovation with its broad spectrum of diverse brands, subcategories, and regional flavor variations – making it the perfect style to galvanize craft beer’s social voice.”

Routson made clear that #IPAday was not some big brewery invention. “#IPADay is not the brainchild of a corporate marketing machine, nor is it meant to serve any particular beer brand,” she wrote in 2011. “#IPADay is opportunity for breweries, bloggers, businesses and consumers to connect and share their love of craft beer. Getting involved is easy; the only requirements are an appreciation for great beer and the will to spread the word. Anyone can participate by enjoying IPA with friends, making some noise online with the #IPADay hashtag, and showing the world that craft beer is more than a trend!”

The response was a bit surprising. “It ended up being huge,” she recalls. “It was really exciting to see something like that happen because the second the clock changed to midnight, boom the IPA Day hashtag went crazy and people were drinking IPAs all day long. We had posts from all over the world. We had posts from so many different countries and I think Brazil was the number two country besides the United States when it came to posting about it. So it was really cool to be a part of a global movement of everybody supporting and talking about craft beer. Because for the most part, the bigger breweries didn’t make IPAs. So we were talking about your local IPA and it was just so much fun. It was like one of the coolest things, especially that first time, it was just so cool to watch all day long and to see all of the bars, having IPA tap takeovers and just to see the buzz that it created and all the people that became interested in it because they just, all of a sudden saw the Internet talking about this beer. And if you had never heard of an IPA, chances are that day you learned what one was.”

In the relatively early days of Twitter, #IPAday made its way into the app’s Trending Topics section, something never seen before for craft beer. “That was a huge moment for us. Because that’s when you know that you’re exploding. People are probably clicking on that hashtag like, “what is an e-Pah? Like an iPad?” We got eyeballs on the beer industry that had never been on it before. So that was cool.”

As with all successful social media campaigns, IPA Day quickly grew beyond Routson and Ross and took on a life of its own. The hashtag, now #IPAday to avoid iPad confusion, will be used hundreds if not thousands of times on the first Thursday in August by breweries and beer fans from around the world.

The post The True Story Behind IPA Day first appeared on All About Beer.

It was toward the end of September 2006, and a 64-year-old Englishman was making his way through the Denver airport. He was rotund, with an ample belly and shaggy grayish hair spilling in curls from every part of his scalp save the balding front. He sported a similarly grayish beard that seemed in need of a trim, and his eyebrows were arched, as if signaling perpetual surprise at his surroundings.

The man was catching a flight back home to London. But he never made it.

He instead found himself in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He was having what turned out to be a mild heart attack and drifting from consciousness.

That did not stop the paramedics from asking for his autograph.

And that did not surprise Michael Jackson, the Englishman just then skirting death, in the least. Jackson had by that point been the foremost beer critic on the planet for nearly 30 years. In areas dense with ale and lager aficionados, including Denver, which had just hosted the 25th annual Great American Beer Festival that September, he was famous—or famous enough that, when he introduced himself as “Michael Jackson,” people didn’t laugh. They knew he wasn’t the pop star, but a rock star unto himself.

He made it back before the end of 2006 to his home in London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, where he got back to work in an attached office that, improbably enough, had once housed a brewery.

Work for Jackson often meant travel. The next year, Jackson visited Turkey for a brewery’s unveiling of a wheat beer; to Italy, for the debut of a book of his writing tied to the Slow Food phenomenon; and to Poland (twice), again for the promotion of a collection of his translated writings. He also started planning a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia.

All the while, he continued to crank out commentary for various publications, including All About Beer Magazine, for which he had written regularly since 1984.

It was quite the year, all the more remarkable because of what we know now: In September 2006, Michael Jackson had less than a year to live.

His passing the following August—from another heart attack—capped an improbable rise that seems just as unlikely now, 10 years after his death, as when Jackson commenced it four decades ago.

To fuel that rise, Jackson mined two sources: one a stroke of luck, the other a stroke of genius.

Jackson was born and raised in northern England’s Leeds area, one of three children of Jack and Margaret Jackson (though his twin brother died shortly after birth). Jack Jackson was the son of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants who had intended to go to America but made it only as far as the U.K.

It was Jack who anglicized the family name of Jakowitz to Jackson, hence etymologically connecting his son to the future King of Pop.

The Jacksons lived comfortably, though not lavishly, amid the U.K.’s postwar austerity, Jack earning enough as a truck driver to purchase a house after a stint in the English equivalent of public housing. It was a warm, inviting family for Michael and his sister, Heather, to grow up in—one of Jackson’s fondest memories was of his father waking him to listen to boxing matches together on the wireless—and included visits to their immigrant grandparents’ place as well as bountiful meals of rich food in the Eastern European and Jewish traditions.

Michael would leave school, and much of this home life, at 16 to become a reporter with a local newspaper in the Leeds area. It was here he first wrote for money about beer.

The pitch to his editor was simple, as Jackson recalled decades later: a series called “This Is Your Pub,” wherein the underage Jackson would visit that staple of English life and report on its characters and offerings.

“So you’re asking me to finance you on a lawbreaking escapade?” his editor asked.

“Yes,” Jackson replied, not missing a beat.

“I like your style,” the editor said. “Those are the kinds of reporters we want.”

“This Is Your Pub” would represent a kind of pre-1970s peak for Jackson and beer writing. He would spend the next decade, into his 20s, working various editorial jobs in British media, including as a reporter at the defunct Daily Herald newspaper. He also worked as a television producer and as an editor at Campaign, a weekly covering marketing and advertising.

As for beer, there was plenty. “Newspaper work at that time was a heady mix of hard graft and hard drinking,” a Guardian obituary of Jackson explained, “and Jackson’s devotion to good beer stemmed from that period.” As did his writing style: “short sentences shorn of adornment”—a kind of Hemingway meets your average travel writer.

There was also an unplanned bus trip into Belgium in the late 1960s, while on assignment in the neighboring Netherlands. “I knew nothing of Belgium,” Jackson would recall in a 2007 interview with importer Daniel Shelton. “One weekend in Belgium changed my life.”

The man and his moment—or pint, as it were—would not meet, however, until 1976, when another writer failed to produce a manuscript for a book on English pubs. Jackson stepped in and produced the reportage and the copy for The English Pub, a book filled with beautiful photographs detailing and depicting just what the title stated.

Jackson was already well at work on his next project when The English Pub came out. He had been collecting thoughts and notes on beer ever since that Belgian epiphany and now undertook to craft them into a landmark book on the drink. In part, a similarly landmark book on wine—Hugh Johnson’s The World Atlas of Wine in 1971—inspired Jackson.

Here was a thorough rundown of the world’s wine regions and styles, coming at a particularly fortunate time: The commercial wine industry was expanding rapidly beyond longtime hegemon France, with growth particularly strong in the U.S., where drier, finer styles such as merlot and chardonnay had just begun to outsell fortified, sweeter plonk.

There was no such book in the beer world, and that world was contracting rather than expanding. Fewer and fewer breweries were producing more and more of the world’s beer. In the U.S., the top five breweries produced more than half the beer on offer—and their share was increasing.

Still, Jackson sniffed an opportunity. He had partnered with two others on an illustrated book venture called Quarto (there were originally four partners) to produce The English Pub, and, in 1977, that London outfit published The World Guide to Beer.

It is difficult to overstate the book’s impact. Charles Finkel, a Seattle wine merchant who would in 1978 begin adding European beer imports to his repertoire, described his discovery of World Guide to the writer Stan Hieronymus as “like a heathen discovering the Bible. It answered all those questions that I had about top and bottom fermentation, about hops, about years, about the nature of beer and the history of beer, and traditions of beer and beer culture.”

While Jackson saw little to no profit from World Guide’s original run—Quarto continued without him and is still a nonfiction publisher—its success among industry people and aficionados opened doors. By the mid-1980s, he was writing regularly about beer for the Washington Post, Playboy and Britain’s Guardian as well as trade publications such as All About Beer Magazine and Zymurgy.

By the end of that decade, Jackson was drawing his income from writing about beer (and whiskey, another topic dear to his palate). And his biggest success was yet to come: A six-episode television series called The Beer Hunter that dropped in the early 1990s in North America and Europe. In the U.S., it aired on the Discovery Channel, which then reached about 38 million households.

The working-class high-school dropout from Leeds had not only all but invented the role of beer critic, he had also brought beer to potentially tens of millions of eyeballs—all at a time when it looked like certain types of beer, and certainly many breweries, were simply disappearing forever.

How did he do it, exactly?

“If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.” That was Jackson toward the start of World Guide.

With a generation’s hindsight, it’s an unremarkable statement. But in 1977, it was positively revolutionary. Jackson was the first critic to write for a consumer audience about beer styles in much the same way that wine critics had long written of wine styles. Before Jackson, beers were fitted into “divisions,” “species,” “types,” “varieties” and “classes,” but never styles.

That etymological flourish by itself would have made his contribution to the beery canon memorable. But he spent the next three decades refining and expanding it, putting on quite an intellectual performance for a subject not used to the scrutiny.

The painter Bruegel might come up in a discussion of lambic, or topography in an examination of the origin of lager, or immigration in the rise of beer in the U.S. Throughout, too, Jackson dove into the technical nitty-gritty of Plato, IBU, ABV, etc., as well as the back stories of breweries and brewers, hop farmers and beer merchants.

Others had touched similar shores. James D. Robertson, an engineer who discovered the possibilities of beer while working in West Germany, began writing guides in the late 1970s, and his 1982 Connoisseur’s Guide to Beer enjoyed updated editions. Fred Eckhardt, whose beer epiphany came while serving as a Marine in East Asia in the 1950s, wrote extensively on the drink beginning as early as 1968, with a particular emphasis on West Coast breweries.

None did it with such depth as Jackson, though, nor did they lead with that idea about styles.

And that was the other thing about Jackson: timing. During a presser for his World Guide to Whisky, a 1987 book almost as influential for that beverage as its counterpart was for beer, a Scottish journalist asked where an Englishman got the nerve to write so authoritatively about Scotland’s de facto national drink. Another Scottish reporter piped up immediately: “Because none of us did, dummy!”

Jackson hit beer style hard and often. For 30 sustained years, his word on the subject was often the last word—and an enduring one. Jackson didn’t live to taste an imperial session IPA, for instance, but it’s impossible to discuss such iterations without at least, consciously or unconsciously, referencing his writing on IPAs in general.

The critic’s impeccable timing also benefited from events in the American marketplace entirely beyond his control: a 1976 excise tax cut in the U.S. that fostered the rise of smaller breweries, legalization of homebrewing at the federal level the following year, the formation of the American Homebrewers Association and the precursor to the Brewers Association the year after that, and just the general first stirrings of what came to be called craft beer in the U.S. and Canada.

In Europe, meanwhile, small brewers looked with wistful eyes toward anyone and anything that might reverse beer’s increasing homogenization and invigorate some of the old ways.

It didn’t hurt that once he had the timing down, Jackson never let go of the beat. Martyn Cornell, a British beer critic, once recalled Jackson dropping in on a group of fellow critics at a Brussels pub. Fresh in from judging a beer festival in Finland, he set about “taking extensive notes on every beer, photographing those bottles he hadn’t already got pictures of, while the rest of us were happy just to slurp and trough.”

What finally curbed this work ethic came to light one winter evening in the late 1990s. Jackson and his longtime partner, Paddy Gunningham, were walking through London. It was cold, and they held hands in one of the pockets of Jackson’s Crombie coat, which he had inherited from Gunningham’s father.

Gunningham felt Jackson’s hand shake, and not from the chill. She implored him to visit a doctor. A Parkinson’s diagnosis followed, and Jackson’s health soon started visibly deteriorating.

In late 2006, after the Denver heart attack, he disclosed his Parkinson’s publicly, including in what turned out to be his last column for All About Beer, published in November 2007. He wrote of the episode in Denver and plans for the future. Those plans included a memoir on the battle with Parkinson’s called I Am Not Drunk—“many friends had been concerned that my profession had taken its most obvious toll.”

Those who knew Jackson well knew he wouldn’t slow down, that the memoir would happen if he was given the chance.

He wasn’t. On Aug. 30, 2007, he collapsed in his Hammersmith office.

“My previous travels had taken me from Poland to Patagonia,” Jackson wrote in that final column. “Now I had pursued a journey almost to the end of my life. As occasionally happens, I had missed the plane I had intended to take.”

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

The post Remembering the Bard of Beer: Why There Will Never Be Another Michael Jackson first appeared on All About Beer.

The commercial commenced with scenes of one of its breweries at work, including an anonymous pair of hands crinkling hops. The words “Budweiser Proudly a Macro Beer” popped onto the screen over the scenes, which also went on to include the famed Clydesdale horses and friends enjoying the brewery’s finished product.

Then came the Anheuser-Busch InBev commercial’s unmistakable angle: “It’s Not Brewed to Be Fussed Over.”

The ad superimposed those last two words over an earnest-looking man with a handlebar mustache and glasses dipping his nose over the rim of a goblet of dark beer.

In case any viewers missed the point, another shot of tweedy men analyzing their obvious craft beers in what looked like a trendy urban bar followed further shots of casual enjoyment of an ice-cold Bud, as did the words, “It’s Brewed for Drinking, Not for Dissecting.” On and on it went for a full minute: “Let Them Sip Their Pumpkin Peach Ale: We’ll Be Brewing Us Some Golden Suds.”

The commercial aired during what turned out to be the single-most-watched television show in American history to that point: Super Bowl XLIX between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks on Feb. 1, 2015. More than 114 million people tuned in for the game, and presumably many of that number saw the commercial, too—or at least saw it later, if tens of thousands of YouTube replays are any evidence.

It was clearly designed to mock, as one AB InBev executive put it, “the overwrought pretentiousness that exists in some small corners of the beer landscape that is around beer snobbery.” It worked.

“The whole ad was uncalled for,” Larry Bell of Bell’s told The Chicago Tribune. His brewery went so far as to release 48 bottles of what it called Pumpkin Peach Ale, made with peach puree and a pumpkin Bell grew on the roof of his Chicago home. “It’s a fuck you to Anheuser-Busch because they sent us a fuck you,” the owner of the Midwest’s oldest craft brewery told the Tribune.

Even fellow Big Beer titan MillerCoors let AB InBev have it, lecturing its archrival in a tweet: “We believe each and every style of beer is worth fussing over.”

Also, it seemed to some that AB InBev had singled out for lampoonery millennials, that generation of approximately 75 million Americans born after 1980 and now coming into their financial own. “This is a somewhat odd approach to winning over young drinkers, which, presumably, is AB-InBev’s goal,” one writer noted.

Many industry observers, too, pounced on the fact that one of the several craft breweries that AB InBev had purchased recently, Seattle’s Elysian Brewing, had produced at least two pumpkin-infused beers.

“I find it kind of incredible that ABI would be so tone-deaf as to pretty directly (even if unwittingly) call out one of the breweries they have recently acquired, even as the brewery is dealing with the anger of the beer community in reaction to the sale,” Dick Cantwell, a founder of Elysian who opposed the craft brewery’s sale, wrote amid the fallout. “It’s made a difficult situation even more painful.”

Finally, the whole thing smacked of desperation. Here was the world’s largest brewery spending $9 million—the cost of a 60-second Super Bowl commercial—to tell the world that it did not feel threatened by craft beer.

Yet Anheuser-Busch InBev likely got the last laugh. Reaching more than one-third of the American populace all at once, the Super Bowl ad was the single, biggest burst of press American craft beer had yet gotten. It was just that, to the tens of millions who did not follow the industry that closely, it was bad press, a sign of little love lost between craft beer and its longtime Moriarty.

Infighting Ensues

Not that craft beer in the 2010s needed any help with unfavorable publicity. There were the wider interrelated controversies regarding the definition of craft beer (and brewing) and whether some companies still fit that definition.

And then there were multiple smaller controversies that seemed big to those involved and that, taken together, fostered a kind of tinny static not endured in two decades. D.G. Yuengling & Son’s freshly minted craft status via a Brewers Association definition change in 2014, and the Pennsylvania brewery’s continued distribution expansion, rankled smaller competitors.

Yuengling’s rollout—it spilled into 6,000 Massachusetts bars, restaurants and stores pretty much all at once in late 2014, for instance—meant other brands got bumped. In perhaps the most ironic instance, a Yuengling tap replaced one for a beer called Slumbrew Porter Square Porter, from the Somerville Brewing Co. in the Boston suburb—at a bar in Somerville’s Porter Square.

Also in Massachusetts in late 2014, Dann Paquette, the then-owner of a Boston-area craft brewing company, accused two bars over Twitter of essentially accepting bribes in exchange for carrying beers from certain breweries.

The accusations of pay-to-play—or, more accurately perhaps, pay-to-pour—rent the normally collegial New England craft beer scene and led to a state investigation. That investigation, in turn, led to an approximately $2.5 million fine against the largest craft beer distributor in Massachusetts.

On the other side of the continent and a couple of months later, Tony Magee’s Lagunitas Brewing Co. sued Ken Grossman’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. over supposed copyright infringement. At issue was a new Sierra Nevada release called Hop Hunter IPA, the packaging for which Lagunitas contended in federal court looked strikingly similar to the packaging for its own flagship IPA, which had done so much to not only establish Magee’s brewery but also the very IPA style in the United States.

After a storm of criticism, Magee announced a day after his company had filed it that he was dropping the lawsuit. “I went home feeling like I had been beaten up, and all I did was stare at the screen,” Magee told a San Francisco publication.

The Lagunitas–Sierra Nevada dust-up highlighted similar disputes in an American craft beer movement with more beer names, and explanations for them, than ever. Simply put, the industry appeared to be running out of words and images to describe what it was producing. This led to infighting over the use of certain puns related to common terms such as “hops” and to the names of beers themselves.

One of the more noteworthy instances again involved Lagunitas. Atlanta’s SweetWater Brewing Co., whose flagship was an extra pale ale called “420”—a common code phrase for smoking marijuana—sent a cease-and-desist letter to Magee’s outfit, which had for years used “420” in its beer descriptions. Lagunitas dropped the term—SweetWater owned the commercial trademark for 420.

Craft brewers found grounds for conflict even on an issue that seemed tailored for unity: further excise tax breaks from the federal government. The original per-barrel excise tax cut in 1976 had helped spur craft beer’s tremendous growth. Its preservation in 1991 was instrumental in sustaining that growth.

In 2013, the Brewers Association and its congressional allies started pushing another tax cut. It would halve the amount, to $3.50, that breweries paid on their first 60,000 barrels annually and reduce by $2 a barrel the tax on all subsequent barrels up to 2 million. Each barrel above 2 million would be taxed at the regular rate of $18. And only breweries producing less than 6 million barrels annually would qualify for the tax breaks.

This last facet of the proposal is what irked some craft brewers (and observers outside the industry). It was one thing to support a cut for the industry’s legion of smaller breweries—most operations easily fell below that annual 60,000-barrel cutoff—but it was another to help breweries such as the Boston Beer Co., Yuengling and Sierra Nevada that produced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of barrels a year and whose principal owners were billionaires on paper.

That these already-flush companies would reap most of the benefits of the proposed tax break thoroughly annoyed some of their colleagues. Besides, as many inside and outside the industry noted, craft beer was growing comfortably in the new decade. Did it really need a tax cut to spur growth?

In the end, and due in part to significant pressure from Big Beer’s lobbying for its own tax reduction, the Brewers Association in mid-2015 swung behind revised legislation that reserved most of the benefits for breweries making no more than 2 million barrels annually, rather than 6 million.

This sparring between larger and smaller operations also manifested itself in marketshare. In October 2016, Stone Brewing, one of the biggest craft breweries, announced it was laying off about 5 percent of its approximately 1,100 employees. The company explained in a statement that competition from Big Beer’s newly acquired craft breweries and “the further proliferation of small, hyperlocal breweries” forced its hand in the layoffs.

That latter reason—the launch of so many smaller breweries—underlined a bitterly ironic trend in the craft beer movement circa 2016. Localness had been one of the defining features of the movement early on—beer as a local product from a local company for largely local consumers, a return to the old days of American brewing in general, before the post–World War II rise of the Big Beer conglomerates.

Now, though, these thousands of smaller breweries with their local fan bases were eating into the bottom lines of bigger craft beer pioneers who had leaned in part on localness to grow during their own early days.

What’s more, these upstarts were claiming reputation, too, not just sales. Few people alive had done more to popularize American craft beer than Boston Beer’s Jim Koch. Yet, a January 2015 Boston Magazine cover story, shared widely on social media, explained that “local beer geeks—the industry’s connoisseurs—think [Koch has] lost his edge.”

Their main rationale? Like with other larger craft breweries, the beer was just … too familiar. The co-owner of a Boston beer bar pronounced the entire Sam Adams line “mediocre,” in fact, mostly because he saw it as so “middle-of-the-road” compared with what else was now out there.

Finally, some familiar arguments found their ways back into the American craft beer movememagnt. Occasionally, owners of physical breweries would publicly criticize contract brewers or those, such as Boston Beer, that initially built themselves up through contract brewing before launching their own facilities.

And numerous brewers mounted vigorous assaults against that stylistic hegemon, the India pale ale and its iterations, which remained the top-selling craft beer style in the United States, a status that AB InBev’s takeover of IPA producers such as Goose Island only enhanced. Hence the rise of esoteric styles such as gose and the session beer trend.

A Movement in Flux

The disputes, the Big Beer and private equity takeovers, the definitional challenges, the reactions and counterreactions to major trends—it all fomented a general sense of an American craft beer movement in flux, as did a spate of transitions in the upper ranks of breweries and organizations beginning in 2014.

Daniel Bradford sold All About Beer Magazine and its World Beer Festivals to Chris Rice, a business-side executive at the magazine who became its president and publisher. Charlie Papazian stepped down as president of the Brewers Association he had been so instrumental in building up, with Bob Pease, its chief operating officer, succeeding him.

New Belgium Brewing Co.’s Kim Jordan stepped down as CEO to become executive chair of the brewery’s board of directors. Greg Koch made a similar move at Stone, transitioning from his day-to-day role to fill a newly minted executive chairman position. Stone’s longtime brewmaster, Mitch Steele, also left the company to found his own concern. Steve Dresler, Sierra Nevada’s brewmaster since the early 1980s, also announced his exit due to retirement in 2017.

Rich Doyle, a founder of the Mass. Bay Brewing Co. (better known as Harpoon) and its chief executive for years, stepped down as part of a stake sale to the company’s employees. Doyle in early 2015 launched a private equity fund to invest in craft brewers wishing to avoid takeovers by entities not as steeped in the business as he. The fund’s first acquisition was Louisiana’s Abita Brewing Co., now the South’s oldest craft brewery.

As much as change seemed the only constant, though, there was a fair sense of déjà vu in the controversies and the complaints, and in the change itself.

The American craft beer movement since Fritz Maytag’s rescue of Anchor Brewing in 1965 had seen many exits, a lot of them abrupt, as well as shakeouts. It had felt the financial hammer of a disgruntled Big Beer sector and the avaricious indifference of financial markets. The tax debate was a rerun of a rerun. Prodigious growth was nothing new, nor were struggles with distribution, government red tape or defining just what the whole thing was supposed to be.

And, while many analysts and breweries sought to credit or blame craft beer’s explosive growth for the trends and challenges in the second decade of the 21st century, there might have been much simpler explanations.

The global market for mergers and acquisitions was hotter than at any time in modern business history, for one thing. Craft beer was but one of many industries that the bullish atmosphere and access to cheap financing affected. This suggested that the pace of Big Beer and private equity acquisitions might ebb. What then?

The same question could be asked of the transitions underway at breweries, a trend less to do with the industry’s growth than with simple actuarial tables—people aged, moved on. Jim Koch, when asked in late 2014 about his strategy for continuing to run the Boston Beer Co., the still-trim 65-year-old replied, “To not die.”

The Future

Whatever the reasons, the repeats and the changes were being enacted—and re-enacted—on a much grander scale than ever before. It was a scale that ensured that more people than at any previous time were paying attention and that, finally, the nation’s palate might tip decisively away from watery bastardizations of pilsners to the kaleidoscope of styles American craft beer did so much to promote.

In a September 2015 Tumblr post about his company’s 50-50 partnership with Heineken, Lagunitas’ Tony Magee wrote: “Beer is an old biz in the U.S. and it used to be very orderly. Craft disrupted that and now the old order wants to find a way back to the past. It won’t work, but it’s going to try.”

Magee was right. Craft beer had upended decades-old ways of doing things in the industry and marketplace, and, in doing that, helped mightily to chart a mesmerizing new direction in food and drink.

What came next was anyone’s guess. The American craft beer movement had long ago pushed into uncharted territory and was now farther from the shore than ever, the end nowhere in sight, the start now slightly fuzzy, and only one thing certain. As Magee headlined his explanation of his own seismic shift, “The future will not be like the past.”

Indeed. On May 4, 2017, not even two years after that Tumblr post, Magee’s Lagunitas Brewing announced it was selling its remaining 50 percent stake to Heineken. As part of the deal, Lagunitas will become the Dutch brewing giant’s global craft brand and Magee its global craft director. Both moves would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.

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Barrel-aging may be all the rage at the moment, but giving beer time to mature is nothing new. And it wasn’t done by halves. While a modern lager might spend a few weeks aging and a barrel-aged beer sits a couple of years in wood, in the past, beers could mature for decades.

Stock Ale and Mild Ale

First a little explanation of old brewing terminology is in order. In the 18th and 19th centuries, ale was conditioned in two ways. It could be sold either “mild”—that is, young—usually no more than a week or two after being racked into barrels, or “stock,” aged for months or even years before sale.

Aging wasn’t limited to commercial breweries. Until the middle of the 19th century, much of the beer in the U.K. was produced by “domestic” brewers: that is, brewed in a residence for the use of the family, servants and staff. Unburdened by commercial considerations, the household brewer could afford to let beer mature for what appears today a ridiculous length of time.

A brewer giving evidence before a Parliamentary committee in 1899 identified four classes of commercially brewed beer (see table).

Table: Classes of Commercially Brewed Beer in 1899

[table id=40 /]

The witness, though, acknowledged that enthusiasm for stock ales was waning.

“The taste for fresh ales as against stock ales set in some 20 years or more ago,” the brewer said, according to minutes of evidence taken before the committee, “and it has been steadily progressive without any tendency to reversion; and even within the past few years I have known brewers who previously brewed their pale ales on stock principles abandon stock beer brewing, and have found that the ales brewed on running ale lines have given greater satisfaction.”

A few long-aged beers did struggle on into the 20th century, maintaining an ancient tradition. Over the centuries many types of long-aged beer were produced in Britain, both privately and commercially. Here are a few examples.

March Beer/October Beer

Before 1850, when all country households of any importance still brewed their own beer, the local gentry were extremely proud of their special October beer. Throughout the year, household brewers made mild ales, drunk fresh, for day-to-day use. But once or twice a year, they made something stronger, a beer reserved for special occasions and honored guests.

These strong beers were mostly made when the ambient temperature was best for brewing: either March or October. Hence the names March beer and October beer. Many preferred October on account of the several months of cold weather that followed.

The theory behind brewing in October went like this: At the time of brewing, the temperature would be perfect for the initial fermentation. As the weather became colder, the fermentation would slow and eventually stop. When the warmer spring weather arrived, it woke up the yeast and a second fermentation began to complete the job. But the beer still wasn’t ready to be drunk. It was left until at least September before being tapped. A longer wait was recommended for those who could keep their patience.

Without the monetary constraints of commercial brewers, domestic brewers could afford to leave their beer to mature for years. Some wouldn’t touch their October beer at less than three years old. Others boasted of beer kept five or even 10 years, so strong that it could only safely be consumed by the wine glass.

Stock Pale Ale

Today’s drinkers want their IPA as fresh as possible, preferably grabbed directly from the bottling or kegging line and consumed on the spot. Victorian Brits had different expectations. The discerning IPA drinker wanted a properly matured beer, something like Bass.

Bass’ method of maturing pale ale sounds utterly, utterly crazy, but confirmed by several independent sources. It received no careful curation in a cool cellar. After being racked into casks, it was piled up in the brewery yard, open to the elements, with only a little wetted straw in the warmest weather as protection. After a year of this brutal treatment, it was deemed ready to be shipped to India, toughened enough during its time in the yard to survive the long trip and helped by Brettanomyces, which stripped everything fermentable that an infection might feed on.

When East India Company officials and army officers got their hands on a bottle of Bass, the beer inside was 18 months old. Drinkers back in Britain had to make do with a version six months younger.

Russian Stout

Originally brewed for Catherine the Great’s court, Russian stout was always given time to mature properly. During the 19th century, aging a strong stout for a year or two wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary. Even in the 1930s, the Barclay Perkins advertisements still boasted a minimum of two years’ aging in wooden vats, at a time when such long aging had become a real rarity.

Russian stout’s secondary conditioning with Brettanomyces couldn’t be rushed. The wild yeast slowly chewed its way through the less-fermentable sugars, dropping the racking gravity of 1.034 to a final gravity of 1.024 and, in the process, boosting the ABV from 9% to 10.5%.

Aging didn’t end with bottling. With live Brettanomyces still present, Russian stout had excellent protection against oxidation, not just surviving, but improving over decades. I drank a bottle that was over 25 years old and still in excellent shape.

Majority Ale

The heir coming of age was an opportunity for a landowner to show off by entertaining hundreds, or even thousands, of guests. Oxen and sheep would be slaughtered and roasted for the poor, while the higher orders would feast magnificently in the main house.

Beer was central to the celebrations. But not just any beer. At the heir’s birth, a special strong brew was made in the country house’s brew house, using large quantities of the very best ingredients. It was then laid down in a cellar and forgotten, to be drunk when the heir turned 21. Now there’s patience.

Guests appreciated the time and effort spent brewing this very special beer.

“… the poor of the neighbourhood, upwards of 4,000 in number, were liberally entertained with old English fare, under an extensive and splendid marquee in the park,” according to an 1839 edition of the Staffordshire Advertiser. “There was an abundant supply of ‘nut brown ale’— some famous stuff, which many of the partakers declared was far preferable to champagne.”

Majority ale was usually brewed domestically. Surprisingly, though, the tradition was practiced at one large Edinburgh brewer, William Younger, even continuing into the 20th century. In this case it wasn’t just a privilege reserved for the Younger family heir, but rather for all members of the family. At every birth a miniature brew of majority ale was produced in the brewery and carefully stored to be drunk 21 years later.

Sadly, aging beer fell out of fashion toward the end of the 1800s, with just a handful of beers like Russian stout clinging on. Only in the past 20 years has a new generation of brewers rediscovered the delights a patiently matured beer can offer and revived a centuries-old tradition.

Long-Aged Oak Beers

Spending four months or more in wooden foeders.

The following beers were reviewed by our beer editor, Ken Weaver. 

The post Slow Beer: The History of Aging Beer first appeared on All About Beer.

Down by the James River in Richmond, Virginia, there are two large stone arches below old brick ruins. Beyond the chain-link fence that protects entrance to the site, flooded rooms and a decaying vaulted brick ceiling can be seen. The caves extend deep into the earth, but no sign or plaque commemorates the important history they represent.

After the Civil War, Richmond lay in ruins. Much of the city’s industrial strength had been destroyed by the fires set by retreating Confederate soldiers. Though the city was temporarily on its knees, the same conditions that had propelled the city to be an economic leader before the war were still in place afterward. Industrial and, in particular, German workers flooded the city. Opportunity flourished for those willing to work, as well as for those who wished to invest.

Three men arrived in Richmond in 1866 to answer the call of opportunity. D.G. Yuengling Jr. had apprenticed at his father’s brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and now 24 years old, brought with him his uncle, John F. Betz, and another experienced brewer, John A. Beyer, to create the first large-scale brewery in Richmond. While their enormous facility was being built near the Richmond dock, also known as Rocketts Landing, the three men began small-scale operations north of the city.

The facility they created was a monster. It was seven stories tall, 80 feet wide and 100 feet deep. The Richmond Whig happily reported that:

“Messrs. Betz, Yuengling & Beyer have put up one of the finest breweries in the whole country. … Deep down in the earth, away from the light of day, are huge vaults capable of holding six thousand barrels, and within these deep recesses is a solid built ice-house, containing some two hundred and fifty or three hundred tons. The hoisting machines and elevators are beautifully contrived, and everything that wisdom, ingenuity and liberal outlay of money could do, has been done to make the establishment perfect. The engine house contains an engine of thirty-five horse-power, and two enormous boilers for heating purposes, each of them of a capacity suited for an engine of seventy-five horse-power. As far as practicable, all that has been required for the erection and completion of the structure has been procured and done in this city. The working capacity of the establishment is 400 barrels per day, and the building complete cost $200,000.”

The same article went on to note that the brewery would “furnish farmers with seed barley on credit, and to buy the crop for cash when raised,” making their product truly local. With veiled language about three Northerners setting up shop in Richmond, the paper concluded, “There is no use in our talking of elevating the State from its depressed condition if we don’t co-operate with those who are able and willing to give us a helping hand.”

This brewery soon became known as the James River Steam Brewery. Its trademark and labels were identical to the classic Yuengling brewery in Pottsville, though it remained a separate entity. It is interesting to note that the brewery advertised in both English-speaking and German newspapers its English- and German-style beers. The proximity to the rail and shipping networks ensured that the brewery could transport its beers not just to Richmond, but throughout the state.

D.G. Yuengling Jr. was not above greasing the political skids with a gift of beer. In September 1874, he sent the governor of Virginia, James L. Kemper, “one barrel of Old Stout in Bottles,” Yuengling wrote in a letter to Kemper. “This has been brewed three years ago and considered the Best, should you find it to[o] strong add water to suit your taste, and it will be a delicious stimulant. Hope it will do you good.” After noting this gift, Yuengling went on to inquire about railroad prospects. He continued to court both political and press connections. The same year, he sent a Christmas gift of a keg of beer to one of the Richmond newspapers. After sampling their gift, at least one reporter was still able to string words together for the next day’s edition of The Richmond Whig:

“ ‘Ye gods,’ what nectar was there! Glass after glass was emptied and quaffed with exclamations of satisfaction, and utterances of best wishes for the success of Richmond beer. A resolution was unanimously adopted that we must sustain Mr. Yuengling in his efforts to revive the beer interest of Richmond.”

As much as Yuengling may have indeed succeeded in reviving interest in beer in Richmond, he could not predict the future. Advances in refrigeration made the vast cellars obsolete, and the economic collapse that occurred in 1873 would eventually destroy all Richmond breweries and much of the nascent post-war growth of industrial America. Yuengling’s brewery was no different. Though it managed to weather the initial storm, with industrial workers moving away and costs rising, Yuengling’s giant Richmond brewery closed in 1879.

In 1883, disillusioned and bitter, Yuengling blamed the failure of the brewery on the locals, ignoring the larger financial picture. “After the war I went to Richmond, Va., and put $500,000 in a brewery, and came back without a dollar,” said Yuengling. “The farmers of Virginia forced their taxes upon the manufacturers, making me pay eighty-five cents a barrel on my beer and admitting distant beers free. The railroads would bring beer from New York and Baltimore at less than they would carry it twenty miles out of Richmond for me. The brewery is there yet, idle, and no brewer has been successful in the South. They won’t drink beer.”

The brewery building was leased by the Richmond Cedar Works until 1891, when a massive fire destroyed both the Cedar Works and the former brewery. All that remained were the vast cellars, which remain to this day, a mute witness to the first large-scale brewery in Richmond.

In 2014, the brewery ruins and the cellars were added to the National Register of Historic Places, paving the way for potential adaptive use. Time will tell if the James River Steam Brewery site will find a new life or be left, like the memory of the massive facility itself, to decay with time.

–Mike Gorman

The post Underground Brewing: Yuengling’s James River Steam Brewery first appeared on All About Beer.

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However, for all the forward momentum the industry has today, little is being done to preserve its history. Here in the United States, largely due to Prohibition and its negative impact on beer, much of the memorabilia and interesting artifacts of breweries past were not retained or treasured. While countries like Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium have dedicated national museums to beer, few similar institutions exist on American soil. Similarly, the brewers of today are not always acting with their eventual history in mind.

However, not all hope is lost. With a rebounding and vibrant beer industry, the rush is on to reclaim America’s beery past. In all corners of the United States—a cache of 19th-century bottles on display at the Brooklyn Brewery, Houston’s Magnolia Ballroom collection of “found art” depicting the milieu of beer-swilling Texas saloons, the weird rigs and historical artifacts of gold-rush era brewers exhibited at Alaskan Brewing Co. and so on—strong evidence of this preservationist movement can be found.

“The 9,000-year history of beer is rich,” says Charles Finkel, co-owner of Pike Brewing Co. and the enclosed breweriana museum, which, in 2008, was named the city’s best local attraction by both the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer.

“Beer was one of the earliest items to be commercialized and is believed to have precipitated the world’s first advertisement—a stone carving featuring amply breasted Sumerian women extolling the virtues of ‘Lion Beer,’ ” says Finkel. “A Trappist brewery opened in Massachusetts last year. History repeats itself. If we want to predict what lies ahead, it’s important for us to understand what came before.”

Before Prohibition, brewers of all sizes were eager to create and disseminate collectibles. From serving trays to die-cast models of delivery trucks and brewery buildings, tobacco pipes, matchbooks and signs of all sizes in materials from tin to porcelain and hand-carved wood.

Many of the collectibles that survived now rest in private hands. Breweriana collectors regularly meet to buy, trade and ultimately collect bits of brewing history. From coasters to cans and bottles, some remarkable personal collections exist. They’re a source of pride for the owners, but the public rarely gets a peek at these artifacts.

Today, America’s brewers are largely struggling to keep up with customer demand, and logoed items offered for sale are largely of the T-shirt, baseball cap or pint glass persuasion. Fine souvenirs to commemorate a brewery visit, but unlikely items to stand the test of time.

It’s not just collectible items that are getting the short shrift, many brewers also don’t even take the time to take photographs of milestones or write down short notes about important-to-them historic moments that could one day be of interest to a wider audience.

“In the midst of the craziness, I think a lot of people neglected to think about it,” says Peter Bouckaert, brewmaster at Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing Co. “Here in Fort Collins, we’ve had at least four breweries close down that probably are only documented in people’s minds.”

“The thing is, in this industry, time flies,” adds Finkel. “Brewers are making history with each and every beer, label, coaster, festival, dinner and so on. It’s important to record and save what is created. And while I’m not suggesting every brewery should have a museum like Pike has, I do think brewers should recognize the importance of recording their history. The investment is small, but more than worth it.”

So, how will the legacy of today’s beer culture look, 15 to 20 years in the future?

“I think the enduring companies will be the ones that develop the story of their brewery’s culture within a context of community,” says Steve Hindy, co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery. “These successful companies will be the ones that make beautiful, great-tasting beer that customers find exciting, while positioning those customers amidst the unfolding story of the brand.”

Which means?

“These endearing breweries?” says Hindy. “They will have meticulously, consciously and steadfastly crafted their own legacy.” 

Here, now, are several of the spots across the United States that are preserving and displaying the history and culture of beer.

Steins Unlimited

Pamplin, VA

Deep in the lolling, bucolic foothills of Virginia stands what may well be the nation’s most avid—albeit nearly unknown—monument to the history of beer vessels: Steins Unlimited.

The museum—a one-story brick ranch-style house with a shed outback—is nondescript, save for the tiny, hand-painted sign announcing the “Home of the World’s Largest Stein!” hanging from the mailbox. Steins Unlimited is home to more than 9,000 historically significant beer steins. With some dating back to A.D. 1200, barring the occasional absurdist oddity, the majority of the vessels are beautifully decorated, featuring ceramic bodies and pewter lids.

The collection is the passion of George Adams, the museum’s proprietor, who has spent the better part of the past 50 years scouring the planet, seeking out the oldest, rarest and most valuable beer-drinking vessels in existence.

Pamplin is about 30 miles east of Lynchburg and home to 219 residents, according to 2010 census numbers. Despite Steins Unlimited possessing neither a website nor a Facebook page, upward of 2,000 visitors manage to arrive at 616 Swan Road each year to ogle the self-proclaimed museum’s elaborate array of steins.

For those who find their way to Adams’ doorstep, it’s hard to avoid getting wrecking-balled by the eerie sense there is something big and strange and kind of fundamentally profound going on here. First off, Adams—serving as museum curator and tour guide extraordinaire—offers interested and legally aged patrons a “bottomless pint” of Coors Light or Yuengling lager, poured straight from the kegerator.

Walking toward the tin-roofed and clapboard-sided building housing one of the main exhibits, the 75-year-old explains how this shrine to beer vessels came to be.

“In the kitchen of my childhood home there hung this fabulous wooden cup thing with a lid,” says Adams, flicking on the lights as he walks through the screen door. “Eventually, I pointed at it and asked, ‘What’s that?’ To which my mother replied, with a shrug, ‘Oh, that’s Great-Grandfather’s stein.’ From that instant, aged 8 and onward, I was hooked.”

When the long, unfinished structure’s fluorescent tubes blink to life, they illuminate an array of tiered, floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with steins.

“This section is arranged chronologically,” explains Adams, his pointer-finger trolling from right to left, indicating the sequence. “It opens with the late 19th century, in the era of Otto Von Bismarck, when Germany was a unified state, then proceeds onward through the war years.”

The heart of the collection is a 3,000-piece exhibit chronicling the history of German stein-craft from the inception of the Reinheitsgebot in the 14th century through World War II. His collection then takes a turn to the west and purportedly includes every stein Anheuser-Bush has ever produced, including a mid-’70s “Bud Man” prototype.

“Right now, this piece is only rumored to exist. Let the cat out the bag and I’ll have to deal with collectors phoning me night and day, begging me to sell!”

With paternal delicacy he cradles another ceramic, pewter-lidded vessel from its perch and, holding the object at a distance (to better utilize his bifocals), like a man gazing into a beloved photo, he sighs, delicately fingers its design—a horse-drawn fire wagon manned by heavily mustached, sternly uniformed men, bustling from the garage of a brick, bell-towered firehouse onto a cobblestone drive, b-lining for a group of faraway, hill-topping bungalows (rendered in perspective), one of which spews into the starry horizon a plume of billowy, orange-tinged smoke.

“During this period—1871 to 1914—steins were a very social phenomenon,” says Adams. “At the end of your workday, you would go to your local stupa, upon which your friends, family and acquaintances would all be converging, have the barman or maid retrieve your personal stein from the wall,and fill it with your favorite draft, which would typically have been brewed on-site.”

It was a different time than now, when bars typically serve beer from a homogenized pint glass featuring the logo either of the establishment or a beer brand.

“But back then,” he says, giving the stein in his hands a tender pat, “for your average 19th-century German, his drinking vessel was a matter of sincere importance. His stein was a cherished, personalized and highly significant article. In the era in question, the steins tended to be first heraldic, familial. …” Pointer finger extended, he taps on first a coat of arms hovering regally over the firehouse, second the horse-drawn fire engine “… and then professional. A fellow’s stein would’ve featured something of the story of his life.”

Steins Unlimited is open seven days a week from 9:00a.m. – 5:00p.m. Adams does not maintain a website for the museum, but may be reached at (434) 248-6114.

Pike Brewing Co.

Seattle

Hard against Puget Sound in Seattle is the Pike Place Market, a hub for the fishing industry, favorite spot of tourists and a place to get quickly caffeinated by one of the countless coffee shops. In the center of a building that houses an indoor mall is the Pike Place Brewery. With its gravity-powered, three-story-tall, 30-barrel brewing system serving as a centerpiece, Pike has been a cultural and comfortable stop since Charles and Rose Ann Finkel opened in 1989. It’s also home to an extensive beer-history collection.

On an overcast morning several months ago, Finkel walked into the brewery, a few minutes before a scheduled interview carrying a canvas bag filled with mounted memorabilia. He unloaded the contents—coasters, a few matchbook covers, some bottle caps—onto his desk, adding them to an already large pile of black-backed plaques with clear heavy plastic covers that he creates at home from items he deems worthy of his collection.

These items will soon join the already crowded walls of the brewery, what is known as the Breweriana Museum, which gets just as much attention from visitors as the beer in their glasses.

Finkel regularly searches catalogs, antique shops, the Internet, etc., seeking all breeds of beer memorabilia—a category including but not limited to tap markers, matchboxes, defunct signs, old advertisements, bottles, caps, pipes, fishing lures, flashlights, barrel-shaped clock radios and so much more—to add to the collection. The museum has what might be the largest collection of sheet music dedicated to drinking songs. If the likeness of King Gambrinus was placed on something, chances are he has that as well. He takes special pride in finding items relating to historic U.S. breweries, regardless of corporate ownership.

“When Miller sold their collection, we were able to acquire some great items,” says Finkel. “This disregard for their history is a metaphor for the relationship these global companies have with the culture of beer. They are factories that manufacture a commodity, which they then advertise. And their sales and diminishing customer base are reflective of that discrepancy.”

The brewery does sell the usual trinkets, but Finkel has also added things like handmade bottle openers, coat hooks, special glassware, and, yes, beer trays: items built to outlast its first owner.

National Brewery Museum

Potosi, WI

Potosi is nestled between historic U.S. Highway 61 and the Mississippi River. The town was founded by miners, German farmers soon moved in, and by 1852 Gabriel Hail began brewing lager beer to quench their thirsts. In the 1880s, he passed the brewery to the Schumacher family, who continued to expand the complex and the brand (it was named Potosi Brewing Co. in 1905) until 1972, when they reluctantly closed—unable to compete with the industry giants.

Like many defunct breweries, the building lay idle for decades, but unlike most, it gained a second life. A group of local residents formed the Potosi Brewery Foundation to buy and restore the building, and then partnered with the collectors of the American Breweriana Association (ABA) to establish a museum in the complex. Restoration began in 2004, and the museum complex and brewpub opened in 2008.

There are actually two museums housed in the restored brewery. The Potosi Brewing Co. Transportation Museum (on the ground floor) integrates the story of the brewery into the broader tale of moving goods and people along the Great River Road corridor. Exhibits show how wagons, trucks and even a steamboat made “Good Ol’ Potosi” beer a popular brand in the region.

The National Brewery Museum occupies most of the rest of the building and will impress anyone who ever saved a glass or coaster from a favorite beer. The central gallery features the Schuetz Collection—an astonishing assortment of artifacts, many of which were saved from small-town Wisconsin breweries after they closed in the 1950s or 1960s. Rare neon signs hang above cases filled with old trays and art deco back-bar lights. Giant 19th-century brewery lithographs and metal signs decorate the walls.

But the primary goal of the National Brewery Museum was to be a “members’ museum”—a place where ABA members could show off portions of their collections to a wider audience. Visitors may see exhibits on world-famous breweries like Pabst or Anheuser-Busch, or on small breweries from around the country that still produced an amazing array of advertising pieces. Since these exhibits rotate every 18 months or so, there will be something new to see with each visit.

The Potosi Brewing Co. brewpub is decorated with Potosi breweriana and is a great place to enjoy a beer and contemplate the history the beer. A new production brewery and taproom are scheduled to be open by summer 2015.

The Brooklyn Brewery

Brooklyn, NY

The Brooklyn Brewery, which attracts thousands of visitors each year, knows its place in New York City’s proud beer history. To remind guests of what came before, there is a display of nearly 80 bottles that document the city’s brewing past.

Many of the bottles came from an attorney who lived in Queens and contacted Hindy shortly before the brewery opened. “He put together this collection over a lifetime,” says Hindy. “He said, ‘When you open your brewery, I’ll lend you the collection to display.’ So when we opened our building in 1995, I called him. He said he was retiring to Florida and his wife wouldn’t let him bring the bottles, so I bought the collection for like $1,200, and he and his wife were very happy.”

Hindy has learned much about the history of the city’s beer through the medium of glass. The collection represents all the breweries he could find information on, like the year opened, volume output and more. There are still some other bottles that represent breweries that never made the history books.

What is fascinating about the collection is that there was once a handful of breweries that were big, regional forces, like Schaefer and Rheingold, and still dozens that were very small. Today they are all gone. Finding bottles that represent these breweries from the 1800s and 1900s is quite the feat itself.

Historically, says Hindy, “the deposit on the bottle was a quarter, the beer itself cost a nickel, so the bottles were more valuable than the liquid.”

Schlafly Bottleworks

St. Louis

Even as the city’s beer scene rebounds today, there are many people who can only think of one brewery when it comes to St. Louis: Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser. Yes, the country’s largest brewer dominates the consciousness and the skyline, thanks to its huge brewing complex. But, historically, there was much more to the city’s brewing past. When the Saint Louis Brewery (which makes Schlafly beer) was creating a space where visitors would gather for the tour several years ago, it turned to then-spokesman Troika Brodsky to fill a room with St. Louis breweriana.

“Historically the city had over 200 breweries, but people don’t fully understand that our history is more than A-B,” says Brodsky. So, with the help of local collectors, he set out to gather as much history as possible. The space now contains everything from old lithographs to porcelain shields that served as signs. There is even a stone bottle that was unearthed and “the only evidence this one brewery ever existed.”

Now, as visitors sample the house beers, they can watch vintage commercials on a television, read old advertisements, explore eras through labels and get a deeper sense of what this proud city has contributed to the country’s beer history.

Other Points of Interest

The American Hop Museum

Toppenish, WA

The Yakima Valley has produced some of the finest hops in the world, and its bounty has inspired generations of brewers. With rotating exhibits and featuring antique harvesting equipment, the museum chronicles the history of the hop industry from early America to the modern-day boom. americanhopmuseum.org

The Herb and Helen Haydock World of Beer Memorabilia Museum

Monroe, WI

Located at the Minhas Brewery, and valued at over $1 million, this is a collection gathered by renowned breweriana enthusiasts. According to the brewery, it features “hundreds of brewery advertisements from the past, lithographs and prints from the mid 1800-era” along with “a collection of tap handles, growlers, model cars, trucks and trains from all around the world.” minhasbrewery.com/brewery-tour

The Brewseum

Honolulu

While the owners call it the Brewseum, visitors to this island bar won’t find much in the way of breweriana. Rather, this monument to World War II memorabilia keeps the memory of the Greatest Generation alive while giving patrons the chance to knock back IPAs, stouts, pilsners and more. There’s even a plan to install a one-barrel brewing system. brewseums.com

The post Beer Treasures first appeared on All About Beer.

When All About Beer Magazine was launched in 1979, nobody talked, wrote or maybe even dreamt about something called craft beer. Five years later Vince Cottone, a beer columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who contributed to numerous publications, first used the phrases craft-brewing scene, craft brewery and craft brewing in the manner they are thought of today. Readers understood what he meant, but craft beer didn’t become part of their vocabulary all at once. The New York Times didn’t bother with it until 1997, and then only occasionally.

There were only a handful of what Cottone called craft breweries in 1984, but as thousands more followed, the name stuck. Each of them is a little bit different. Annual sales of craft beer swelled from less than 72,000 barrels (2.2 million gallons) in 1984 to 20 million barrels in 2014, and estimates are the number of consumers who drink craft beer has grown to 40 million. Each of them is also a little bit different, and, if they think about it at all, their ideas of what craft brewery and craft beer mean are different as well.

The words craft beer are part of dozens of book titles and several magazine names; it seems every city has a craft beer week; many breweries have made it part of their names; there is a chain of stores called Craft Beer Cellar; the “I am a craft brewer” video has been watched uncounted times at various Internet sites; and the Colorado Brewers Guild recently began to promote Colorado as “The State of Craft Beer.” The term has spread to England, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Germany, China and likely three other countries since you began reading this paragraph. The century-old Palm Breweries in Belgium were recently rebranded as Palm Belgian Craft Brewers. The Global Association of Craft Beer Brewers was founded in 2013, with its own criteria for what qualifies as a craft brewery.

“Now you have other segments of package consumer goods using the word, craft whiskey, craft gin,” says Neal Stewart, director of marketing at Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. There are craft bakeries and craft sausages. “You had the greenwashing trend,” Stewart says, referring to when companies promote their products as environmentally friendly. “Now you have craftwashing.”

Cottone picked the word craft because it “seemed to fit best.” He did not envision that his terminology would work its way so deeply into American beer culture, that craft beer would be used both as a marketing term and an anti-marketing term, or that some would still embrace at least parts of his rather specific definition, and others would find their own entirely different one.

Some would call it a perfect choice, and others consider it meaningless. Tracing its etymology reveals how craft beer, certainly the two-word noun and perhaps even the entity, got to where it is today.

Craft Breweries and True Beer

Cottone did not use the words craft beer in 1984 when he wrote an article headlined “Craft Brewing Comes of Age” for New Brewer magazine, a publication for members of the Institute of Brewing Studies. (The IBS was a subsidiary of the Association of Brewers, which merged with the Brewers Association of America in 2005 to form the Brewers Association [BA].) He also did not include any definitions.

He offered those in the Good Beer Guide: Breweries and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest, published in 1986. He wrote: “I use the term Craft Brewery to describe a small brewery using traditional methods and ingredients to produce a handcrafted, uncompromised beer that is marketed locally. I refer to this beer as True Beer, a detailed definition and description of which appears in the following section.”

The details included a discussion of the ingredients and process that resulted in a True Beer. He explained when and why he thought adjuncts were suitable, the role of finings, filtration and pasteurization. He admitted the last was the most controversial. “Pasteurization damages beer flavor. Period,” he wrote. “If it is minimal and carefully done, the damage may be slight, but all too often it results in unpleasant cooked flavor, usually coupled with some degree of oxidation.”

Ultimately, True Beer described “the ideal, uncompromised beer, beer that’s hand-made locally in small batches using quality natural ingredients, served on draft fresh and unpasteurized. It’s not a new kind of beer, even in North America.”

Association of Brewers (AOB) founder Charlie Papazian first defined craft brewery in New Brewer in the spring of 1987 as “any brewery using the manual arts and skills of a brewer to create its products.” He then listed the various categories of breweries: brewpub, microbrewery, small brewery (between 15,000 and 100,000 barrels), large brewery (up to a million barrels), and mega or giant brewery (bigger still).

Craft brewery and craft beer insinuated themselves into the vocabulary of what would eventually be called the “craft beer industry” during the next 10 years. For instance, what was known as National Microbrewers and Pubbrewers Conference and Trade Show until 1995 became the Craft Brewers Conference in 1996. When the IBS began to aggregate craft brewery production, a concrete definition of what qualifies as a craft brewery was needed. After two years of review, IBS director David Edgar wrote members in the mid-1990s, it was decided that brewers included in the craft statistics would 1) have a federal brewer’s notice, 2) sell beer brewed with no more than 10 percent adjuncts, 3) not use artificial coloring or artificial flavoring, and 4) that no more than one-third of ownership would be by noncraft breweries.

Publicly, the AOB and then BA listed “craft beer industry definitions” that included the categories microbrewery, brewpub, contract brewing company, regional brewery and regional craft brewery. A regional craft brewery was one whose production was 50 percent or greater craft beer. Craft beers were “Generally, ‘all-malt,’ domestic beers produced using 100 percent malted barley. … Compared with other beers, their emphasis is more on flavor, and less on appealing to a mass market.”

A craft brewery was “a brewpub, microbrewery, regional specialty brewery or contract brewing company whose majority of sales is considered craft beer.”

Paul Gatza, who succeeded Edgar as IBS director and now is director at the BA, explained the internal criteria were tweaked in the decade that followed. After the merger that formed the BA in 2005, the board of directors approved a definition (see sidebar) that focuses on the words small, independent and traditional, although what constitutes small and traditional has been revised since. It became the definition that people look to first, if only to point out what’s wrong with it.

In The Craft Beer Revolution, author Steve Hindy, co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery, writes that whom an association was going to promote and protect and how to define craft brewer had been contentious issues for years. The definition the board agreed on settled the first matter, but not the second. “The reason for a definition was a pretty pragmatic one,” he says. “It was to define the population of brewers the Brewers Association was representing.” The Widmer Brothers Brewing Co. and Redhook Ale Brewery, both of which had been included among the 50 largest craft breweries on the 2005 list compiled by the BA, were cut from that list in 2006 because they were partly owned by Anheuser-Busch. Goose Island Beer Co. and Blue Point Brewing Co. were later struck from future lists for the same reason.

As Hindy, who was a member of the board at the time, writes in his book, “such exclusions would lead to hard feelings and nagging, sometimes bitter, controversy.” To celebrate its 30^th anniversary this year, Widmer Brothers brewed 30 beers, each conceived to commemorate a specific year in the company’s history. They called the 2007 beer Rejected Ale, and the label told a story about how “Once upon a time the Brewers Association kicked us out of their club.”

Ten years earlier, Fred Eckhardt polled industry members for a column headlined “What is ‘craft beer’?” that appeared in All About Beer at the outset of 1997. It was a topic discussed often by brewers that seldom showed up in print. In fact, in the first of a lengthy two-part interview with Papazian and Michael Jackson about the past and the future of beer—included in the same issue as Eckhardt’s column—the words craft and beer never appeared in tandem.

Those who wrote back to Eckhardt offered quite different opinions. Anheuser-Busch brewing education director Tom Schmidt focused on quality: “I don’t believe there is anything such as ‘craft beer.’ The use of the term may lead consumers to believe that beer made in some small, quaint place is much better than beer that is produced in a large, efficient brewery, where quality and consistency are the hallmarks. We all fight the same battle using the same raw materials. … Our brewmasters are (dedicated) ‘craftsmen,’ not just brewing ‘engineers’ who monitor the process from afar.”

The response from the late Jack Joyce of Rogue Brewing eerily portended recent debates: “What does craft mean? To whom? For Rogue, it means artisans of integrity. The original meaning has been successfully appropriated by crafty marketeers, copying the friendlier aspects of the term undeterred by integrity, with no interest in fueling the flame.”

And the late Greg Noonan at Vermont Pub & Brewery began, “I wish Vince Cottone had trademarked the term.”

Crossing the Cultural Chasm

After an early romance with drinkers when the company began selling its beers in the Northwest in 2002, New Belgium Brewing discovered the grass-roots relationship marketing that had worked close to its Colorado base could not be replicated in Oregon and Washington. When sales fell, New Belgium turned to marketing consultants Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron. They outline and explain the strategy they developed in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.

New Belgium is one of several breweries Alan McLeod, co-author of The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer—A Rant in Nine Acts, describes as big craft. “What bugs me about ‘craft beer’ as a term is that it arose to cover up that micro beer was less and less crafted and more and more industrialized. It is double speak,” he wrote via email. “… New language was required to mask the industrialization and then nationalization of what is now big craft.

Co-author Max Bahnson, also writing via email, added, “First of all, I don’t see ‘craft beer’ as a concept, but as a brand, one that’s basically in the public domain. As any other brand, it has a series of positive attributes associated to it, which have made it a very successful and valuable brand with a pretty loyal consumer base—people don’t drink Lagunitas, Stone or New Belgium, they drink Craft Beer.”

Mike Kallenberger of Tropos Brand Consulting, who previously worked 30 years at Miller and Miller Coors and now has several craft beer clients, is talking about brand in a different way when he says, “I’d argue that craft beer as a category has a collective brand identity, and one of the most important values implicit is that identity is authenticity.” He acknowledges just how over-used that word is, but continues, “Craft drinkers don’t necessarily think consciously in those terms, but I think there is a sense that craft brewers do what they do out of personal passion, whereas the big brewers do what they do for money.”

New Belgium brewed almost 800,000 barrels of beer in 2013, more than the other 174 breweries in Colorado combined. They continue to use the “Follow Your Folly, Ours is Beer” tagline that Holt and Cameron originated. “We wanted to say ‘here’s the kind of ideology we aspire to, we celebrate all those who pursue the same kind of thing, and this is exactly the ideology that is at the heart of our brewery and the beer we are drinking,” the authors explain in Cultural Strategy. The leadership at New Belgium understood their appeal as offering a better mousetrap—excellent, crafted if you will, beer—but did not envision that a wider audience was more interested in an “innovative cultural expression than in the fine-grained product differences.”

Bahnson wrote in the email that he is bothered when industry members use those cultural positives as a “foundation to build an ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric that instead of sticking to ‘we are good and our products are great’ will point, disproportionately, to ‘they (the big brewers) are bad and their products are crap,’ creating in the process a mythology of a revolution, a movement where (breweries of all sizes) and the consumers are all in the same thing together, and that the consumer is in the frontline of ‘the war against crap beer.’ ”

Bystanders may be injured in the process. In 2012, the Brewers Association issued a statement that kicked off a “craft versus crafty” debate that continues today. It was intended to draw attention to the “increase in production and promotion of craft-like beers by large, non-craft breweries,” and specifically named Blue Moon Belgian White brewed by MillerCoors and the Shock Top beers made by Anheuser-Busch as craft pretenders. The BA also posted a list of “Domestic Non-Craft Brewers” at Craftbeer.com, the website used to promote its members. The list included August Schell Brewing Co., noting the company was not considered traditional because its beers are made with adjuncts.

Jace Marti—the line under his name on his business reads, “Brewmaster * 6^th generation descendent”—posted a passionate letter at the company website and on its Facebook page defending Schell as a traditional brewery and describing the “list of shame” as “rude and quite frankly, embarrassing.” The BA removed the list at Craftbeer.com rather quickly, but the information remained available at craftbeerblacklist.com and on a smartphone app.

Early in 2014, the BA changed the definition of traditional, and Schell is now listed as a craft brewery. But on the same evening last April that two of his beers won medals at the World Beer Cup, Marti told a colorful story about “talking a beer geek down from the ledge” at a recent festival. “He just had a chip on his shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s adjunct beer,’” Marti says. “He refused to even try the beers. We were evil and he wouldn’t even try them.”

In The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, author Tom Acitelli uses the word “movement” on one-third of the pages. Brewers and consumers may not always share the same interest, but Hindy agrees that the word movement is appropriate. “There was, is, a desire to change the way people think about beer,” he says. “A whole different way of defining beer or characterizing the consumption of beer.”

He thinks craft is the right word to modify brewery or beer. “Because what we all do is much more connected to the word craft than it is to the word industrial,” he says. “We want to make a beer we are proud to share with other people. It’s more about craft than it is trying to judge what the beer drinker wants and then going out to do it. That’s not what a craftsman does.”

The New Belgium commercial that Holt and Cameron created in 2003 features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside. The final frame features a glass of Fat Tire beer, but more than a decade after the spot appeared, those who saw it most often remember The Tinkerer.

Indie Beers

Neal Stewart was 28 years old in 2002 and a brand manager for Pabst Brewing Co. when the beer underwent a revival so astonishing that the story ended up on the cover of a New York Times Sunday magazine and was a part of several books studying marketing successes. Pabst sales grew 45 percent from 2002 until 2006, when Stewart left the company.

Stewart went to work at Dogfish Head Craft Brewery last April as director of marketing. The main difference between his job at Pabst and the new one, he says, is that Dogfish markets around what it does, primarily brewing, and Pabst markets around what others do. Pabst hasn’t brewed its own beer since 2001. “We’re far less wrapped up co-opting (consumers’) cultural interest to gain favor. We’re more interested in telling our authentic story day to day.”

Pabst returned to the headlines in September when the company was sold. Much was made of the fact that the new CEO is Russian by birth, but he grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University. Nonetheless, questions rose immediately about whether Pabst could continue its hipster cachet. In a study (“What Makes Things Cool: How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness”) released in May, two market researchers wrote that there’s a direct correlation between a brand’s perceived autonomy influences and its perceived coolness.

Kallenberger, the branding consultant, adds that authenticity is linked to autonomy. “Here’s how I define it: doing what you do, not because of others’ expectations or even money, but because it comes from with, from your heart, from you own internal passion,” he says. “Authenticity, then, is rooted in autonomy and independence. And millennials in particular share this aspiration.”

Stewart does not need to coach Dogfish Head co-founder Sam Calagione on the subject. “He recognizes the importance of talking about us as an indie brewer every chance he gets,” Stewart says.

When Sam and Mariah Calagione opened their production brewery in Delaware in 1997, Sam knew exactly why he wanted to call it Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, making it the first brewery in the country to include craft in its name. In 1995, the same year they started Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats, Miller Brewing had acquired Celis Brewery and Shipyard Brewing, placing them under its American Specialty/Craft Beer Company umbrella.

“I trained at Shipyard. I was super bummed out,” he says. “I thought, wait a minute, that’s not craft. If they win at this, all the small breweries are in jeopardy.”

Fifteen years later, the craft versus crafty conversation continues. “If there wasn’t a definition, we’d need (to write) one,” Stewart says. “That keeps the purity of who a craft brewer is.” When consumers tour the Dogfish Head brewery, one of the first things they hear is the Brewers Association definition of craft beer.

What Makes Things Cool co-author Caleb Warren offers a reminder about how fragile the cachet can be. “As a craft beer brand becomes increasingly popular, it becomes associated with the dreaded mainstream (thus, less autonomous and uncool),” Warren wrote via email. “Another thing that happens is marketers jump on the trend to try to make money. By doing this, they adopt many of the cultural codes to appear like they are creating a craft beer, but if consumers suspect that the ‘craft beer’ is actually a sub-brand of a giant brand (e.g., Blue Moon/Miller), they probably will see it as less autonomous.”

In December of 2013, Stone Brewing Co. co-founder Greg Koch posted this on Twitter: “A dream: We stop calling fizzy yellow beer ‘beer’ & real actual beer ‘craft beer,’ & begin calling them ‘fake beer’ & ‘beer,’ respectively.”

For the time being, Stone press releases still identify it as a craft brewery. Craft can be a useful word, if not always necessary.

Sidebar: Definitions of Craft Brewer

This story appears in the March 2015 issue of All About Beer Magazine.

The post How Craft Became Craft first appeared on All About Beer.

Small—Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales). Beer production is attributed to the rules of alternating proprietorships.

Independent—Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.

Traditional—A brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation. Flavored malt beverages (FMBs) are not considered beers.

Global Association of Craft Brewers

Local—At least 70 percent of a brewery’s products must be distributed locally—in and around a brewery’s community.
Independent—51 percent of a brewery’s products must be produced using a founder’s own money (without outside investors). This includes funding for brewery equipment, raw materials, bottling, etc. Breweries founded from a cooperation of multiple breweries/brewers may still be considered independent.

Creative—A brewery must show creativity throughout the brewing process and a willingness to experiment with different styles of beer.

RateBeer

Craft Brewing is a category in beer making. There is no qualitative value attached to “craft” or “craft” versus “traditional,” or even what we call “industrial” brewing. There are good and bad quality craft beers. Craft Brewing is a genre. It is not a quality certification.

What criteria define Craft Brewing?

We don’t see all beers as either craft or not craft, but instead on a scale of more or less craft. These criteria are associated with the Craft ethos and culture.

• The business is structured around a brewer/owner and is independent. This person or persons are known to consumers.

• Distinguishes itself from regional or national brewing cultures by producing beer styles inspired by a global Craft culture.

• Primarily focuses on local consumers, local sales and tastes. A craft brewer should embrace a geographic spirit.

• Engages in human-scale rather than corporate-scale business practices.

• A lack of reliance on a fixed line of products or flagship.

• Creative brewing or lack of adherence to traditional brew styles.

• Distinguishes through the use of quality ingredients and the targeting of complex, highest quality flavor profiles.

If it’s not Craft Brewing, what is it?

Industrial, Belgian Traditional, American Regional, English Traditional, German Traditional, Brazilian Traditional.

Related: How Craft Became Craft: Exploring the Word That Transformed Beer

The post Definitions of Craft Brewer first appeared on All About Beer.

In 1979, in the fourth issue of All About Beer, at the bottom of the penultimate page, this brief news item appeared: “We’re checking out rumors of a new steam brewery located in Chino, California, called the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.”

Journalistically, the reporting fell short of ideal. The brewery would not open for another year; it was not a steam beer brewery; and, despite the excitement of the southern California-based writers at All About Beer for whom Chino would be a local destination, the site of the future Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. was actually Chico, 500 miles to the north.

Apart from that, great coverage. For the subscribers who pulled that 16-page broadsheet issue out of their mailboxes, this was the first they would read about Sierra Nevada. All About Beer would write frequently—and more accurately—about this new brewery, but many readers would not be able to purchase its beers for another decade or more, nor the beers of other talked-about young breweries like Boulder, Newman’s or Boston Beer as they came on line. It’s fair to say that during that first phase of the American beer “revolution,” it was easier to find good writing about beer than it was to find good beer, itself.

In the late seventies, there was scant evidence that beer was on the brink of re-invention. American brewery numbers were at a post-Prohibition nadir of fewer than 90, and most brands were of a single style: pale lager. Given that, who would read a magazine devoted to beer?

At the time, there were two sets of people who had long made beer their hobby: collectors of breweriana, who traded in antique cans, advertising material and other ephemera of the brewing industry; and homebrewers, whose underground pastime would be declared legal in California in the summer of 1978, and at the federal level a few months later. These specialized hobbies, though, already had or were building their own publications, associations and conventions. Besides, these were esoteric pursuits, with no natural connection to a broader public.

It was the emergence of a third cohort that prompted a small team of California print professionals to launch their own title. As founder Mike Bosak explained in 1992, “Seventeen years ago when All About Beer was conceived, it was inspired by a sign I saw on my local liquor store that read, ‘Five Imported Beers Sold Here!’ A few months later the sign was changed to read, ‘Ten Imported Beers Sold Here!’ That was when a group of us did our homework and discovered that there were no publications strictly for the consumer of beer.”

When the magazine debuted with the tagline “The world’s only consumer publication about beer,” the publisher indicated that the interests of the curious beer drinker took prominence over those of collectors and homebrewers, although those groups would also be catered to. In some issues, there wasn’t much to write about, and, in those pre-Internet days, information was hard to come by. Features on imported beer, beer can collecting or homebrew techniques were interspersed with articles about chili cook-offs, football, barroom lore and other topics apparently tailored for a male audience.

Imported beers set the standard for the magazine’s readership. From the first issue, however, a new phenomena also generated interest: the tiny club of small breweries opening in the United States, offering styles that gave consumers an alternative to domestic lager. Fritz Maytag, who had rescued San Francisco’s Anchor Brewery in 1964, was selling his beer in eight states. Jack McAuliffe had built and opened New Albion, the first new microbrewery: an AAB staff member found McAuliffe’s beers while on a gold-panning trip to northern California, and declared “Those people at New Albion know what they’re doing. Both porter and stout are the equal of the best imports.”

New Albion closed before All About Beer was three years old, but others opened, examples of a phenomenon variously called micro-breweries (with or without the hyphen), specialty or boutique breweries, and much later, craft breweries. By the mid-nineties, these new enterprises numbered more than a thousand. The first tantalizing contact with a new beer no longer had to come through the medium of print: the curious drinker was just as was likely to encounter a novel beer at a good bar, a tap room, a forward-thinking retailer, or that increasingly common event, the beer festival.

Good writing about good beer continues to be important, whether on the page or on the screen. Beer enthusiasts are more numerous and vastly more sophisticated with every passing year—but so are the breweries, beers and expanding styles that inspire such passion. For 35 years, All About Beer has both shaped and responded to that passion.

Editor’s Note: This story appears in the March 2015 issue of All About Beer Magazine. To see a timeline of All About Beer Magazine covers throughout the years, look for the March issue on newsstands. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.

The post 35 Years Devoted to the Curious Drinker first appeared on All About Beer.