Tag: Craft Beer history

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Open / Shut – Anchor Brewing in Stasis

Some small good news from the crappy Sapporo handling of Anchor Brewing, per the NAGBW, “At the end of September, the National Museum of American History collected the business records and other artifacts from the recently shuttered Anchor brewery to preserve and make them accessible to researchers and the public into the future. The items include tools from the brewhouse and lab, a barrel that transported steam beer to 19th-century taverns, books from Fritz Maytag’s library, and more.”

Plucking those items combined with, the pluck and zeal of former employees and the recent book about Anchor’s history will go a long way to helping unfreeze the actual Steam Beer out of carbonite. More will need to be pried out of Sapporo’s hands if a new age of Anchor is to really happen.

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Bite-Sized History

Tom Acitelli has been kinda quietly amassing a nice historical archive over on the All About Beer website.

From Michael Jackson, to beer tastings of the past to a discussion of cream ale, the topics vary but touch upon integral points in beer history.

Check it out to up your beer education game.

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Book Review – The Audacity of Hops

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Tom Acitell’s book The Audacity of Hops, takes on the uneviable task of tying together all the strands of craft beer history into a cogent and linear whole.  And it succeeds.  This history starts in the wastelands of beer and re-acquaints us with Jack McAulliffe and New Albion Brewery.  It shows  us the humble beginnings of the Great American Beer Festival and the Brewer’s Association and makes quick dips into how some of our favorite breweries got started like Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head and Brooklyn Brewery.

The journey goes from 1972 up to pretty recent happenings as well .  The key takeaway for me was how hard it was to get this ball rolling.  Bank loans were non-existent and no Kickstarter either.  Blogging and the internet was in its infancy so word just could not be spread like it is today.  Suppliers of ingredients and equipment were not there to buy from whereas now there is an infrastructure.  And most importantly, the market for these beers was uneducated and dulled by years of watered down beers backed by ad campaigns.

Some locales and breweries get short shrift but that may have been simply to keep the book at a reasonable length because even giving cursory mention to more would have ballooned the size.

I am hoping that Acitelli will re-embark on another chapter in 5 or 10 years to really dig into what happened between 2006 and 2013 because I want to read his perspective on how all these brewers and beer geeks are faring.

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Beer as History

From April 6, 2013 to January 20, 2014, (plenty of time even for procrastinators)  You can head to a museum to learn a bit about the history of craft beer in San Diego.

The exhibit is entiteld Bottled & Kegged: San Diego’s Craft Brew Culture. It is subtitled with the rather grandiose claim of “How San Diego became a nationwide leader in craft beer.”  They certainly are and were on the vanguard but I would have phrased that a little more defrentially.

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Either way you look at it, from the description below, it looks like a fun learning experience.

“Beginning with the region’s earliest inhabitants to the present day, the exhibit highlights events and individuals who built a brewing industry where once there was none, kept an industry alive during Prohibition, and managed to bring back what, at one time, was one of the region’s most robust enterprises.The exhibit features many hands-on interactive elements that help explain: the brewing process, how San Diego County brewers achieve such expansive flavor profiles, and the science behind matching beers with food.Bottled & Kegged has components that speaks to audiences of all ages and will educate even the most avid craft beer lover.”