The State of the Beer

In a very, very technical sense, this was the first photo taken for the book. When  +The History Press  agreed to publish my book , I was a little worried about getting the right photos. But not quite as worried as they were at first. You see, Eastern Shore Beer was to be a pretty book, as well as an informative one. I got something like 32 color pages for a photo insert and was responsible for the cover and back cover art. When they asked if I thought I could get photos I said, "Kind of." There were three problems as I saw it. First of all, beer hasn't been all that well-documented on the Eastern Shore. Certainly, it hasn't been treasured until recently, so the archives that aren't bare, aren't well marked. Secondly, there weren't the kinds of high-profile prohibition busts in the 20s as there were in metropolitan areas, therefore there were no photos of colorful characters in bowlers smirking for the camera after destroying a beer barrel.

Groupo Modelo write-offs cost AbInBev $6 billion this year. It lost another $1 billion anyway, even with the Word Cup. This is a tinfoil hat observation, but one that's fun to make. Like all kooky theories, it begins with demonstrable facts and descends into the gap between madness and unlikelihood.  Craft beer now has 8 percent of the market and think they can make it to 20 over the next decade. Budweiser's parent company, even bolstered by the World Cup, reported losses of more than $1 billion already this year even though revenue increased. Much of that has to do with them purchasing companies that don't run at the famous AbInBev margins, but, to be fair, the revenue boost was because of Brazil. There won't be a World Cup next year, but there also is no craft beer revolution in South America. Or in Africa. Or Russia. There also is no NFL advertising expense in those countries. Last week, Budweiser made an uncharacteristically frank indictment of the NFL. It w...

Oddly, though, Boxer Light hasn't taken Belgium by storm Twenty years ago, I would tell you that Belgium was the greatest brewing country in the world. And today I would say it's the United States. -- John McDonald, Founder of Boulevard Brewing Company, in an  +NPR   story. Exporting a revolution Late last year, Belgian beer company  +Duvel Moortgat  closed a deal to buy  +Boulevard Brewing Co.  primarily to secure an American craft beer for export (or, I guess, import, depending upon your perspective). The word from all involved is nothing will change about the beer, and, while there's tons of historical evidence that corporate culture will have an affect on the beer, there's no evidence that Duvel isn't a quality beer company. It's billed as a Belgian craft brewery and is a family owned company. More recently, Lagunitas sniped at Boston Beer for making a West Coast IPA  that was, they say, an attempt to horn in on their market....

Setting aside the 8 or 10 people who remember when beer from cans had an off flavor, the rise of craft beer in a can is probably the next bump in the craft beer market . Cans are cheaper to buy and cheaper to ship, and they hold flavor better. It is quite possible they hold flavor longer, but it's not an experiment I'm willing to try as it means arbitrarily leaving beer un-drunk. Over the last few years, the beer in a can market has grown significantly. The Genius of Mobile Canning I spoke with Augie Carton of Carton Brewing, who had canning as a major part of his original business plan. He said when he called a company to arrange to buy a canner, they directed him to one of their newest customers, a guy with a regional canning truck. Rather than have to invest in a very, very expensive and technical piece of equipment, Carton was able to contract with a company who would come out as needed, pump beer into the truck and roll filled cans out of it and into the brewery's...

The recently-reported discovery of an o n-campus brewery at the  +College of William & Mary  highlights a point that we've forgotten, a little bit. Yes, it's cute to make jokes about having beer on campus, but where there are people, there is beer. This is a fact of civilization. What was difficult was making good beer. It not only took time, but also resources that most smaller places didn't have. Maltsters were rare in the country, but they could make a living in cities, larger communities and even on plantations, if the plantation owner was rich enough and liked beer that much. Anyone can make a passable cider, but colonists who liked beer had trouble getting good brews. What's exciting about the discovery is that we might get additional insight into the recipes they were using. A good beer recipe, like a good maltster, was, if not rare-ish, less common than we would like. Brewers wrote to one another about their processes and occasionally some of the ingredi...

I've been working on a book about a local brewery for three years. Like many would-be nonfiction authors I wrote as much as I could when I wasn't at my day job. I was a reporter when I started, then (mostly because I was cheap and the newspaper was bleeding cash) I was an editor and finally a section editor at a bigger paper. Between my day job and my book I was cranking out a phenomenal number of words every week. When I finally left the newspaper business for the nonprofit sector, my first draft was nearly done and I was cruising toward a second draft. It was time to try selling my book. I've learned since that it is foolish (or at least amateur) to first write and research a nonfiction novel before selling it. My first proposal (I also learned nonfiction authors don't query) was to  +The History Press . As I'd never written a book professionally before, I included the first four chapters of the second draft as an example. Having not heard from them, I started...

In the late 90s my uncle and I started having beer tastings. Craft beer was just catching hold in Jersey and he had some access to some really esoteric beers. To be honest, though, it mostly was about the drinking. We (for example) included Zima once because we felt as if it were important to know what it tasted like. Two beers stuck out from that period. Dead Guy Ale, by Rogue was one and the other was a Lambic, maybe raspberry. I was pretty sure both of them had gone bad. I kept the bottle because it was cool (cool labels are a relatively new thing, I think) but resolved never to try the beer again. It took only about a decade for me to revisit Dead Guy Ale. It's probably and even likely that the beer changed over the course of a decade, but it is more likely my taste buds improved. Our beer tastings didn't often include beers that were too out there. If Pete's Wicked or Samuel Adams had something "kooky" out, we'd get it. But a lot of the smaller brews w...