In the fall of 1997, a new brewery opened amid 136 acres of an old hop farm in Cooperstown, New York. Brewery Ommegang was named after the medieval pageants held in what is now Belgium. The animating force behind the new brewery was a husband-and-wife team, Donald Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, who had long run... View Article
There is really no way to know for sure, but Deb Carey, cofounder of the New Glarus Brewing Co., thinks her brewery’s launch nearly 25 years ago was the fastest microbrewery startup ever. She and her husband, Dan Carey, first talked about launching a brewery in January 1993. They drew a 30-mile circumference around Madison,... View Article
In 1993, Lagunitas was just starting up, and breweries as varied as Stone, Victory, Dogfish Head, and Smuttynose did not exist as commercial concerns. In 1993, there was no Brewers Association, never mind a definition from that group defining a craft brewer or a craft beer. In 1993, brewpubs and India pale ales were still... View Article
Twenty-five years ago, the then-Miller Brewing Co. was preparing to roll out a beer it called Icehouse, which it clearly considered an answer to twin realities in American beer in the very early 1990s. One was that beer consumption and sales were basically flat, particularly for the wares that Miller and its biggest rivals Coors... View Article
The idea was a simple one: a seal to honor those independently owned purveyors of smaller-batch, more traditionally made beer. The seal caught on pretty quickly after it was announced, and, eventually, dozens of such purveyors proudly bore it. The Brewers Association’s recently announced Independent Craft Brewer Seal? No. It’s the Good Beer Seal that... View Article
Though his brewery shares an anniversary with America’s Independence Day, it was during an extended stay in Europe that Mike Hale was inspired to launch what has become the oldest independently-owned, small-batch brewery in the Pacific Northwest. Hale’s wife was on a Fulbright teacher exchange in 1982 with an educator from England. The couple had... View Article
It was the summer of 1992, and Steve McCarthy and his wife were having one of those vacations. The couple had flown to Ireland all the way from Oregon, and rented a car in Dublin. From there, things started promisingly enough. They drove out into the republic’s sparsely populated western reaches, staying at delightful hotels... View Article
On the morning of April 7, 1997, Kirby Shyer, the owner of the recently shuttered Zip City brewpub at Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in Manhattan, poured 3,100 gallons of Belgian tripel down a sewer drain. A New York Times reporter was there to witness the carnage. “Once it was over, it was over,” Shyer... View Article
Matthew Reich’s goal for his New Amsterdam amber lager in the summer of 1982 was fairly modest. Here it was in a nutshell, according to the business plan that the Hearst Magazines executive and wine aficionado drew up: “To sell 4,000 cases per month by the end of the first operating year; 6,000 cases per... View Article
