Greg Schirf’s mother dropped him at the side of the highway in Milwaukee so that he could hitchhike to Utah. It was 1974, and the recently minted Marquette University graduate, hair down to his waist, was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. His older brother had gone to school out west,... View Article
On Sunday evening, Oct. 13, 1996, the sonorously calm voice of Stone Phillips, a host of NBC’s Dateline, eased into around eight million American households: “When it comes to beer, you’ve never had more choices on tap.” The words were all too true, given the decade’s growth in the number of American breweries, brewpubs and brands... View Article
Today, America’s winemaking industry and culture will mark a significant milestone: 50 years since the formal dedication and first grape crush at the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley’s Oakville. A little background: The Robert Mondavi Winery was the first major ground-up winery in the U.S. since the end of Prohibition in 1933 and the... View Article
The Ballast Point brewery launched in 1996 out of the back of a then-four-year-old homebrew supply shop in the Morena neighborhood of San Diego, near the University of San Diego. The first beer the brewery released was Ballast Point Copper Ale (which Ballast Point renamed Calico Amber and then California Amber). Jack White was the... View Article
On June 25, 1986, a Wednesday, D.G. Yuengling & Son started production on its first-ever light beer. It called it, simply, Yuengling Premium Light, a lower-calorie variation on what was one of its most popular offerings, Yuengling Premium. It was an auspicious event for what by then was the oldest brewery in the United States. The... View Article
On a July evening in 2006, Ray Daniels, Lyn Kruger and Randy Mosher stopped in at a basement bar in Durango, Colorado, well-known for its beer selection. The trio were in town to teach an advanced homebrewing course through Durango’s Fort Lewis College and the Siebel Institute, the esteemed Chicago-based brewing school where Kruger was... View Article
On Monday, June 17, 1991, new Mid-Coast Brewing Co. formally unveiled its Chief Oshkosh Red Lager at a Hilton hotel in downtown Oshkosh, Wis. The event would now otherwise be unremembered 25 years later were it not for one thing: Chief Oshkosh Red Lager came in cans. Mid-Coast Brewing was the brainchild of Jeff Fulbright.... View Article
On page 154 of the second edition of the Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Beer, published in 1988, author Michael Jackson described a brewery called Golden Pacific: “Beer-in-a-box was an early innovation from this micro-brewery in Emeryville, a borough in the urban agglomeration between San Francisco and Oakland. The initial product, Golden Pacific Bittersweet... View Article
By June 1991, Kim Jordan’s days off as a social worker began with calls to customers to see which beers they needed. She would then spend the afternoons delivering them around the greater Fort Collins, Colorado, area in her Toyota Tercel station wagon, picking up her son from first grade along the way (he... View Article
