There were three keynote addresses scheduled for the National Craft-Brewers Conference and Trade Show in Boston in May 1996, one for each day of the annual conclave for smaller brewers now known best as the Craft Brewers Conference. Charlie Papazian, long-time head of the Association of Brewers behind the conference, would give one of the... View Article
On Tuesday, March 21, 2006, at 9:50 p.m. Pacific time, Jack Dorsey, a New York University dropout-turned-tech-entrepreneur, sent this message via a new social media app he helped develop: “just setting up my twttr.” It was the earliest message of what became Twitter. (Dorsey’s firm did not acquire the now-famous domain name for several months,... View Article
During the third week of November 1980, Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi, founders of a new brewery called Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. out of a converted metal warehouse in the Northern California city of Chico, brewed the first batch of what they intended to be their second commercial release. Their first had been a stout,... View Article
In March 1996, August Busch III, then-chairman of Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewer, told a national conference of wholesalers that they had better start thinking solely of A-B brands when it came to distribution. “Each of you,” Busch told the crowd, “must exert your undivided attention and total efforts on Anheuser-Busch products. If you sell... View Article
Thank goodness for that random magazine ad for a homebrewing kit. Peter Egelston and his roommate in New York City saw it; were intrigued; sent in their $15; and got back some instructions as well as rudimentary ingredients that included “a can of malt syrup, a pathetic little baggie of grayish brown hops and a... View Article
For Carroll Zuber, like many others, it started with an epiphany in Europe. While traveling in what is now Germany in 1975, the financial planner from Iowa discovered the sorts of flavorful beers that were in increasingly short supply in the U.S., where the recently introduced Miller Lite was taking the marketplace by storm. Within... View Article
Charlie Papazian was studying nuclear engineering at the University of Virginia in 1970 when a friend mentioned that a neighbor homebrewed. Would Papazian like to try some of the finished product? He would. The pair walked to a place off Montebello Circle in Charlottesville and met the neighbor, an older man who had been homebrewing... View Article
The American brewing industry just wrapped a banner year, not least because of the growth in the number of breweries to 4,144, according to the Brewers Association, an all-time high. Most of these breweries are smaller operations using traditional ingredients and methods to brew in relatively small batches. With such growth, one gets the sense... View Article
Twenty years ago, the Stone Brewing Co. was preparing to open in rented warehouse space in San Marcos, about 35 miles north of San Diego. The opening, on Feb. 2, 1996, would be the culmination of years of dreaming and planning by Stone’s founders, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner. Koch was born in Southern California... View Article
