Gary Geminn was in high school and just approaching the old New York state drinking age of 18 when his father, Clarence Geminn, is said to have declared on the floor of the Genesee Brewing Co.’s brewhouse, “I think we have a winner here.” The winning beer in question? Genesee Cream Ale, which debuted in... View Article
Michael Jackson’s original 1977 World Guide to Beer understandably had little to say about American beer beyond the macro-producers such as Anheuser-Busch. There just weren’t that many breweries nor beer styles left in the U.S. to write about. The American section in a revised edition a decade later ran much longer. Toward the middle... View Article
In 1967, Kenneth Kolence co-founded one of the world’s first computer software companies. It was headquartered in the San Jose, California, area that would by the start of the next decade become known as Silicon Valley because of the amount of technology firms based there. About 13 years later, Kolence co-founded one of the nation’s... View Article
Matthew Reich, an executive on the business side of Hearst Magazines in Manhattan, had an idea: start a brewery in New York City, the first, in fact, since Rheingold closed a few years before in Brooklyn in 1976. He hired Joseph Owades, a biochemist turned consultant, to help him. Owades was most famous for devising... View Article
This time 30 years ago, Geoff and Marcy Larson were busy bringing brewing back to Alaska. The Last Frontier’s last brewery had gone spectacularly belly up in 1979. Generous incentives from the Alaskan government, including a 56-cent break on each case, lured West Germany’s Radeberger Group to open what it called Prinz Brau Alaska in... View Article
In the summer of 1984, the Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco released what it called Anchor Summer Wheat. It marked a watershed in beer packaging: the first widely available American-made beer to explicitly call itself “summer” in some way. Such beers now seem ubiquitous in these warmer months, but they were quite rare in... View Article
Until a little more than a generation ago, if an American brewer said he (for they were almost always men back then) went to brewing school in the United States, it invariably meant he trained at the venerable Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. Then, the University of California-Davis (UC Davis) added a major to... View Article
On Sunday, Jan. 21, 1990, about 8:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Homer Simpson saw a commercial for Duff Beer. His thirst piqued, the 38-year-old married father of three got off the couch and went to the fridge to grab a can of the brew. He found none—perhaps having already drunk his usually steady supply, it’s... View Article
The billboards started popping up in the Philly area in the autumn of 1993: “Philadelphia Is Putting Blondes Behind Bars,” a ribald double entendre aimed at advertising what the region’s newest brewing entity was calling Red Bell Blonde Ale. If the meaning of the billboards was somehow lost on a consumer, then the equally ubiquitous... View Article
