It was early 1985, and the Miller Brewing Co. was in trouble. Ten years before, the Milwaukee-based concern had smacked a commercial homerun with the introduction of Miller Lite. The lower-calorie pilsner interpretation made Miller the second-biggest brewer in the nation, with Miller Lite eventually accounting for roughly one in 10 of all the beers... View Article
Sam Calagione stood in the cab of the old pickup truck and started to put in place the sign for his new brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Del. His wife, Mariah, had a disposable camera ready to capture the magic moment. First, though, Sam had to remove the sign of the last business at the same... View Article
On Aug. 1, 1862, the Lincoln administration enacted a recently passed tax of $1 per 31-gallon barrel on “all beer, lager beer, ale, porter and other similar fermented liquors, by whatever name such liquors may be called.” It was the first national excise tax on beer, and it had perhaps the furthest-reaching effect on the... View Article
It was 1994, and Pete Coors had an idea. The head of the Golden, Colorado-based Adolph Coors Co., which his great-grandfather started, had noticed the rise in the number of smaller breweries and their brands nationwide. Why not get in on the action? Coors was, after all, the first brewery to use the Cascade aroma... View Article
In April 1995, Charlie Papazian, president of what would become the Brewers Association, asked a roomful of attendees at the annual Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) to raise their hands if they planned or wanted to open a brewery but had not yet done so. Most of his audience raised their hands. (My source on this... View Article
On a July evening in 2009, five men sat down to gin martinis and medium-rare steaks at Harris’ Restaurant in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood. Two of the men were there to pitch a proposal: a consultancy involving the Anchor Brewing Co., the oldest independent brewery in the United States making small batches of beer... View Article
UPDATE: In case you missed it, this was an April Fools’ Day joke. To our knowledge, Michael Jackson never wrote about carrot juice. LONDON (April 1)—Buried within his papers at England’s Oxford Brookes University are sheaves of the late critic Michael Jackson’s correspondence, clips and collected arcana on one subject in particular: carrot juice. Jackson’s... View Article
For Randolph “Stick” Ware, it all started in his junior year of high school when Uncle Slim blew into South Pasadena, CA. The new arrival, the brother of a mother of one of Ware’s friends, was fleeing legal entanglements back east and he knew some things. One of those things was how to make what... View Article
On the day after St. Patrick’s Day in 1985, Jim Koch got a phone call. It was his mother’s cousin, whom Koch considered an uncle and who was an investor in Koch’s new Boston Beer Co. “So what did you do today?” asked the uncle, a partner at Goldman Sachs in New York. Koch, speaking... View Article
