In the fall of 1984, Richard Wrigley, a British transplant from Manchester who once likened Michelob to “a soft drink,” opened a 5,000-square-foot brewpub called the Manhattan Brewing Co. It was located in its namesake borough, in an old electric-company station at Watts and Thompson streets in the not-quite-fashionable-yet Soho neighborhood. Wrigley sold two ales... View Article
In 1986, John Hickenlooper drove from Colorado to California to visit his brother after getting laid off as a geologist for an oil company. The two dropped in on Berkeley’s Triple Rock Brewery and Alehouse, a restaurant with its own brewhouse that another fraternal set, John and Reid Martin, had just opened. Hickenlooper loved the... View Article
The first pour every February of the Russian River Brewing Co.’s Pliny the Younger had been reliably popular since the inaugural one in 2005. Something about the 2010 debut seemed different, however. Perhaps it was because the triple IPA from the Santa Rosa, CA-based brewery and brewpub had scored a perfect 100 rating on both... View Article
By the mid-1980s, the beer scene in Arizona, which hosts Super Bowl XLIX this weekend, was bleak. The state’s only brewery to make it out of Prohibition for any length of time—eight tried—was the Phoenix-based Arizona Brewing Co. That brewery began to shed consumers, however, as Phoenix’s post World War II population boomed, the newcomers... View Article
Twenty years ago this Valentine’s Day, commercial brewing returned to Hawaii. It was on that Tuesday in 1995 that Kona Brewing Co. rolled out its first kegs and bottles of Pacific Golden Ale and Fire Rock Pale Ale from its brewery in an old newspaper pressroom in Kailua-Kona on the western edge of the state’s... View Article
In November 1975, the Anchor Brewing Co. released what it called, simply, “Our Special Ale.” The beer quickly became known by two other things on the label: a generic Christmas tree smack-dab in the center and the words, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” Anchor’s seasonal in 1975, the first seasonal from an American... View Article
The mad men from the ad agency told Pete Slosberg, co-owner and public face of Pete’s Brewing Co., to sit down one breezy day at a red-draped table set up on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco and stick a radio piece in his ear. Slosberg obliged. Above him and the table a sign read,... View Article
On Nov. 16, 1983, a Wednesday, readers of The Washington Post awoke to an essay, meandering over four pages, on which beers to pair with which parts of the Thanksgiving feast the following week. It was written by the English beer critic Michael Jackson. As difficult as it may be to fathom in our golden... View Article
On Oct. 29, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hosted a talk and a dinner to honor the contributions of some of the earliest makers of fine wine in the United States. It was also part of the museum’s American Food and Wine History Project, which has been curating artifacts, oral histories and documents... View Article
