In early 1973, Mike Royko was at the top of his game as a newspaper columnist. Fiendishly prolific, the 40-year-old Chicago native and Air Force veteran wrote five columns a week for the Chicago Daily News. In 1972, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary and his work often found its way into other newspapers... View Article
In March 1982, Anheuser-Busch rolled out its new Bud Light in 40 states. It was the nation’s largest brewery’s long-awaited return salvo to Miller’s 1975 introduction of Miller Lite. That beer had propelled Miller from a relative also-ran in the increasingly consolidating American beer market to the No. 2 brewery behind Anheuser-Busch, a position it... View Article
In 1987, D.G. Yuengling & Son introduced an amber lager that was a throwback to the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, brewery’s first decade after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Much like back then, the mid-1980s was a time of transition at the brewery—or, more accurately, a time of turnaround, though it would be years before anyone... View Article
At the start of 1987, William Least Heat-Moon was a writer best-known for a 1982 book called Blue Highways. Heat-Moon (he was part Osage) had lost his job and his wife on the same winter’s day, and so had set off on a road trip, using as a guide those blue lines on maps... View Article
The hops shortage that hit the brewing industry 10 years ago could not have come at a worse time for smaller American brewers—stipulating that it’s never a great time for the industry to run short on its signature bittering and aroma agent, but it also ended up having a positive side effect. The number of... View Article
By the start of 1977, Michael Jackson was a mildly successful, 34-year-old newspaper and television journalist whose biggest coups to date were editing the in-flight magazine of Dutch airline KLM and filling in for another writer on a 1976 book called The English Pub (the photo-heavy affair covered exactly what its title implied). Jackson would... View Article
In early October 2006, the Joseph Huber Brewing Co. in Monroe, Wis., just north of the Illinois border, traded hands for an undisclosed sum. The buyer was Huber’s biggest contract-brewing client by far: the Mountain Crest Brewing Co. of Calgary, Canada. Within three days of the purchase, Mountain Crest’s two founders and owners renamed... View Article
In the forthcoming issue of All About Beer Magazine, I discuss Brouwerij Westmalle’s Tripel, one of the most important beers in the Belgian canon, in my Classic Beer column. Until that beer came along in the 1930s, amber and brown beers were the overwhelming norm in Belgian brewing. (There was another early blond, Witkap Pater,... View Article
My wife’s family is scattered across New England, from Wrentham, south of Boston, to Norway in Maine (just a few miles north of Poland Springs, for you mineral water fans). Every couple years, I get to visit for a week around Thanksgiving, and it has allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse of... View Article
