A view of beer writer Michael Jackson's office, the contents of which are now at a library in the United Kingdom. Photo courtesy of Oxford Brookes University.

The world’s best-known beer writer did not claim to get everything right at first.

“Obviously, I’m learning all the time, and revising my ideas. Nor did I start with the assumption that I knew better than anyone else,” Michael Jackson wrote to American beer importer Charles Finkel in 1981. “My initial contribution was not knowledge but a willingness to research.”

Jackson and Finkel were near the beginning of a friendship and business relationship that would last until the Englishman Jackson died in 2007. Finkel once said finding Jackson’s World Guide to Beer in 1978 “was to me like a heathen discovering the Bible,” and it was an essential reference in building the portfolio for his company, Merchant du Vin. Finkel had recently visited the author in London, and that the two were at ease with each other was obvious. Jackson suggested Finkel must have had a good time, because there was part of the evening the American apparently did not remember.

Jackson corresponded with total candor. “There is, in fact, no limit to the egomaniac self images I can conjure up, and will do, as raw images for anything you care to put together in Alephenalia [a newsletter Finkel created for Merchant du Vin],” he wrote. “Let me put it in another, mock-modest way: here are some of the aspects of my work in which I take pride.”

In the paragraphs that followed, Jackson did indeed forgo modesty, but more extraordinary in retrospect is how accurately he forecast, in 1981 and well before he became known as The Beer Hunter, a good portion of what he would be remembered for:— being the first writer to attempt an international study of beer styles, championing beer at the table, and using a “literate” vocabulary in his beer writing. Perhaps that vision explains why much of what he wrote before the current generation of beer drinkers was even born remains relevant today.

The Michael Jackson Collection

The typed carbon copy of what Jackson wrote to Finkel is filed along with more letters, promotional material and other documents related to Merchant du Vin inside a folder labeled MJ/4/14/211 in an archival box in the special collections room at the Oxford Brookes University library. In May of 2008, nine months after Jackson died, Don Marshall at Oxford Brookes supervised a crew that moved almost the entire contents of Jackson’s office in London to Oxford.

They packed up 83 linear feet of books (1,500 from his personal library and 300 copies of his own books, often with versions in multiple languages), the contents of 29 filing cabinets and 26 linear feet of archival material. The movers left behind only considerable quantities of beer and whisky, as well as most of the glassware.

Included among the objects moved were several pairs of Jackson’s glasses, Beer Hunter business cards, Christmas cards and a tattered copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Cut-up Post-it notes protrude from the top, acting as tabs, labeled with page and item numbers plus key words like beer, drink or porter. The last marks a quotation from J.P Donleavy, who wrote The Ginger Man.

It reads: “When I die, I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?”

The Beer Hunter’s place in history, as the world’s most prominent writer about whisky as well as about beer, was secured long before Jackson died. By donating all that he had accumulated, the executors of his estate, Paddy Gunningham and Sam Hopkins, assured the massive amount of information he collected would remain available to future historians.

Michael Zislis, Gene Simmons and Dave Furano

Kiss’ two active original members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, want you to rock ’n’ roll all night, party every day—and how about you nosh on some burgers and wings and try some microbrew from the new international casual dining chain they’re partners in, Rock & Brews.

In their trademark makeup, Simmons as “The Demon” and Stanley as “The Starchild” fashion the image of Kiss that’s as recognized—and bankable—as Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald. Makes you wonder why I, a beer writer, am hanging out with them in Los Cabos, Mexico, on assignment. They’re hardly connoisseurs.

Mr. Simmons does not drink beer at all (not even Kiss Destroyer, the licensed German Pilsner brewed in Sweden). “I like to be in control of myself,” he says from behind a pair of sunglasses (and black jacket and pants to match). “If I was high or drunk—and I’ve never been either—there’s no way that I’d be witty. I would not make any sense, and I may wind up throwing up on your shoes. [A buzz] doesn’t make my schmeckle bigger.”

Stanley hardly ever sips it. “My dad has always loved beer,” he says, decked out in a black leather jacket, jeans and shoes that look like zebra hair with rhinestones. “When most people were drinking Rheingold or Schaefer, my dad was getting Kirin, Tuborg, Guinness. My dad used to drink a beer that you put raspberry syrup into.” Whoa! Papa Starchild was clearly drinking a Berliner weisse pre-Renaissance.

As such, I asked why they’d sign on as partners in RockBrews. The rock part’s obvious. The décor is a clean congestion of epic album covers and photos—Beatles, Ozzy and here in Mexico nods to artists including Café Tacuba—while TVs screen music videos by Smashing Pumpkins or Rush.

Are they even aware of the craft brewing revolution that’s taken place? After all, Destroyer came out the same year as New Albion Brewing.

“Of course!” Simmons exclaims. “You’d have to be asleep at the wheel.”

Obviously, they’re not the principals. That’d be Dave Furano, a rock promoter who served as tour manager for bands including the Rolling Stones as the “Rock” half, and Michael Zislis, an LA restaurateur and hotelier who, having homebrewed since age 13, opened Manhattan Beach Brewing in 1989 as the first in his string of Southern California brewpubs before the bottom fell out of the second wave of the craft beer era. He represents “Brews.”

After the 1990s crash, Zislis retired his mash paddle, but his beer passion and acumen persisted. He created Bohemian Brewing and built some 150 systems for other brewers around the world. With Rock & Brews, he gets to support local craft brewers. And with plans to open about 100 locations worldwide, that’s a lot of locals.

Many, but not all, of the 52 taps at each restaurant will be craft-brewed. “If somebody wants Bud Light, I’m gonna sell him one,” Zislis says unapologetically. He pays homage “to the classics” among craft and import beers—Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head and Pilsner Urquell—while tasking each bar director with selecting “what’s happening in area.” The first RockBrews in the LA enclave El Segundo features El Segundo Brewing and Eagle Rock Brewery topping the taps along with Speedway Stout from San Diego’s AleSmith.

The Cabo spot only has “24 because they don’t have the same scene we have yet,” explains Zislis, but Baja Brewing’s Pelirroja red ale is excellent with a serious hop kick. Zislis added that he has plans for a keg exchange that’ll bring here beers such as Ballast Point’s Sculpin IPA, which you absolutely won’t find at Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo or the Hard Rock Cafe. RockBrews is in San José del Cabo while Hagar’s and Hard Rock are in the spring break miasma of Cabo San Lucas. They’re only 20 miles apart, but it’s stressed to me that the gap is much wider.

“Both Michael [Zislis] and I are foodies. As soon as I hear Michelin Star I go: Where?” enthuses Stanley. “The idea was not to be a theme restaurant with crappy food. Those are a dime a dozen. Having a theme environment should never be an excuse for poor food. … You can’t eat atmosphere. You can, but you’ll be very thin.”

This puts RockBrews more in line with chains Flying Saucer or Yard House. “I’d hate to be in the same breath as Hard Rock,” Zislis says.

As independent breweries strive to produce just 10 percent of the beer in America, growth needs to come from an untapped audience. There is an army, of sorts, to expose to better beer. As teetotaler Simmons reasons, “Life should give you a menu. I don’t like spinach so I’m not going to order this spinach thing, but that doesn’t mean somebody else shouldn’t have it.” In this way, RockBrews puts craft beer front-row center.

I overheard a member of Mexico’s Kiss Army ask the guys, “Will you be coming down here to jam?”

“No,” deadpans Stanley, “but we will be serving.”

Faces from All About Beer Magazine's list of 30 Under 30

With more than 2,000 craft breweries in production and another 1,000 in the planning stages, the craft beer scene is poised for growth and ground-breaking innovation like we’ve never seen before.

Craft beer’s pioneers deserve the lion’s share of the credit for where we are today, but where we’re going will be, to an increasing extent, influenced by another contingent: the young brewers who grew up in a world many now take for granted, one of abundance, one with more variety than “the fizzy, watered-down crap that the big guys push on us,” as Helder Pimentel, the 28-year-old founder of Boston’s Backlash Beer Co., puts it.

All About Beer Magazine wanted to know more about these brewers who are ready to push the envelope when it comes to beer styles, ingredients, brewing techniques, branding and presentation. We scoured the American craft beer world in search of 30 up-and-coming brewers (and a few brewing executives) who are 30 years old or younger who we think will be leading that charge as a new generation of brewers builds upon the foundation laid by craft beer’s pioneers.

A common theme throughout the series of interviews is excitement for craft beer’s potential and a sky-is-the-limit attitude about what the craft beer scene has to offer.

“The next generation of brewers are bringing a fresh approach to the brewing world,” says Kim Lutz, the 29-year-old former lead brewer at Maui Brewing Co. who is now helping launch Saint Archer Brewery in San Diego. “We are very open to bending the rules of what beer can be and creating new styles. It is crucial to understand traditional styles, but who is to say that we have to follow strict guidelines of what we want to produce and consume?”

New, zany beer styles aren’t the only things the next generation will contribute (though they’ll do that, too), says Luke Livingston, founder of Baxter Brewing Co. in Lewiston, Maine. “We will continue to push the envelope … with innovation, collaboration, better quality standards and fun,” he says.

They cite varying motivations, from creative expression to having a meaningful impact on their communities, but they share passion. Many—like Travis Guterson, the 29-year-old brewmaster at 7 Seas Brewing in Gig Harbor, WA—speak about brewing in reverential terms. “I didn’t choose for my life to revolve around brewing beer,” Guterson says. “Somehow it chose me.”

They didn’t all take the same path to get to where they are today—many started homebrewing, others washed kegs at a commercial brewery, some got their start in the wine world—but now that they’re all members of the same craft beer clan, they share a unified mission: to further the scope and breadth of the American craft beer scene, foster collaboration among its members and more deeply penetrate the individual communities in which their breweries operate.

“The brewing community is very much a collective power and team focused on improving our craft rather than competing for market share against one another,” says Jon Carpenter, the 30-year-old brewmaster at Golden Road Brewing in Los Angeles. “The family we build within and outside our brewery walls can’t be matched in almost any other industry I know of.”

But with opportunity comes responsibility. Besides experimenting with new ingredients and growing the market, the next generation are also tasked with protecting the collective spirit that has been fostered over the years by their predecessors, says Joe Mohrfeld, head brewer at Pinthouse Pizza in Austin, TX.

“It is up to us to maintain craft beer as the subculture that it is,” Mohrfeld says. “The industry started because some people thought they could be brewers and make something new and exciting. Let’s shake things up by being the industry that stays creative and doesn’t just worry about the numbers.”

All About Beer’s “30 Under 30” is designed to highlight brewers we think you’ll hear more about. It’s not a competition, so the list is unranked. Brewers are presented in alphabetical order by last name.

Read the following interviews and learn what the next generation of craft brewers have planned for the future of the industry.

Enjoy.

As the beer served at American bars has changed during the last generation, so too have the necessary inputs to meet the growing thirst among consumers for more flavorful brews. This means a shift in the supplier networks to meet the boutique needs of brewers. It has also meant the need for a vast increase in the knowledge base of the beer community, with training for servers that rivals what restaurants with a focus on fine wine have considered critical for decades.

The Pursuit of Hoppiness

Ralph Woodall first became acquainted with hops as a teenager when he worked the fall harvest as a seasonal job. Forty years later he is still finding new things to talk about when it comes to the conical flower.

You get hops in your blood,” Woodall says. “You develop a passion for hops. It kind of gets ingrained in you over the years.”

Woodall, 57, took a job with what is now Hopunion in 1983. The company, known as Western Hop Co. at the time, has changed hands five times over the years and along the way Woodall has watched the birth of the craft beer community in the United States.

Back then, the craft microbrewery movement was just starting. We were mainly dealing with Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Stroh’s, Miller, Pabst, Olympia and Rainier at the beginning,” Woodall says. “It was almost like a hobby when we started dealing with Sierra Nevada, BridgePort, Redhook and Pyramid in the mid-1980s.”

Then the craft beer business “exploded,” he says.

We had the inside track on working with craft brewers, knowing the hops they were using and dealing with smaller quantities,” Woodall says. By the mid-1990s, craft brewers had become the major share of the Hopunion business in the U.S.

Woodall worked as a traffic manager at Hopunion in the early days, growing into the position of director of operations responsible for production and warehousing. He could see the explosion happening in the craft beer segment by the daily shipments waiting for the UPS pick up.

We’d have four or five 44-pound boxes going out. When it got to 20 boxes a day, I used to jump in and help get the shipments out,” Woodall says. “Then it got to 40 boxes a day. When it started to get to palleted shipments, I said ‘I’m done.’”

Woodall became director of craft brewing sales for Hopunion’s Craft Division in 1997, a job that allowed him to travel the country and meet scores of brewers.

I was a true road warrior salesperson. We visited breweries and attended festivals and conventions. I would end up visiting 300-plus breweries a year,” Woodall says. “In the early days, you would be on the road and you’d run across start-ups in the middle of a trip that no one knew about. It was interesting to see guys like Bert Grant, the Widmer Brothers and Deschutes in the start-up stages. Now these breweries have all been around more than 20 years.”

Woodall also looks back to hop varieties like Centennial, Columbus, Chinook, Amarillo, Simcoe and Citra, and can trace their success to pioneering brewers and creative beer recipes.

Things really changed when hoppier beers started coming into play. There was a real evolution in beer styles and a new appreciation for hops among brewers and consumers,” Woodall says.

Woodall believes that companies like Hopunion and breweries that led the way in the formulation of today’s craft beer movement have a responsibility to mentor new people coming into the industry and help them to “recognize how we got here.”

Woodall notes that the changes in the hop market during the last couple of decades have not been without challenges. The most notable was the hop shortage that took place in 2007. He said that crisis made it clear to all involved that there is a need for a balance between farmers, dealers and brewers in trading in an agricultural commodity.

Things were out of balance and it took about three years for the crisis to develop. Basically, there was a reduction in the acreage devoted to hops in the early 2000s and at the same time more craft brewers were coming online,” Woodall says. “By 2007, we had a hop shortage.”

The economic downturn in 2008 signaled the end to increased hop demand. However, as prices have gone down, growers again reduced the amount of hops that they have planted. At the same time, beer sales have rebounded.

It was a real difficult last three years, but now we are seeing sustainable pricing for growers,” Woodall says.

According to Woodall, the 2010 crop came back from a cold, wet spring that delayed the growing season. A hot summer meant an average yield, but overall acreage has been reduced by as much as 20 percent in key U.S. growing regions. The result is that there may be some spot shortages of certain varietals, which will be further exasperated by demand for some hops favored for India pale ales. The harvest of imported hops is mixed due to weather conditions in August, but a surplus of hops from the 2009 harvest will help fill the gaps.

Hops have a way of coming through,” Woodall says.

Yeast Affection

Chris White got into homebrewing as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. When he came to San Diego in 1991 to go to graduate school he got “lucky” and became friends with some of the future heavyweights of the Southern California brewing scene.

I was just very lucky. If I was not in this city, none of this would have ever happened,” White says. What happened was the start of White Labs Inc., one of the leading suppliers of yeast to craft beer makers, wineries and distilleries.

I felt lucky I was homebrewing with these guys,” White says of his time at the University of San Diego where he spent time working in the yeast lab and making homebrew with the future brewers at Ballast Point, Stone, AleSmith and Pizza Port. “I didn’t expect it would turn into a business that would be selling yeast around the country.”

White Labs now has more than 1,000 customers. In the early days, White sold yeast to a local homebrew supply store in San Diego. Now more than half of the yeast White Labs sells is shipped east of the Mississippi and the company sells to brewers in 60 countries.

White, 42, is constantly on the road, spending just five to 10 days a month in San Diego. Most of the yeast the company propagates is sold to commercial breweries, although homebrewers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany remain frequent customers.

White built the company’s yeast inventory by visiting yeast banks in England, Belgium, Holland and Germany. “The strains we have are older than the current breweries that use them,” White says. “We went to the banks to get the pedigree.”

In addition to building a collection of yeast strains that it markets, White Labs also serves as a yeast bank for brewers and distillers. The company stores the frozen yeast as a safety net for brewers in case the yeast at the brewery develops a defect.

It’s been fun because the brewing industry in San Diego has grown up along with White Labs, and the rest of the country has also had remarkable growth among craft brewers,” White says.

White recognizes that many consumers think about hops and malt in their beer but don’t give the yeast much of a thought.

It’s hard to make yeast sexy, but brewers know,” White says. “In countries without a good yeast supply the beer suffers. Yeast has everything to do with the aroma and flavor of beer.”

White says he expects the craft segment of the industry will grow to be more than 10 percent of the market.

I think there is going to be more growth,” White says. “The distribution side of the business is not there yet. It still has to catch up with the growth in small breweries. Right now brewpubs and small craft brewers don’t have access to the distribution system. We already had our downturn in the industry in the 1990s. The breweries making bad beer are gone. There is a real opportunity for growth in the next 10 years.”

Malt Maven

Penny Pickart had no brewing or beer industry experience when she decided to take a job with Briess Malt & Ingredients Co. 14 years ago.

I’m a local girl. I kind of just fell into the industry,” Pickart says, who switched from a career in financial services. She started in the customer service operation at Briess, but soon moved over to sales. Pickart’s job involves working with brewers on beer formulation, answering questions about malt and troubleshooting brewing issues.

I’m the internal voice of the brewer at Briess,” Pickart says.

Pickart, 48, attended the Siebel Institute to learn the science behind brewing and her sensory talents have resulted in her serving as a beer judge during the last six years for both the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup.

If you would have told me I would be judging beer as part of my job a few years ago I would have said, ‘I’m not that lucky,’” Pickart says.

Pickart’s sales territory runs from Michigan and the Dakotas, down through the center of the country to Texas. She spends about 50 percent of her time on the road visiting breweries and meeting with customers.

I taste a lot of beer,” she says. “We taste it to be sure there are no defects. A beer needs to be balanced and you are looking for drinkability. Drinkability is very important.”

There is no other beverage in the world that offers the range of flavors and styles as beer,” Pickart says. “Look at the uniqueness of Belgian beers, the flavors of barrel-aged beers. I could never pick just one beer or one beer style. It depends on the day, the weather and where you are.”

While the trend in hoppy beers may have taken some of the limelight off of malt, Pickart maintains that malt is even more important in building a big beer. “You don’t make a good hoppy beer without using good malt,” she says. “We sell a lot of malt to brewers that make big IPAs.”

Brewers are always looking for something new and exciting,” Pickart says. Briess markets more than 60 different varieties of malt, which she says is the largest selection of any malting company. Most of the malt that Briess makes comes from barley grown within a 20-mile radius of the company’s Wisconsin operations.

Pickart says she was attracted to Briess because of the family atmosphere. “I was drawn to the industry by this company. Monica Briess is a great leader,” Pickart says. “It’s more than just a job.” She says the friendly attitude extends beyond Briess and permeates the industry.

The growth we are seeing in craft brewing is going to continue, even in this difficult economy,” Pickart says. “People are willing to pay good money for good beer.”

We are making some of the best beer in the world right here in the U.S. People should drink local. They should drink fresh beer,” she says.

Certified to Serve

Andrew Van Til knows a thing or two about beer. And he has the paperwork to prove it.

Van Til, who is an account manager with CKL Corp. in Michigan, was the first person to earn the certified Master Cicerone designation in 2009. The Cicerone program for beer servers is similar to the certification process that a sommelier goes through to show a superior knowledge of wine.

I love the basic sales rep work involved in selling beer. We have a great portfolio and great customers,” Van Til says. “But I really like talking to people about beer and educating them.”

Van Til is 33 years old and holds a degree in chemistry. He worked as a bartender and has been around the business for a decade. The Cicerone process has three levels: certified beer server, which is a 60 question written test; Cicerone, with a written exam and blind tasting; and Master Cicerone. The test to achieve the Master Cicerone designation requires two days and includes essay questions, an oral exam and a tasting panel component.

It is a difficult test. You have to be able to identify styles, identify flaws,” Van Til says. “You also need to know about the basics of maintaining a draught system. It is a pretty in-depth process.”

People in the beer industry are so friendly. They all compete, but they are willing to help,” he says. The training process to prepare for the Master Cicerone exam included plenty of reading and beer tasting.

I had a pretty good foundation in beer, but it was important that I set goals for preparation and study time,” he says. Juggling a young family and a busy job made preparing for the exam even more difficult. Anyone considering taking the exam should talk to a local brewer and ask for help in building their understanding of beer.

Van Til loves to talk beer.

It’s fun to talk with people about how a beer is made, the different aspects of the beer style and the history of the brewery, then put the beer in front of them to taste,” Van Til says. “My goal is to break down the stereotypes of what a beer is and what it isn’t.”

He says he is starting to see a greater understanding of beer in the market, which will lead to further growth among craft domestics and import.

We’re seeing changes in the market. People are looking at beer as food,” said Van Til. “Education is a key part of helping to raise the understanding of beer in America.”

The evolving and expanding craft beer segment requires constant feeding. Quality raw ingredients for brewing, trained brewers, educated servers and informed consumers are bringing about a deeper appreciation for both classic and new beer styles.

The future of the industry depends on this fuel to keep the river of great beer flowing.

America’s beer IQ has been on a steady climb, thanks in large part to an army of dedicated beer “educators” who do everything from help people learn how to produce better homebrew to making it easier to find the next great place to have a pint.

A Civilized Approach

Samuel Merritt got started in the beer business by “fighting for draught lines every day” as a brand representative at Brooklyn Brewery and later the Craft Brewers Guild, the former distribution arm for the company. “I don’t ever want to put another keg of beer in the trunk of a car,” he quips.

While he is no longer interested in hawking beer, he is still motivated to help sell more beer. “Beer is really one of the first things man ever made and sold,” he says. “Being a brewer is probably the third oldest profession.”

Merritt formed Civilization of Beer in 2006, a company focused on beer education and consulting. In addition to doing consumer tastings and corporate events, Civilization of Beer focuses on improving beer knowledge among distributors and retailers.

You have to have the beer appreciation thing down and it has to go right alongside the professional side of selling,” Merritt says of the making of successful distributors or retail salespeople. “Educating the ‘old-timers’ is the hardest part of what we do. We start off by having them take the Great Beer Test, which is a 100 question multiple-choice test. Most of the time they end up saying, ‘I really thought I knew about beer, but I don’t.’”

Civilization of Beer is based in New York and teaches regular monthly consumer and professional training classes in that city, as well as traveling to states like Illinois, Texas, Florida and California to offer classes. The recreational division of the company does private parties and corporate events, and also offers classes through the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. “It is still a discovery process for many consumers,” Merritt says.

The need for training of hospitality industry professionals became apparent to Merritt while he was still selling beer for Brooklyn. “Instead of talking about the features of our brand, I ended up teaching people about what beer is,” Merritt says. “The sales people I was dealing with were selling beer like it was any other fast moving good. It might as well have been toilet paper.”

The more you know about beer, the easier it is to hand-sell beer,” he says. Merritt notes that the formal Cicerone certification process is proof of how far beer has come and where it is headed. The Civilization of Beer training program for distributors and retailers uses assigned readings from books, videos, pop quizzes and reviews of the tasting panel section of All About Beer Magazine to immerse students in the world of lagers and ales.

We can turn the light on in an hour or two, and make a pretty big transformation in a day,” Merritt says. Still, he points out, when you look at the time spent by both restaurant staffs and consumers to become beer smart, it is still a fraction of what people put into learning about wine.

Merritt calls himself “an anti-beer snob. I’m a Miller High Life and a Chimay drinker. I drink them with equal pleasure.” And being educated can help you enjoy them both more.

Book Smarts

Kristi Switzer says she has “the best job ever.” What does she do? Switzer is the publisher at Brewers Publications, an arm of the Brewers Association in Boulder, CO, that turns out books for both professional brewers and homebrewers.

We publish good, solid books that people come back to again and again as they brew,” says Switzer. “It’s great when we hear a brewer say, ‘You have to have this book’ when they are talking to a another brewer, or when a tattered book shows up at a book signing. It’s great to see a well-loved brewing book that might have stains and smell of hops. You can tell they are getting used.”

Brewers Publications has 50 titles to its credit. Its best-selling book, How to Brew by John Palmer, was self-published by the author when Brewers Publications started publishing it in 2006. The book has sold 60,000 copies since then.

Switzer came to Brewers Publications after spending 13 years as director of marketing communications at Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juno, Alaska. She “learns something everyday” reading the manuscripts of brewing books and often finds herself drinking a particular beer style based on a project she has in the works at the time.

I consumed copious amounts of wheat beer while working on the new Stan Hieronymus book, Brewing with Wheat,” Switzer says.

Brewers Publications typically releases two books a year. Switzer looks for holes that need to be filled in the knowledge base of homebrewers and commercial brewers. She networks with brewers and writers, making herself accessible at craft beer events so that she knows the right people in order to match them up with a project down the road.

Sales for Brewers Publications continue to grow as the homebrewing hobby has prospered. For Switzer the key to a successful project is “taking the science of brewing and making it accessible in a practical book.” All of the Brewers Publications books share a focus on brewing styles, ingredients and the process of producing better beer.

The process of publishing a book on brewing is a lengthy and involved, starting three to five years before a book hits the shelves. Brewers Publications will focus on a topic and discuss potential authors for the book. The project starts with a rough outline that the author will gradually fill in. Once a detailed outline is approved, the author will go to work on researching the book. The actually writing then begins and Switzer plays the role of coach and monitor, setting a deadline for the manuscript and establishing a target release date.

I’ve tried to add in more time to the process to plan for every contingency,” Switzer says. “You want to have time built in so you have the openness to be gracious. There are just things that happen during the writing of a book.”

Once the writer delivers a manuscript, Switzer will do an initial check before it is sent off for technical review to make sure that the science end of the project is accurate. The document comes back and undergoes copy editing, footnotes are added and references are chronicled. Meanwhile, Switzer is holding meetings about cover art and the interior look and feel of the book. Then, it is time for final editing and proofreading. Only when every step is complete is a book ready to be published.

Switzer has homebrewed for a number of years and her time at Alaskan Brewing provided her with a good understanding of the art of brewing. But reading the how-to brewing books as they come to life has allowed her a better understanding of what it takes to make a great beer and what goes wrong when a beer has a flaw.

We’re feeding off the growth in craft beer and homebrewing, and the demand for current information and knowledge,” Switzer says. “We’re trying to satiate that thirst for knowledge.”

Mapping Out a Plan

Jonathan Surratt describes himself as “a pretty visual person.” He combined this trait with a desire for finding great beer to create a tool that many beer enthusiasts find invaluable when they visit a new city for the first time.

Surratt and his wife, Robin, were living in North Carolina and became interested in craft beer. They found it difficult to track the locations of breweries and brewpubs in the state and realized others likely were struggling with the very same issue. Surratt decided to build a map plotting the 30 breweries and brewpubs that were located in North Carolina at that time.

The reaction to the North Carolina beer map was so positive that Surratt repeated the process for Michigan and Indiana, then went nationwide. The Beer Mapping Project (beermapping.com) is now international with locations in 20 countries.

We want to give people as many options as we can, so they can find places to try new beers,” Surratt says.

The Beer Mapping Project utilizes Google’s free mapping API and the hundreds of beer fans who submit locations. So far, 9,250 breweries, beer bars, brewpubs, beer stores and homebrew shops have been cataloged.

Confirming the information we get is really hard because no one is getting paid for this,” Surratt says. Robin Surratt has the ultimate approval power for a new listing and is on the lookout for duplicates of places already on the list or for entries submitted by owners. Contributors are urged to photograph the exterior, interior and tap list so first time visitors can more easily find the location and know what to expect when they arrive.

The Beer Mapping Project does offer a $15 lifetime subscription that links the data to GPS devices, which “basically pays the server bill,” he says. “We’re basically giving away the site.”

Surratt says the payoff has come in the form of knowing that the Beer Mapping Project “has helped a tiny bit” in building a stronger beer community and making it possible for consumers to find new and out of the way beer spots.

I hear people talking about using it to find good craft beer,” Surratt says. “It’s fun to see someone walk into a bar with one of our T-shirts on.”

Surratt now works as a web developer and he realizes that the original need for the Beer Mapping Project is starting to fade.

It is getting easier to find good craft beer,” Surratt says, assessing that the site is shifting from being a purely a locator and source for directions to now having a social side by allowing comments and reviews that help consumers select which location to try. “I guess you could ask if it is still necessary to have a website like this, but I think with some of the mobile apps and giving people the ability to separate the good from the bad, we bring value to the equation.”

Women Drink Beer, Too

Ginger Johnson’s entry into the community of beer all came together one night in 2002 at a beer dinner at Granite City Brewing in Sioux Falls, SD. She was on a first date and had decided on the beer dinner as a safe and fun way to get to know her new acquaintance.

He threw back the first sample and slammed down the flute and announced ‘This is not going to do,’” Johnson says. “I was thinking exactly the same thing, but it was not about the beer.”

I had an epiphany at the beer dinner,” Johnson says. “There was this community of food and beer people, but I realized that most brewers were only marketing to men.”

As it turns out, the Granite City beer dinner was significant for Johnson for another reason; Larry Chase, Johnson’s future husband, was the brewer conducting the tasting. Johnson was managing hardware stores, but was intrigued by the beer business.

The whole feeling around the beer industry was great. Beer brings people together and they want to engage,” Johnson says. “The brewing industry is extremely cordial.

Johnson developed a presentation with the title “What About the Other 50 Percent?” for the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference in Boston. The marketing manifesto was part of Johnson’s birthing of “Women Enjoying Beer” (www.womenenjoyingbeer.com), which has the aim of helping the industry cultivate female beer enthusiasts.

The industry has new market share it can add without cannibalizing existing sales,” Johnson says. “I want to do what I can do to make the industry thrive. This segment can make a difference in brewery sales.”

According to Johnson, beer is already a socially acceptable beverage for women to consume at a wide range of events. She says the key is moving to a point of social familiarity where women have a knowledge base and comfort level to order beer in a variety of settings. She notes that some markets around the country, such as Portland, OR, have already experienced this transition.

Johnson’s goal is to educate beer marketers so that they know more about what motivates female customers and that they avoid pinkwashing an issue or outright pandering to half of their potential customer base.

Marketing beer to women cannot be an initiative,” Johnson says. “It has to be a permanent part of the culture. They shouldn’t care about the plumbing of the customer, they need to want to sell more beer.”

Brewers need to focus on events that help educate women about beer and make sure participants recognize the benefits they will find as an educated consumer, she said. Another essential factor is building in social elements to the program that women tend to crave.

By all means the answer is not brewing a ‘woman’s beer,’” Johnson says. “We believe in tossing out preconceived notions and supplying beer education materials where and when it is possible.”

The more we know about beer, the more we enjoy beer. From finding the roots of brewing traditions to uncovering today’s best new craft brewers, knowledge is power. For brewers, no matter how healthy the craft segment has been, without the spread of information through marketing, journalism and beer education, future growth would slow to a halt. Craft beer has overcome the mass homogenization of the beverage in large part because the stories behind craft beer are almost as enticing as the flavors of the beer, itself.

No matter which start date you subscribe to, the reality is that the founders of the craft brewing movement are now, 30 years later, approaching retirement. In fact, Fritz Maytag sold Anchor Brewing Co. earlier this year and other brewers who helped form the first wave of the craft brewing movement are hard at work on business succession plans.

Where there were once just a few dozen pioneers making craft beer, there are now hundreds. Personalities like Sam Calagione, Adam Avery, Carol Stoudt, Tomme Arthur, Geoff Larson and Garrett Oliver are some of the modern faces of craft beer that most of us know and respect. But what of the next wave? Who might become the media darlings of the next generation of craft brewing? Who is attracting the kind of critical attention that could make them the names on everyone’s tongues when they talk beer in the coming decade?

Those are not easy questions to answer. After all, think back just 10 years ago. Did you really imagine that beers from breweries like Allagash, Firestone Walker, Founders, Three Floyds, Bear Republic, Jolly Pumpkin, Foothills or Stone would come to define craft beer greatness? The constant is the craft movement pushing forward and beer fans on an endless search for the next great beer find. Here are a few brewers that are positioned to be the next craft brewing rock stars.

From Drinker to Brewer

Paul Cain says he “kind of got lucky” landing a job at Southern Tier Brewing in Western New York. He was at a friend’s house in 2004 having a couple of beers when the brewery called asking the friend to come in for an interview.

He couldn’t do it, so the brewery asked if there was anyone there who could, so my friend passed me the phone,” says the 29-year-old Cain. He was designing snowboard ramps at the time and first heard about Southern Tier as planning was underway to open the brewery a couple of years earlier. “I just kind of got lucky. I said yes and got started working in packaging and shipping that summer.” The brewery had five employees at the time.

I ended up training in the cellar and then gaining experience in the brewhouse.” He is currently the lead cellarman at Southern Tier..

I like the creative aspect of brewing. That really appeals to me,” Cain says. “I can make something that other people are going to enjoy. It’s a product people think about and they talk about.”

Cain says the one constant since he has joined Southern Tier Brewing has been expansion. “We cannot make enough beer,” he says. The brewery now ships beer to more than 50 percent of the country, having just opened Florida and Georgia. When Cain joined Southern Tier, the company had 100 barrels of fermenting capacity. It now has 2,000 barrels of fermenting tanks. The expansion is coming at an extremely rapid rate. Southern Tier Brewing made 16,000 barrels of beer in 2009 and expects to reach 30,000 barrels this year.

The demand for the beer stretches beyond the domestic market. Southern Tier ships beer to Europe, Scandinavia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

During a visit to Amsterdam I actually found our beer on the shelf of a beer store, which was kind of neat,” Cain says. “And Asia has an unquenchable thirst for American products.”

Southern Tier will make about 30 different beers during the course of a year. These include a group of year-round products and some one-off experiments.

There is still a counterculture environment in craft brewing,” Cain says. “Much of what we brew goes against the grain a bit. Not everyone understands it, but those who get it are cool. They really like the difference.”

Cain says the success comes from the fact that Southern Tier Brewing is focused on reinventing Belgian-style ales and treats beer like wine.

Our growth will plateau at some point, but we’re not quite at that point yet,” Cain says.

Shedding Some Light on Dark

If you were going to start a brewery focused entirely on making dark beer, the Southeastern United States might not be the first place you would think of locating. But that is what Paul Philippon did.

Philippon, 44, started to homebrew as a senior in college in 1987. “I fell in love with brewing beer,” he says. “I already loved drinking beer.”

In the mid-1990s, Philippon was teaching at Eastern Michigan University and decided he needed a career change. After considering a few options he decided to follow his love of making beer and enrolled at the Siebel Institute in 1996. Along with the technical classes in brewing beer, he enjoyed talking with other would-be brewers during tasting sessions that were designed around finding flaws in particular brews.

After graduating, he quickly landed a job at a now defunct Cincinnati, OH, brewpub, Brewmasters. Next he moved to Pipkin Brewery in Louisville, KY, which made its own line of beers and contract brewed for Bluegrass Brewing. That company would later acquire Pipkin.

Philippon’s next stop was the Williamsville Brewery near Wilmington, NC. He was at a point where he felt ready to open his own brewery.

When I first went pro it was my goal to eventually open a place. That is not that unusual for brewers,” Philippon says. “I felt it was important to pay my dues and learn from other people along the way. And this also gave me the experience to help get a bank loan.”

Philippon was ready to open a brewery, but felt he needed some type of hook. “I looked at the beer brands I respected and that were having success. I was looking for a common thread and it appeared they all had some sort of specialty,” he says. “Stone was making hoppy, aggressive beers. Allagash made Belgian-style beers. Dogfish Head was making experimental beers.”

I wanted to emulate their success, but do something different that I could be proud of,” Philippon says. “That’s when the idea of dark beer came up. There is a whole world of dark beers that I love and think are great. “

The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery was born out of this thinking and sold its first beer in August 2004. Operating out of Farmville, NC, the company has four year-round dark ales: amber, brown, porter and milk stout. Consumers quickly warmed to the idea of a brewery focused on dark beers, making milk stout an instant hit that accounts for 50 percent of the company’s sales.

I’m somewhat surprised by it, but Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout was the horse that ran the fastest right out of the gate,” Philippon says.

In the craft beer industry, timing is often everything. When Duck-Rabbit opened its doors, under North Carolina law it could not produce beer above 6 percent alcohol by volume. However, a grassroots movement called Pop the Cap was able to get legislation passed in 2006 allowing beer up to 15 percent alcohol by volume to be sold legally in the state. This opened up an entirely new avenue for Duck-Rabbit in the area of high gravity brews. The company was soon making seasonals like Russian imperial stout, barley wine, a Scottish wee heavy and a Baltic porter. A line of dark lagers also flows from the brewery on a seasonal basis, including a schwarzbier, doppelbock and märzen.

Duck-Rabbit currently sells about 3,500 barrels annually. The current brewhouse could reach 4,000 barrels with more focus on brewing efficiency, but that would require cutting back on some of the seasonals and reducing some of the specialties the brewery makes. The brewery regularly fields calls from distributors around the country that it has to turn down.

We’ve never been interested in exponential growth,” Philippon says. “I’ve wanted to keep our brewery culture how we like it.”

Upstream with a Brewers Paddle

Mike Hall was studying electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. He could not legally buy beer, but he discovered that he could legally buy all of the necessary ingredients to brew beer. A homebrewer was born.

In the early 1990s, two commercially produced beers caught his attention: Pete’s Wicked Ale and HC Berger Red Banshee. He started buying books on brewing, got involved in the local homebrew club and graduated to all-grain brewing in 1995.

I put myself around the brewers,” Hall says. “The beer scene was exploding at the time.”

While his beer passion was growing, Hall was working as a field tester for a data services firm. Then economic downturn after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, put him out of work.

I was ready to put on some brewer’s boots and decided to get out of electrical engineering,” he says. Hall went to work at Bristol Brewing in Colorado Springs for three years, before moving to Flat Head Lake Brewing in Big Fork, MT, for a year. Then he landed the lead brewer position at Oskar Blues Brewing in Lyons, CO. That all led to his move two years ago to Upstream Brewing in Omaha, NE.

Upstream owner Brian McGee and his partners were open to experimenting. The city was begging for some beer change. Hall did not disappoint.

We did a lot of crazy things when I first got here,” he says. “We cut half the line up and changed other year-round beers to seasonal. This sparked the interest of the house brewers and their assistants.”

We brew all kinds of beer,” Hall says. “I’m very passionate about Belgian beers—sours, abbey ales and saisons. But I’m also into lagers. I like the technical side of lagers and enjoy the freedom of the farmhouse. I also like to drink IPAs and other ales.”

Upstream has two locations in Omaha. One is in the Old Market District and the other is in the western suburbs. And while Omaha might not be the first place you think of when you talk about interesting beers, Hall points out the city is culturally sophisticated and diverse.

Upstream Brewing produces six house beers on a regular basis, three rotating seasonals and two “brewer’s whims,” which tends to be extreme brews.

Hall notes not all of those brewing adventures are hits. For every success, like saison with hibiscus, pink guava, mango and strawberry, or ale made with pink and green peppercorns, ginger and grains of paradise, a few brews will miss the mark. That is part of the price to be paid when you push the envelope. Hall calls these “successful failures.”

One example is a recipe Hall concocted because the two Upstream locations have restaurants with bakery operations. Oatmeal Cookie was made with several hundred pounds of toasted oats, vanilla, cinnamon and dry hopped with raisins. While Hall said it was a good tasting brew, the name was the problem because the result really did not taste like an oatmeal cookie.

Another failure was Lavender Lager. “It was a great pilot brew,” Hall says. “But, the lavender flavor got stronger when we made a full batch.”

The experimentation—good and bad—is all part of Hall’s plan to “keep it fresh and not repeat things” at Upstream.

Unless you are passionate about brewing, you won’t like it,” Hall says. “This is the hardest job you’ll ever love.”

A Trail of 25 Years

Ron Gansberg began making wine at Mulhausen Winery in Oregon in 1984, but his start in the beverage world came much earlier. “I’ve been doing fermenting since I was 12 years old with root beer and with fruit wines.”

Gansberg decided early on at Mulhausen that winemaking might not be his thing.

Cascade Brewing’s Ron Gansberg and beer sage Fred Eckhardt.

Beer is a daily beverage,” Gansberg says. “You are active all year long making beer. In the wine business, after the harvest it is sleepy hollow. You can be victim of the climate when you are making wine. With beer you are making another batch the next day.”

In 1986, an opportunity developed at BridgePort Brewing and Gansberg moved over to the beer business. He would later go to work at Portland Brewing, before joining Cascade Brewing 13 years ago as the foundations were being poured.

After 10 years of competing with major brewers making IPAs and other standards, and living through hop shortages and barley price increases, the people behind Cascade Brewing came to the conclusion that “we needed to create a higher value product, with higher margins,” Gansberg says. So in 2007, Cascade made blackberry, cherry and apricot sour ales.

Making sour beers is a culmination of my years in the cellar making wine,” he says. “We only use real fruit, mostly whole fruit in season. Raspberries are the only fruit we use that is frozen.”

In many ways, the move to fruit beers has taken Gansberg full circle to where the climate and growing season influence the final product. And he likes to get involved at harvest time, bragging that he can pick 50 pounds of cherries in an hour for Cascade Kriek.

I’m the happiest when I’m in the orchard or the field looking at the fruit,” he says. “We like the connection to the fruit and the growers. We make a Northwest-style sour beer that fits our palate, our likes and taste.”

Cascade does not use any concentrates or essences to make its sour ales.

We are trying to stay very true to the fruit. The aromas, the flavors and the sourness, acidity of the fruit,” Gansberg says. The range of fruit beers ranges from the basics you have come to know from Belgian-style brewers to unique brews, such as The Vine (grapes) and Noyeaux (raspberries and apricot pits).

Cascade Brewing, which is connected to the Raccoon Lodge brewpub, still makes a standard line up of beers, but it is the sour ales that occupy much of Gansberg’s time.

We’ve had a steep learning curve for the sour beers,” Gansberg says. “It’s been very rejuvenating. I’ve loved every minute.”

The move to a focus on sour beers has also been reinvigorating for Cascade Brewing. The company recently established a barrelhouse on the east side of Portland that will be the home of 500 barrels of sour beer as they age.

As the craft beer industry heads to the future, fueled by the creativity of brewers like Cain, Philippon, Hall and Gansberg, it will continue to reinvent itself. The next wave of brewers form a new generation of beer makers that owe the original craft brewers a debt that can only be repaid with great beer made with attention to quality and authenticity.

A career in beer can take many forms. It could involve a nomadic life with a passport filled with stamps from exotic locations; or days spent behind the wheel, with an occasional snooze in the car after the road has taken its toll. Beer is a liquid that flows across state and national borders, taking with it the men and women who call the industry home. For some, the road warrior life can be a step in their career development; for others, being a beer nomad is a lifestyle and business decision made after decades in the business.

Brewing Itinerate

Dann Paquette embarked on a dream career when he started brewing professionally back in 1992. He worked for a couple of American breweries before heading to England to make traditional real ale in North Yorkshire. But Paquette had a passion to do his own thing and came back to the United States in the summer of 2008.

Because I’m a brewer, I didn’t have a few million dollars to pull out of my back pocket to build a brewery,” Paquette says. Deciding that going into debt to start a brewery was not for them, Paquette and his wife, Martha, came up with the idea for Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project. For $13,000 they would launch a wandering brewery that leases the equipment of other craft beer companies to produce their beer.

I’ll go in to a brewery in the middle of the night to brew and finish up around lunchtime,” Paquette says of his brewing schedule. “The hardest thing is to find a brewery to work with because most are bursting at the seams. If you went to 100 breweries and asked them to do what we do, 99 would not let you in.”

Paquette firmly states that Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project is not a contract brewer. He leases the equipment and brews his own beer. He says his business model confuses some people, but at the end of the day he is connected and passionate about his beer. “Life is consumed with the beer and brewing. I’m more attached to these beers than most brewers,” Paquette says.

Currently Paquette brews his flagship Jack D’Or Saison and other beers at Buzzards Bay Brewing in Westport, MA, and Mercury Brewing in Ipswich, MA. One of the interesting series of beers Pretty Things has launched is the Once Upon a Time collection that takes a date out of brewing history for inspiration. The idea is to look at the brewing log at a historic brewery and recreate the recipe used that day. The first beer in the series was taken from Feb. 27th, 1832; a London XXXX Mild Ale brewed on Brick Lane. The recipe attracted Paquette because the “Mild” weighs in at 10.5 percent alcohol by volume. The next beer in the series will be a dark ale brewed by Whitbread in 1901.

While Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project has reached 2,500 barrels of annual output and remains debt free, “I don’t think I’d go out of my way to choose this business model,” Paquette says. “At the end of the day, I’m not the boss of the brewery. You have to work with how they have their equipment set up and they have to trust that you won’t go around moving and changing things.”

But Paquette is not planning to change his itinerate brewing style any time soon. In fact, one idea he has is to match breweries to beers he wants to make.

It would be great to choose the right brewery to make the right beer,” Paquette says. “You could make a style in a brewhouse designed to produce that particular beer.”

Selling Beer is Not a Desk Job

The explosion of craft breweries in the United States has created a cornucopia of beer options for consumers. There is a wide variety of distribution models that exist for craft brewers—everything from selling every drop they make across a brewpub bar to shipping beer nationwide through a network of distributors. For brands making the transition from local to regional distribution, success often depends on garnering attention from distributors who must juggle multiple labels and retailers who are being pitched daily to replace your tap handle with a nationally advertised brand.

Quality beer and strong branding is important, but the critical linchpin in the operation is often the regional sales manager who does everything from organizing a pub night and introducing the brand to a new market to attending beer festival after beer festival, pouring samples for as many potential customers as possible.

Joel Armato was working a desk job and had a beer blog two years ago when he decided to become a “beer ambassador” for Michigan’s New Holland Brewing. He was into beer, had been a bartender and run beer tastings, but this did not prepare him for the 2,500 miles a month he typically covers representing Mad Hatter IPA and Dragon’s Milk in a territory that stretches from New Jersey to South Carolina. Some days can stretch to 18 hours, taking away some of the glamour and fun of being in the beer business.

During my first couple of months on this job, I would have been a good one to follow around to get a few good laughs,” Armato says. Those first few road trips included ordering a hot dog and a beer in a Pittsburgh bar at 8:30 a.m. to be able to get to use the bathroom, a night sleeping in his car and a wardrobe change in the middle of a farm field.

I was on my way to a beer dinner and got lost in the middle of Pennsylvania farm country. The only way to show up looking like I knew what I was doing was to pull over and get changed into my clothes for the evening,” says Armato. “I figured if you show up wearing the appropriate clothing no one will ask where you put it on.”

The life of a brewery regional sales representative is a combination of sales calls and special events, the former building availability and the latter generating demand. Armato spends his workdays riding with distributor sales staff to meet managers at on- and off-premise accounts. His nights and weekends are often filled with beer dinners, tastings for consumers at retailers and working some of the many festivals that have popped up around the country.

When you cover a big territory, things can get undone as you go. The wholesaler guys on the street who are in these accounts on a weekly basis are key: they are at least 80 percent of the process,” Armato says. “There are bars that it has taken the better part of a year to get our beer in. Then you get a bar that immediately wants 30 kegs of our Golden Cap to run as a promotion all summer.”

The craft beer world is a small one, Armato points out. Competitors often end up being friends as they meet up at the same festivals over the course of a year.

We’re peers just as much as we are competitors,” says Armato. “We like to see each other. We’re pretty much all good friends and like to hang out after a festival ends.”

Passport to Brew

Alan Kornhauser has had his brewing passport stamped in places like Wisconsin, California, Oregon, Hawaii, Tibet and China. Along the way, he has worked for regional brewers, craft brewers and international breweries.

I live in Japan, but I brew in China and Hawaii,” Kornhauser says. After breaking into the business with Huber Brewing in Wisconsin, Kornhauser was at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco when he decided to leave the company to move to Japan to learn the language.

I have had a lifelong infatuation with Japan,” he says. “My father’s cousin, David Kornhauser, was a translator after the War and ended up marrying Kyoko Kornhauser, so there have been Japanese Kornhausers in my family from the time I was 3 years old.” While in Kyoto, Kornhauser met his wife, Yukako. She passed away nearly four years ago, but Kornhauser continues to live in Japan when he is not on the road as Pabst’s brewmaster and chief representative for Asia.

At this point in my career, I’ve had 20 to 30 years of 10- to12-hour days,” Kornhauser says. Being located in Japan makes travel relatively simple to get to Chaoquing, China, or Hilo, HI, the locations of the two breweries he is responsible for at Pabst.

I’m in China every other month for two to three weeks. While I’m in Chaoquing, I do a complete audit of the plant, from brewing to aging and packaging. I check everything, even the warehouse to be sure things are being used in the correct rotation,” Kornhauser says. In Hawaii, he is responsible for overseeing the brewing of Primo draught.

Kornhauser has spearheaded the launch of what he calls the first craft beers made in China, Pabst Black Lager and 1844, a reddish brown, all malt, dry-hopped ale, conditioned in new, uncharred American oak whiskey barrels.

The Chinese beer market is changing by leaps and bounds. Palates are really expanding,” Kornhauser says.

Brewcation

Mike Saxton has made about 40 trips to Europe to visit breweries and drink in pubs. And he gets paid to do it.

Saxton runs BeerTrips.com, a company that specializes in developing small group tours to European and North American beer hot spots. The tours take 12 to 15 guests on malty journeys ranging from five to nine nights to explore beer culture.

Beer is an excellent path into European history,” Saxton says. “What we try to do with our tours is to focus on beer, but leave time for people to go out and explore, enjoy dinner on their own, visit a museum, take some pictures and check out a bar they’ve heard about.”

BeerTrips.com got its start back in 1998 when Saxton happened to meet Greg Hall from Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago. The pair used the same printer. Saxton was working for a small tour company; Hall was interested in putting a trip together for customers to visit Belgium. Saxton had discovered Belgian beer during a side trip in college while spending a semester in France. The Great Beers of Belgium trip was born and would ultimately take travelers to Chimay, Orval, Rodenbach, Cantillon, Rochefort and beyond.

Shortly afterwards, Saxton purchased the beertrips.com domain name and set up a business that he says really was more of a hobby at the start. The trips soon expanded beyond Belgium, taking in brewing capitals like Prague, Bamberg, Munich, Amsterdam, Krakow, St. Petersburg, Dublin and Cologne. By 2008, even with the economic slowdown and negative exchange rate taking a toll, BeerTrips.com was sending beer tourists on 13 different tours to locations that now also included Oregon and Quebec.

Saxton says that his customers fall into three basic categories: first time European travelers wanting the security blanket of an organized tour, experienced travelers looking for insider access to famous breweries and the “repeat offenders” who have taken multiple BeerTrips.com tours. The common denominator is an interest in good beer.

One of Saxton’s specialties is getting access to places that average tourists cannot experience. In the early days that meant gaining approval of the abbot at Rochefort for his groups to visit the monastery, tour the brewery, take part in a church service with the monks and even eat in the dining hall.

We believe that less is more when it comes scheduling. Visiting two breweries and having a group lunch is a big day,” Saxton says. The first day in a city usually includes a walking tour of historic sites with a local guide, combined with stops at a couple of classic beer bars. “If we have a couple of busy days we’ll have a free day next to give people some time to enjoy themselves and relax.”

BeerTrips.com sometimes will include a stop at a beer festival along its route, but Saxton feels these do not work well for groups because they fail to offer the intimate experience most people enjoy. “I’d much rather have a brewmaster to ourselves in his cellar tasting beers than have to compete for their attention at a beer festival,” he says.

The addition of North American destinations to the schedule is partially a result of the economy and its impact on people’s willingness to spend the money to tour Europe. But it also reflects the continued improving beer scene and developing interest on this side of the Atlantic.

People will ask me ‘What is the best beer country?’ And I sheepishly will tell them that I think right now it is America,” Saxton says.

Keeping it Clean

Ed Ramshaw caught the craft beer bug in 1994 during a road trip in the western United States, after encountering a number of new and flavorful brews. Later, he lived in Oregon and Hawaii and helped with the Oregon Brewers Festival and Kona Brewers Festival while also working at breweries including Full Sail.

He then moved to Concord, NH, where he established Blue Line Draft Systems in January 2006. Now he travels an average of 500 to 600 miles per week, stopping at between five and nine bars each day to keep draft beer flowing smoothly.

Draft beer can be finicky, so systems need to be maintained on a consistent basis,” Ramshaw says. “Every two weeks, we will clean our customers’ lines. If you don’t, calcium oxalate settles in the lines and it starts catching organic material in the beer. Before long you have flavor issues and problems with foaming and beer flow.”

In addition to line cleaning, Blue Line Draft Systems will design and install new draft systems, repair existing systems and provide profitability consulting to bar owners.

I love beer,” Ramshaw says. “I’m very passionate about beer and doing this makes me feel like I’m playing a part to help bars and making sure consumers get good tasting beer.”

Ramshaw, who is president of the Concord Area Homebrewers, gets to cover an interesting territory around northern New England. His day might start off in the mountains and end up along the seacoast. His draft systems have been installed in tour boats and ski lodges.

At Loon Mountain, they have a couple of places up on the mountain, so I ride the gondola up and then will ski down with my equipment to do the maintenance work,” Ramshaw says.

One of his strangest draft system installs took place in Whitefield, NH, at the Spalding Inn, which is reputed to be haunted. The owners allowed Ramshaw and his family to stay in one of the rooms the night after the install was complete. He did not know it at the time, but they were the only people staying at the inn while work was progressing towards the opening.

It was not long before a few of the phones started ringing and Ramshaw heard some odd noises. He was alarmed to find candles flickering on the back deck of the inn when he stepped outside. “Then I realized they weren’t really candles. They were solar-powered lights,” laughs Ramshaw.

For centuries, travelers have been welcomed with a cold beer, a hearty meal and a warm bed. For nomads of the beer industry, hospitality on the road is both a welcomed respite and the reason for their journey. The road takes many turns, which are smoothed out by tasty ale at the end of the day.

Any given cohort coming through the ranks together―learning the craft, launching a new business, testing the economy―has strong connections based on having faced similar challenges at the same time. But there are also strong ties established between craft brewers who enter the field at different times, as one generation speaks to another.

We invited three young but well-established brewers to sit down with three up-and-coming craft brewers and listened in on the three conversations: over lunch, over pizza, and―implausibly― over morning coffee. Here are brief glimpses of where craft brewing is now, and suggestions as to where it might be headed.

Brewing is Business and Passion

Tomme Arthur

Port Brewing Co./Lost Abbey
San Marcos, CA

Patrick Rue

The Bruery
Placentia, CA

Considering its propensity for setting trends, Southern California was surprisingly slow to embrace craft beer. Tomme Arthur was there at the beginning of the “overnight sensation,” beginning his brewing career with Pizza Port in Solana Beach in 1996.

“In the mid-nineties, it was a big turning point in San Diego,” he recalls, “because Ballast Point opened up, AleSmith opened up, Stone opened up, and we started to see in our environment, in San Diego, a real shift from lots of other people’s beer in our town to locally-produced beer in our town. And not only in town―in the case of Stone, when they started bottling their beer, and they became the first San Diego brewer to ship beer out of town, on a measurable basis.”

Fast forward to 2008. San Diego has a nationally-recognized beer culture, prominent enough to have hosted the annual conference of craft brewers twice in a four-year period. Craft brewing has a presence further north, in the greater Los Angeles area, where Patrick Rue is opening The Bruery. Like Port Brewing and the Lost Abbey in San Diego, where Arthur now brews, The Bruery focuses on the highest niche of the already high-end craft beer market. In the last six months, Rue’s bottled beer has found distribution in eight states.

He worked at the bottlehouse for Schmidts while attending Villanova in the 1950s. He had landed the job from an uncle who worked at Esslingers. “It was grunt work,” he told me. “I worked the 4 pm to midnight shift. And they gave you three twenty minute beer breaks.” At the time, he was underage and unable to imbibe, yet he would smell like a brewery on his ride home on the El late at night, much to the consternation of fellow passengers.

Years later, as a middle-schooler with a paper route, I would collect discarded beer cans that littered the local yards after late night high school parties, while I delivered the Washington Star on Saturday mornings. When it appeared that my collection wasn’t a passing fad, my father would return from business trips abroad with empty cans for my collection as souvenirs.

During summers at the Jersey shore, my father and my uncles would play pinochle in the garage, which was stocked with cases and cases of Carling Black Label; Uncle Paul, my grandfather’s best friend, worked for a beer distributor and had the bent knuckles from moving cases of beer to show for it.

But despite the fact that beer was prevalent in family discussions and during beach vacation card games, I rarely can recall my dad drinking it growing up. He didn’t drink at all for the longest time and when he finally jumped back into the game he was a wine man. Later he worked with a fellow who he claimed was a “Guinness guy.” “He would make this punch with that and champagne that looked like root beer,” he said. My father himself would sample Guinness on a trip to Ireland but upon return found that the beer stateside wasn’t the same as what he’d had in Dublin.

After college, I relocated to Southern California in 1990 and found myself in the midst of the craft beer boom. When my father had to make a trip to San Diego, I drove down from Los Angeles and we went to a local microbrewery there; he had found his way back to beer. By the time I moved back to the east coast, my dad was a full-blown Heineken fan, so much so that when my sister got married, it became the de facto beer for her reception.

These days, when traveling abroad, he will typically ask to sample a local brew like Lithuania’s SVYTURYS or Australia’s Cooper’s Original Pale Ale. His palate has opened up and now a world of beer awaits him.

In the spirit of that generational giving, All About Beer Magazine posed the question “What is your dad’s favorite beer?” to its contributors, readers and others in our extended family to see what they had to say about it. This is our homage to dads and their beer.

—Greg Barbera

From our writers—

Matt’s Premium. We lived in Syracuse and it was as “local” as you could get.

—Rick Lyke

There was one ritual that will forever stay in mind: the spring bock beer run. Each year, when the Formosa brewery of Ontario would release its seasonal bock in the five liter mini-keg—or whatever the Imperial equivalent was in those pre-metric days—my father would drive across the provincial border to pick up at least two and, since gas was always cheaper in Ontario than in Quebec, fill up the tank. The tricky part, of course, was that the trip would need to be timed so that the tank was almost empty, but not so much that the car would run out of gas before my dad made it to Cornwall. I don’t recall him even once not making it.

—Stephen Beaumont

My dad’s beer was Busch. He would let me have sips of it whenever I wanted. And I liked it! I remember enjoying the way the bubbles tickled my tongue. They were different than pop bubbles. I also liked the cans—they were blue with a big, white mountain on them. You don’t see mountains like that growing up in Tulsa, OK, so it was quite exotic.

Granddad’s beer was Coors. I think that was mostly because he couldn’t get Coors at the time in Houston, where he lived. So when he and Granny would drive up to visit us in Tulsa, they would head home with a trunk packed with so much Coors, the back end of their car nearly scraped the road!

—Lisa Morrison

My dad drank two beers that I remember. When I was very young, he drank the confusingly-named Duke Ale, The Prince of Pilsners, from the Duquesne Brewing Co. of Pittsburgh. When they went under—and a sad day it was in our house—he switched to Miller High Life, which turned out to be an important step for my beer education: I didn’t like it. I had no reason not to, no one had told me that beer even could taste different—it was “beer” —but when I filched one, it tasted grainy, nasty, and I went back to drinking illegally purchased Genny Cream Ale and National Bohemian. But now I knew that beers really had differences. I finally got my dad drinking Yuengling Traditional Lager with the “drink local” argument.

—Lew Bryson

We lived in Boulder, CO, so it was definitely Coors. I used to get the first sip when I would fetch him one and I can still remember that crisp taste.

—Adem Tepedelen

My dad’s always been very susceptible to advertising and the power of suggestion. So for him, growing up, hearing jingles such as, “What are you gonna have? Pabst Blue Ribbon,” it used to be PBR. Now he loves wheat beers: “heferweizen” (though he’s lived in California for over 40 years, he still has his Brooklyn accent). He brings home mostly Widmer Hefeweizen and Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat, and when we’re out, I’ll steer him toward Gordon-Biersch hefe to go with the garlic fries at a Dodger game, or take him to a proper beer bar and suggest Blanche de Bruxelles.

—Brian Yaeger