Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was about to go national. It had found a distribution and marketing partner, and was ready to bust out of Wisconsin. Jeff Fulbright, the founder and president of the brewing company behind Chief Oshkosh, Mid-Coast Brewing, excitedly placed the beer in a spectrum that showed both his ambition and confidence.
One day in August, 1965, a 27-year-old former graduate student in Japanese studies at Stanford walked into his favorite bar, the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco’s trendy North Beach neighborhood. He ordered his usual: an Anchor Steam. The bar’s owner, a World War II veteran and local eccentric named Fred Kuh, ambled over. “You... View Article
You might call them craft beer’s nuclear club. We’re talking about breweries that have pushed the alcohol content of beer past 20 percent by volume, through the process of fermentation alone.
We all know how craft beer history goes. Beer was great until the 19th century, when mass production of lagers took over the world, and American brewers put corn and rice in their beer to make it cheaper. By 1950, everyone was hypnotized by marketing into drinking the fizzy yellow beer. It looked bad, but... View Article
How did you decide to get into brewing? One might have to ask, why did it take me so long? My grandfather was a brewmaster. My father went to Siebel in 1948. His timing was terrible: he got out of brewmasters’ school when there were probably 800 breweries in the United States. But what they... View Article
When New Yorker magazine publishes cartoons about the price of beer and the Wall Street Journal runs front-page stories about high-priced beers, beer drinkers in America’s heartland should start to get nervous. Trend spotters guaranteed higher prices at the moment they labeled beer an “affordable luxury.”
In his scant nine years as a professional brewer, Matt Brynildson has worked for one award-winning brewery after another: Goose Island in Chicago, SLO Brewing in California, Firestone Walker in California.
So many trends—from Starbucks coffee to grunge music to gourmet pizza with capers and duck sausage—started on the West Coast that it’s enough to give some East Coast residents an inferiority complex.
America is dotted with the corpses of old breweries. You might have passed them while driving through some forgotten inner-city neighborhood: brick-and-mortar behemoths, four to five stories high, sometimes with gaps in the wall where copper brewkettles and other objects of value were extracted.
