Brewed Culture

An interview with Brian Alberts​

One of the joys of running a blog is when you unexpectedly encounter like minded people. People who have the same obsession and used it as inspiration to go down a similar path, and, somehow, make you feel a little bit more normal.

Brian Alberts is the creative mind behind Brewed Culture, a blog which aims to place beer within its context. He is currently working on his PhD in 19th century brewing in America at Purdue University. I stumbled across his blog awhile back and immediately bookmarked the site. This is a person I wish I could sit down and have a pint with.

So for now, via the power of the internet, I had a brief online conversation to get to know Brian a little bit better

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Have a favorite beer at the moment?

​Officially my favorite beer is Three Floyds’ Zombie Dust, which is definitely deserving, but there are too many great beers out there to nail down just one. Some recent highlights for me have been Brickstone APA (out of Chicago), New Glarus’ Oud Bruin and Cran-bic special releases (only in Wisconsin!), and New Albanian’s Black and Bluegrass ale (southern Indiana, right by Louisville).  
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Beer style?

I don’t really “discriminate” among beer styles. I’ve encountered bad beer, sure, but no bad styles yet. Right now I’m most interested in Oktoberfest seasonals. Ayinger’s Oktoberfest märzen is far and away the best I’ve had, but on the American side I’m a sucker for New Glarus’ Staghorn.
 
But I’m also hoping to attend Cincinnati’s “Oktoberfest Zinzinnati” this year, the largest Oktoberfest celebration in the United States, so I’ll make sure to keep an open mind.
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What got you interested in Beer history?
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Indiana has a fantastic beer scene which hooked me within a couple years of entering grad school. I specialize in the 19th century United States, but my original dissertation topic lost its appeal, so I went shopping for a new one. I wondered whether it was possible to meld a personal interest in craft beer into a historical moment.

Make no mistake, this is very much a “Danger, Will Robinson!” kind of approach. Just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s a significant or lucrative topic of historical inquiry. But I explored it in consultation with my advisor and discovered that beer could really be a gateway into better understanding very significant facets of the antebellum United States. Facets like capitalism and the market revolution, reform movements, and German immigration and ethnicity. What’s more, the U.S. between 1840 and 1873 saw a dramatic expansion of its brewing industry that in some ways resembles the American craft beer explosion we’ve been witnessing since the early 80s or so.
 
I’m not at the stage yet where I can draw definite lines between the two eras, but the correlation is difficult to ignore. And on top of it all, I’ve seen lots of space in the literature for further study on the pre-1870s American brewing industry. And when you see a lot happening in a historical era and not enough being written about it, that’s a dissertation.

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What is your dissertation about, And how do you perform research?

My dissertation uses beer as a nexus point for better understanding how German immigrants navigated a mid-19th century United States that was itself undergoing massive transformations. The market revolution was changing the face of American capitalism, which in turn affected politics and culture. Demand for labor brought millions of immigrants, notably Germans and Irish, into the country. Immigration combined with urbanization and associated issues like crime and poverty spurred both political nativism and social reform movements, specifically the temperance movement.
 
Beer is connected to all of these issues. Lager beer and its German immigrant brewers helped transform and expand the industry from the late 1840s onward despite a changing economic landscape. They faced periodic resistance from nativist and temperance groups opposed to both their products and their presence. Yet by 1873 the U.S. contained ten times as many breweries as had existed in 1850. A German-American-dominated brewing industry was flourishing, had a working relationship with the federal government, and stood poised to embrace the economic, technological, and organizational developments of the Gilded Age. My dissertation examines this process by looking at two Midwestern cities—Chicago and Cincinnati—as sites which combined proportionally high German populations, large concentrations of breweries, and urbanization patterns tightly connected to the market revolution.
 
I perform research like many historians do. I look at old paper. For me it’s government records, newspapers, pamphlets (especially temperance pamphlets—if you want to learn about something, find the people who hate it and they’ll go on for days), trade journals, Civil War court martial proceedings, records of beer-related organizations like the United States Brewers Association, things like that. A particularly fun source is a massive book titled One Hundred Years of Brewing, published in 1903 or so by a trade magazine called The Western Brewer. It describes the development of American beer in exhausting detail and is unique in that many of the historical sources its authors used no longer exist today. Read any book on 19th century brewing and you’ll probably see it cited, though I’m of course supplementing it with a number of other source bases.

What is a typical day for you?

I’ll let you know when I have one. The to-do list is always changing, and a grad student like me definitely has it easier than, say, a professor. But generally my time is split between processing the research materials I’ve collected, reading, writing, preparing content for Brewed Culture, keeping up with beer news, and stuff like conference or funding applications. Over the next few months I hope to find a publishing opportunity to work towards, as well as put together a syllabus for an American beer history course I want to teach!

Are there any general misconceptions about the history of alcohol within the US?

I think general audiences are too quick to default to the “progressive” view of history. It’s the idea that things tend to always get bigger and better than they were before. That as we move forward in history, rights expand, technology improves, problems get solved, on and on. The stuff of the past must have somehow been worse or less developed than today, because as a society we move forward, not backward. Most historians rejected that notion decades ago.

But that idea still crops up in relation to beer. I used to mention to people that the U.S. had more breweries in 1873 than they did now (that’s no longer true as of November 2015, but it once was). They’d respond with some comment about how breweries then would have been tiny and with little reach.

Well sure, but the vast majority of breweries today are tiny and serve a local community too! Roughly 75% of American breweries today produce less than 5,000 barrels according to the Brewers Association. That’s well over 3,000 breweries. Add them all together and they’ll produce less than a single MillerCoors brewing complex!

My professional goal for the moment is not so much to clear up individual misconceptions about beer history in the U.S., but rather to establish how critical beer history is in understanding its present identity. That the craft beer revolution, while distinct, is not completely without precedent. That even modern-day giants like Anheuser-Busch-Inbev stand on the shoulders of those who came before them.
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Whose research do you think doesn't get enough recognition?

Amy Mittelman wrote a fantastic book several years back, called Brewing Battles. If you read it, you’ll notice how wonderfully specific she gets in the first couple chapters, once she begins talking about the American Civil War, the first government excise taxes on beer, and the brewing industry’s coordinated advocacy to get the U.S. government to reduce the taxes. It stands out to me in relation to the other (still laudable) parts of the book. That’s because Mittelman’s dissertation work at Columbia University focused on that very topic, the relationship between the beer industry and the federal government from 1862-1900. It’s a shame that such an important subject had to be condensed and fit into a larger work, especially when Mittelman clearly knows the subject well.
 
What deserves more recognition are these intimate connections between beer and broader society. My point isn’t that no such studies exist (take Sharon Salinger’s Taverns and Drinking in Early America, for example) but rather that rising interest in craft beer ought to contain a rising interest in the context and implications of that beer. Several popular histories of the craft beer movement already exist, but audiences and scholars alike should demand closer, deeper studies as we move forward.
 
That said, exciting new research is already appearing. I can’t wait to get my hands on Peter Kopp’s recently released Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon's Willamette Valley (U. of California Press). Also watch out for a forthcoming edited volume called Untapped: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer, scheduled for release March 2017 by the West Virginia University Press. Untapped will combine 12 essays from multiple disciplines and looks very promising.
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Where do you see the research going in the next few years?

I honestly don’t know because I think the terms of the conversation are about to change. The Smithsonian is currently in the process of hiring a historian for its American Brewing History Initiative, who will be tasked with collecting and curating a new cache of resources devoted to tracking and interpreting the history of the American craft beer movement. The Smithsonian is a leading institution (deservedly so) and American brewing history isn’t the largest subfield out there, meaning it doesn’t have irresistible scholarly momentum of its own. So naturally I think the Smithsonian’s choices for who gets this job, and what specific directives they’re given, is going to set the tone for a lot of what’s to come.
 
It’s possible that the American Brewing History Initiative, with its focus on craft beer, will treat the movement as a watershed which is changing everything we thought we knew about American beer. They might focus on everything from the 1960s onward and its contributions to later craft beer, and ignore everything before. Alternatively, they could view craft beer as a product of longstanding trajectories and momentum and actively seek out the historical context which steered not only the diversification of late 20th and 21stcentury beer, but also the incredible consolidation that craft beer reacted to. I bet you can tell which of those I’m hoping for, but whichever paradigm the Smithsonian chooses will have a significant impact on public interest, available resources, and the terms of scholarly discussion.
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Is there anything people should be more involved with / discussing at the moment?

I would encourage more people in general to take a ‘long view’ with their interest in American brewing. Even the most ardent craft beer fan must acknowledge that the significance of American beer history runs far deeper than Sam Adams or Dogfish Head, deeper even than New Albion or Anchor Steam. And if they think beer just wasn’t interesting before that, well then they aren’t paying enough attention.
 
Regardless of anyone’s present opinion of Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Pabst, etc, their historical significance for American beer is indisputable. But even they rest upon a historical foundation of intense economic competition, diversity, and controversy which defined the brewing industry before their rise. It’s easy to look at American beer pre-craft and see nothing but bland homogeneity. But, honestly, I see the intensely consolidated beer markets of, say, the 1950s, as the exception rather than the rule. Craft is continuing, not inventing, a tradition of diversity and local influence in American beer and calibrating it to fit a 21st century economic climate. It’s something to celebrate, and also something to put into its rightful context.

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"Craft is continuing, not inventing, a tradition of diversity and local influence in American beer and calibrating it to fit a 21st century economic climate. It’s something to celebrate, and also something to put into its rightful context."

​Cheers to that.