Classical antiquity covers the period from the publication of Homer to the fall of the Roman empire, roughly 800 BC to 500 AD. As most are aware, the Greeks and Romans were adamant wine drinkers. Thus, when the Romans decided to write about their barbaric neighbors, they normally were not kind in their judgments of the barbarian's habit for beer drinking. So literary evidence from the era stems from those who normally didn't consume it, creating an interesting dynamic of 'Us vs them'.

In researching the history of beer, it is inevitable to come across such texts. However, most articles on the matter omit the translations, leaving the reader to trust in the researcher's interpretations. That is why the Brewing Classical Styles (BCS) blog is awesome. They’re bringing the primary literature to light, thus making the sources available to all. Plus, they brew some interesting styles to boot, like an all lentil beer.

Kyle is based in Illinois, USA. He started the blog, is the main author and the “brains” of the operation. Kimberley is based near Amsterdam, Netherlands. She does the social media and is now a regular contributor because all the cool beer festivals and Classically-themed beers in the Low Countries are too good for BCS to miss! 

Via the power of the internet, I had a brief online conversation to get to know Kyle and Kimberley a little bit better:
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Kyle: Anything without lentils. Actually, I typically don’t have a “favorite beer,” because I rarely more than one or two of the same beer (there are too many great ones out there!). I recently had Cigar City’s Marshal Zhukov and loved it. 

Kimberley: My favorite is EigthFive-0 American Pale Ale by Proof Brewing Co. Kyle used to live in Tallahassee so we had easy access, but now sadly no more. He promised to save me one though!
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Kyle: Although I love heavy stouts and Belgian quads, I find myself gravitating towards lower ABV beers (you can drink more!) like English ales, pale ales, and sours.

Kimberley: (India) Pale Ale and, dare I say it, Pumpkin beers. I don’t like some IPAs, particularly not fond of the dank flavor that is all the rage these days and overly bitter brews so my go to is to first get the Pale Ales on draft. Definitely a fan of the citrus and tropical flavors that some IPAs have and I have to admit that I am one of those girls who loves pumpkin-spice-anything, so that includes beer. Actually, Kyle is brewing me some pumpkin beers as we speak!
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Kyle: I’ve always loved ancient Greece and Rome and I wanted to be an archaeologist since my childhood. Beer is a relatively new passion of mine that has only increased since I started homebrewing. Despite the relative popularity of beer-history, there are not many resources available to the general public on ancient Greek and Roman brews. Most publications are general syntheses and omit primary sources. I became curious about the literary evidence and decided to start the blog. My main area of research is not ancient beer, so the blog is as much a document of my own discovery of the literature.

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Foreshadowing my foray into ancient beers: in college – many years ago – I took an “Ancient Technology” course. We had the option to recreate any ancient technology for the class’s final project. A buddy and I decided to brew ancient beer. We read the “Hymn to Ninkasi” and many ancient Egyptian and Sumerian references before trying our hand at brewing. The result was absolutely revolting. Now that I know how to brew, I realize how many absurd mistakes were made for that project. It never even entered my mind that one could make real beer in his/her house until many years later.


Kimberley: Well, for me it was archaeology before anything really. During my studies, Classical Greece and Rome were part of the course work, but I chose to specialize in Aegean prehistory instead. So for me personally, Classical Greece and Rome used to be what I had to wade through to get to the good parts! Kyle is the one that got me into craft beers and recently, the beer history of the Greco-Roman world! Through his blog I am rediscovering all these places and times that I had to learn about during my undergrad and it turns out, the Classical world is far more interesting than I used to think! Nothing beats the Bronze Age though ;-)
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Kyle: Identity and architecture in the Greek Bronze Age. Although the topic is unrelated to beer, beer was necessary for its completion. 

Kimberley: I am still writing up my PhD dissertation at the moment and it is about the question how connections between Greece and Italy could continue after a big crisis hit the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. To this purpose, I mainly study bronze objects and ceramics that indicate these connections in Greece, but for comparative purposes I also look at Greek ceramics in southern Italy. So no beer (yet)!
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​Kyle: I used to dig/survey very frequently (3-4 projects/summer). However, I have begun to focus more on studying material that was already excavated.

Kimberley: Sadly no. The dissertation has kept me away from excavating lately. My last project was the Mitrou Archaeological Project, which was already in the post-excavation study season when I joined. It’s actually where Kyle and I met.
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​Kyle: Beer had the stigma of being a “barbarian’s” drink or a drink that was popular on the fringes of the Roman empire. There are several great books about the social role of beer in ancient society. As a result, I try to avoid this avenue of study. In fact, the main purpose of the blog is to make the primary sources on which these studies are based accessible to the general public so that the reader can draw his/her own conclusions. 

Kimberley: Kyle is the expert here, because he’s the one that started researching beer in ancient Greece and Rome recently and founded the blog. The reason I joined initially was to help him out with social media. My role has since evolved to that of regular contributor, but so far I’ve been mainly doing reviews of modern, Classics-inspired beers rather than doing the in-depth research of beer in the ancient world. When I visit him in December, I may become more active on the research side because the plan is I will be helping him out with the experimental brewing project. 
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Kyle: It was certainly not a drink reserved for barbarian-soldiers. The true scale of production (especially outside of Britain) is hard to determine due to the lack of relevant sources and problems identifying brewing spaces in the archaeological record.

Kimberley: Well, they have recently been finding these brew houses in the UK from Roman times in the south, far away from Hadrian’s wall. So far, the reports do not make a connection with Roman forts or soldiers; one site (Wood Burcote) appears to be on the road to a larger Roman town (Towcester) and there are some speculations about it being an inn or pub of some sorts, while the other (Boxford) appears to be located in the countryside, not too far away from a Roman villa. In these instances, it appears too early to tell whether you can really speak of a domestic mode of production, but the location alongside an important road to a larger town could perhaps hint at production that was not (only) geared towards supplying the soldiers in the north. Hopefully, more extensive reports on these sites will clarify the situation. 
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Kyle: The 2013 article about this is very detailed and comprehensive. It is a fascinating read!  However, I have not personally studied this material and, as a matter of course, I do not feel comfortable commenting on the interpretations.

Kimberley: The article presents a compelling case but, as the authors themselves readily admit, it is based on circumstantial evidence that could also be explained in a different manner. I thoroughly enjoyed their interpretation of the plastic decoration on those Cypriot vases as representing the activities taking place in a brewery as a way to support their case for having excavated a drying kiln used for making beer. It certainly is an interesting hypothesis!
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​​Kyle: To my knowledge, there is no definitive evidence that proves this. I would be very interested to read any articles to the contrary. My primary research interest relates to different modes of production and the transfer of technological knowledge – a related area of study. 

Kimberley: That’s a very interesting idea that seems to counter the notion that beer was only reserved for barbarian soldiers. 
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​Kyle: This is a very difficult question. There are different types of “recognition” – especially between academia and the general public. Research that is very popular within the field may never make it to the popular media because it often is not “exciting” from the public’s perception. Alternatively, popular finds that appear on new sites may take years before full research and publications are prepared. Only then can academics understand the full significance and integrate into their own research.

Kimberley: Kyle definitely has a point here. Hopefully, one day the blog can grow to become a medium that bridges the gap between what’s popular in the media and what’s popular in academia – at least as far as beer in the Greco-Roman world is concerned. 
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​​Kyle: Beer is becoming a much more popular direction of study. Its importance in popular culture and the development of more advanced scientific techniques have helped to make beer history and beer archaeology to become almost “trendy.” I would not be surprised if there are more discoveries/identification of ancient breweries. 

Kimberley: It’s already happening! Two Roman breweries in one month, now we just need some Greek ones!
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​Kyle: The most important thing is public support of the Humanities. Go to lectures/public talks (the Archaeological Institute of America has public lecture series at regional chapters throughout the USA), enroll in courses at your local universities (or declare a major!), learn foreign and ancient languages, travel to museums and sites of archaeological importance, and keep trying to learn more. I guarantee you will find the relevance of Classics, a Classical education, and archaeology, regardless of your profession/hobby.

Kimberley: Amen to that.

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

​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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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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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.

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.

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!

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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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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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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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.

"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.