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The streets are so packed with people in various stages of undress and intoxication that we can barely see them, but the visible slivers are enough to prove that no, these lanes are not paved in gold. Indeed, opportunity of any kind, other than the opportunity to blast your current misery into drunken oblivion, is hard to spot in the teeming crowd. Here are desperate couples hawking their last meager possessions to the unsympathetic eye of a pawnbroker, mothers pouring gin down their crying children’s throats, homeless neighbors lowering one of their own into a makeshift coffin, and dancers flailing with more mania than joy. And is that? Yes, that is an infant impaled on a spike held by one of the revelers. That baby’s fate is much like that of the nearby newborn tumbling headfirst out of the arms of his catatonic mother.
About a half hour’s walk southwest is an altogether less traumatizing scene. Here, the people have apparently found all the opportunity London has to offer, even if the streets still aren’t gold. Merchants have bountiful inventories, which are in turn scooped up by shoppers with the means to buy everything from fish to fabric. No one is without proper clothing, or the privilege of enough food to eat. They are therefore in good spirits, mingling, laughing, and enjoying pints of beer. New businesses are being built, and, according to the newspaper on one man’s table, the king has recently spoken of “the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace.”
These are the scenes in St. Giles, a slum north of Covent Garden, and nearby Westminster, circa 1751. Or, rather, they are St. Giles and Westminster as depicted by William Hogarth in his pair of 1751 prints, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.”
For as long as alcohol has existed in people’s lives—which may have been upwards of 12,000 years ago—figurative art has been an available medium for depicting it. In the 18th century, however, both alcohol and art evolved in a way that made the period a crucial turning point for public drinking habits—and a stage for some of the most famous depictions of booze in art history.
A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
At the beginning of the 18th century, spirits were becoming more accessible to the average person in the Western world. While the Greeks had started tinkering with distillation to produce drinkable water a couple of millennia ago, the first hard alcohol was not produced until the 10th century, most likely by Arab scientists in North Africa. Later, such tinctures were seen primarily as medicinal, as Mark Forsyth notes in A Short History of Drunkenness. By the start of the 16th century, the very wealthy seem to have discovered the joys of drinking spirits recreationally, but even 100 years later, the trend hadn’t caught on with the general public. Around 1595, Forsyth notes, only one bar in England was recorded to have been selling spirits—aqua vitae, or liquor distilled from wine, to be precise.
But in the second half of the 17th century, that began to change across Europe—the Dutch fell for an early version of gin, for instance, and the French for brandy. At first, Forsyth writes, the English were preoccupied by civil war, but when Charles II was invited back to the throne from his exile in France in 1660, he and his cronies arrived packing all their new French habits, like vermouth and brandy.
Before this, the English relationship to alcohol was dominated by Ale, which men, women, and children drank with meals. It was low in alcohol, a safe alternative to polluted drinking water, and provided essential daily calories. As English settlers colonized America, that, too, became a place where people made and drank Ale as well as cider.
Prior to the rise in spirits consumption, what people drank depended largely on culture and agriculture, as impacted by the grape-grain line which laterally bisects the European continent. Further south in Europe, grapes grew better and people drank wine; further north, barley grew well, and people drank beer.
Drinking, in general, had been on a steady incline thanks to brewing’s increasing commercialization, while globalization was a driving factor in the proliferation of new alcohol categories. As Ale and cider consumption grew in what would become the United States, wine simultaneously spread throughout Europe thanks to Dutch traders’ efforts.
The Dutch were responsible for a number of drinking trends, in fact: In addition to importing wine, they put gin on the throne in England when one of their own became king and brought his homeland’s drink of choice with him. Dutch influence even saw England’s Ale—then unhopped and flavored with an array of herbs and aromatics—evolve into the hopped drink we’re familiar with today. According to a House of Commons Health Committee report, between the commercialized production of alcohol (established in part by Dutch Protestants settling in England) and the increasing traffic of imports and exports, drinking was ticking upwards between 1550 and 1650.
When I ask about the growing prevalence of alcohol in everyday life during this period, Forsyth points out that Europeans and Americans drank heavily up until the 19th century.
“You’re not operating machinery and you’re not driving cars, you can kind of drink all day,” he says. “The whole, ‘You shouldn’t have a beer with breakfast,’ ‘Children shouldn’t have beer,’ that comes in with the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. It’s largely pushed by factory bosses who don’t want their workers losing limbs using heavy machinery, which you shouldn’t operate if you’re having a beer with breakfast.”
In the 18th century, then, the time was ripe for consumption: Industrialization was still a century away, and distilled spirits were going mainstream. I asked David McNicoll, author of the The Language of Whisky, if this was indeed the most alcoholic time in modern history.
“Was it the most booze-soaked era?” McNicoll muses. “Hard to say, but it is the best-documented and most-acted-upon by any government until Prohibition in the U.S.”
This was true across a number of countries. According to the International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture by Dwight B. Heath, rural prosperity in France enabled all classes to begin regularly drinking wine by the start of the 1720s, which led to booming business for vintners, while the upper classes could enjoy brandy, too. In Holland, gin production ramped up 400% between 1733 and 1792, as is documented in Robert J. Forbes’ A Short History of the Art of Distillation, which also reports that in 1754, there was one alcohol-serving inn per 88 residents in Stockholm, compared to one restaurant per 700 today. In places like Glasgow and London, McNicoll says, there was about one shop selling booze for every 14 people.
Drinking was so tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life that when spirits emerged, people didn’t stop and realize that their customs should be adjusted for the significant spike in alcohol content. They didn’t have the “cultural framework” with which to consume it like they had with good, old, familiar beer, Forsyth points out.
“People didn’t know how to drink [spirits] or when to drink them. Why not gin with breakfast? And what size are people going to have? People are drinking a pint of beer, so why not drink gin in the same quantity?”
The more people drank, the more negative consequences were becoming apparent—and so the more effort went into curtailing consumption. As the world’s biggest city at the time, and a hub of mercantilism (a system in which the government controls the economy, promoting exports and limiting imports to protect the country’s prosperity), London was naturally primed to be the kind of place where spirits, spirits’ politicization, public drunkenness, and public concern over drunkenness all collided.
FROM CRAZE TO PANIC
Charles II and company brought spirits home to England in 1660, but it was the Dutch who made gin, specifically, the country’s “it” drink three decades later. When the Dutch-born William of Orange was crowned King of England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1689, the spirit of his homeland became dominant among his new subjects. (That gin wouldn’t necessarily be recognized as such by today’s drinkers, however: Gin actually entered England as genever, a Dutch-made, juniper-laced forerunner that could only be made from grains like rye, malted barley, or corn.)
Gin, or genever, arrived around the same time as industry began to grow in England. Seduced by the presumed promise of opportunity, people packed into the city from the countryside and then often found no such luck. These unfortunate new urbanites quickly fell into squalor.
“Drinking was […] an escape from the slums,” McNicoll says. “London was the fastest-growing city on earth, and the largest port, and its growing pains all too palpable. 60% of Londoners did not know where their next meal was coming from in the 1740s.”
Despite not being able to afford much, these people could afford genever. To help fund war with France at the start of the 18th century, the government lifted restrictions on domestic spirits production and slapped imported spirits with massive duties. This created a big market for subpar grain, bolstering tax revenue and benefiting landowners. It is also when genever gave way to gin, which can be distilled from any raw material and is less regulated. Gin was cheap to make and cheap to buy.
Almost immediately, the upper classes—still preferring brandy themselves—realized that they were not too keen on the effects of all these working-class people getting blotto on pints of gin.
“One of the absolute constants in the history of alcohol is, ‘Alcohol is fine when I’m doing it, but when you’re doing it, it’s very bad,’” Forsyth says. “And specifically when it’s the working class, it’s very bad.”
The impact of the Gin Craze among 18th-century Londoners was immediately visible, because people quite literally sold the shirts off their backs to afford their spirits. Textile and labor costs made clothes incredibly valuable at the time, Forsyth explains. This led to rich homeowners stepping out of their front doors to be faced with nearly nude people drunk on gin, and the imagery of this helped turn the Gin Craze to a Gin Panic.
By 1730, about 10 million gallons of gin were being distilled in London annually. There were around 7,000 dram shops, and the average Londoner consumed an estimated 14 gallons per year. The government tried to stomp out gin’s wildfire spread with taxes, but initial attempts just exacerbated the problem when the market for unregulated gin boomed. Notably, the 1736 Gin Act set a tax of 20 shillings per gallon, and made selling gin without a £50 annual license illegal.
One of the absolute constants in the history of alcohol is, ‘Alcohol is fine when I’m doing it, but when you’re doing it, it’s very bad. And specifically when it’s the working class, it’s very bad.
Similar to the subsequent explosion of speakeasies and bootlegging operations in the United States after Prohibition passed, people just started making and selling their own bootleg gin. This meant the basic ingredients of the spirit were free to be loosely interpreted, and a subsequent tax on juniper itself led to creative alternatives for flavoring, like delicious sulphuric acid or turpentine.
The gin of mid-18th-century London clocked in at about 80% ABV, compared to the 40% alcohol content of today’s. Drinking tall pours of this stuff didn’t just lead to people selling their clothes. It wasn’t unheard of for a drinking session to kill an imbiber, especially if a drinking contest was involved. Gin was also blamed for an increase in crime, violence, prostitution, and falling birth rates. It earned its nickname, “Mother’s Ruin,” due to the latter, plus a rise in infant mortality rates as well as infamous, specific examples.
In Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, Patrick Dillon writes of Judith Defour, who in 1734 strangled her two-year-old daughter, Mary, and sold Mary’s clothes so she could buy gin. In A Short History of Drunkenness, Forsyth tells of Mary Estwick, who, passed-out drunk, let the child in her care catch fire and burn. Another intoxicated nursemaid had an even more direct role in her charge’s death when she mistook the baby for a log and tossed it into a fire.
There were certainly enough societal factors to prompt those in positions of power to crack down on the consumption of spirits, but thanks to ongoing war and colonialism, booze was political, too.
DRINK FOR YOUR COUNTRY
The globalization that fueled spirits’ growth in the 18th century also helped blur cultural borders. This made the ruling classes of many nations feel threatened. As a result, they often sought to wipe certain or all spirits off their maps. These tensions gained urgency during and as a result of war. After a demand for untaxed or lower-taxed rum helped fuel the American Revolution, for instance, newly independent Americans wanted domestically distilled whiskey over imported rum, the supply of which was strangled by severed ties with English trade routes anyway. Brandy fell largely out of fashion in England during its years of war with France, which only paved the way for gin, the destructive drink that too had an outsider origin which would soon be used against it.
As European countries battled each other (in the Nine Years’ War between France and multiple other European countries, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Anglo-Spanish War, then the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, to name a few) it seemed vital to foster patriotism and loyalty. Citizens were urged to eschew products made in other countries, and consumption of foreign goods was branded as a betrayal: Wasn’t an Englishman drinking brandy while England battled France showing support for the enemy? Governments promoted their domestic drinks, ostracizing all others.
As the associate curator of textiles at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nicole LaBouff helped organize the museum’s 2019 exhibition, “Alcohol’s Empire: Distilled Spirits in the 1700s Atlantic World.” The installation aimed to discuss alcohol’s geopolitical context, how colonialism and imperialism shaped where alcohol went and how it grew, and how in turn the globalization of alcohol created interactions between different nations.
“There was a politicization of alcohol at this time,” LaBouff says. “National identities were bound up with certain drinks. Beer in England was inherently English, and gin was characterized as this evil foreign force that made its way into Britain in the 18th century.”
From the 18th century onward in Europe and Colonial America and the Early Republic, there was a clear distinction seen by people who made and consumed beer, that it’s healthful and nutritious. It was seen almost more as a food than a drink. It was this daily domestic chore to make beer, just like you baked bread.
Those in positions of power in England sought to create an all-around negative image of gin. It wasn’t just that drinking it was unpatriotic, but it was unhealthy compared to England’s healthful beer. LaBouff says this dynamic played out elsewhere, like when France promoted its own wine over rum, imported from “outsider” colonies. Establishing these binaries was easy because the big, bad foreign drinks were typically distilled spirits: new, strong, unfamiliar, and cause for people to brawl, strip down and sell their garments, toss their babies, and even spontaneously combust. Beer, on the other hand, was long-established, safe, and fun for the whole family.
“From the 18th century onward in Europe and Colonial America and the Early Republic, there was a clear distinction seen by people who made and consumed beer, that it’s healthful and nutritious,” says Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the National Museum of American History. “It was seen almost more as a food than a drink. It was this daily domestic chore to make beer, just like you baked bread.”
The two causes fed each other: Governments wanted to drastically reduce the consumption of spirits because they believed they were causing societal ruin, so they thought convincing people these spirits were unpatriotic could help extinguish them. Governments also wanted to drastically reduce the consumption of spirits because they were imports rather than domestic products, so they took to highlighting the dangerous effects of these liquors.
Almost as soon as spirits burst onto the scene, they spurred drinking crazes, backlash in the form of temperance movements, and politicization, creating an explosive moment in humanity’s relationship with alcohol that would shape consumption for generations to come. In London, the art scene had evolved at a perfect pace for one artist to capture that clash.
ALL THE BOOZE THAT’S FIT TO PRINT
Art of the 18th-century Western world is largely represented by the Rococo movement, spanning from about 1730 to 1770, and Neoclassicism, from about the 1760s to the 1850s. Rococo was ornate, whimsical, and pastel-hued, and within it lived the genre of fête galante. Fête galante saw aristocratic subjects frolicking in bucolic settings; it was all things fun, frivolous, and outdoors. Here, alcohol might pop up as a prop, the greater attention paid to the romance of our central characters’ good times.
As the Age of Enlightenment blossomed and progressed from 1730 to 1780 (the “High Enlightenment” period), many began viewing Rococo ideals as trivial. They instead sought nobler subject matter in art, representative of the quest for reason and knowledge. Coinciding with archaeological discoveries like the buried city of Pompeii in 1748, this took shape in the form of ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics.
This is where the road forks. While painters going through art school set their sights on the more formal aspects of Rococo and Neoclassicism, aiming for patronage among royalty and nobility, mercantilism was gaining speed and creating a new avenue for artists, says Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of drawings and prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
There was a rising regular group of patrons who were merchants, and that created more opportunities to sell paintings, paintings of more secular subjects. More artists started working outside the academy and finding a market for their works. People opened picture shops and sold directly to the public.
“There was a rising regular group of patrons who were merchants, and that created more opportunities to sell paintings, paintings of more secular subjects,” she says. “More artists started working outside the academy and finding a market for their works. People opened picture shops and sold directly to the public.” This, Tonkovich says, is when we began to see art dealers emerge and auction houses establish themselves. It’s also where, predominantly in England, print culture blossomed. Artists looking to sell to buyers of lesser means figured out the best route was first drawing and then printing those creations, often selling them out of their own shops.
In England, the swell of opportunity to depict everyday people doing everyday things opened the gates for satire, especially because, as LaBouff notes, art was not as heavily controlled by the crown as it was in other countries. During this period, alcohol’s depiction in art was often either aspirational or satirical, says Dr. Richard Johns, a lecturer in the history of art at the University of York. Think wealthy men sharing wine with the utmost dignity (Francis Hayman’s “Portrait of a Group of Gentlemen”) versus the aftermath, men chattering away among knocked-over chairs (Joseph Highmore’s “A Club of Gentlemen”).
One particular artist, William Hogarth, forged a lasting reputation within print culture and satire. Born in 1697 in London, Hogarth became an apprentice to a silver engraver at 16. He later set up his own engraving shop and attended art school. By the age of 30, he’d garnered a following of wealthy patrons for whom he painted scenes of men and women at leisure. Bored by this, he started sketching and engraving humorous scenes of everyday life.
What Hogarth would become famous for—satirical works examining vice and morality—began with “A Harlot’s Progress,” a series of six paintings that told the story of a young London woman’s corruption and eventual death. Later, he released “The Rake’s Progress,” another series chronicling one man’s downfall at the hands of gambling, sex, and alcohol. In 1745, his “Marriage A-la Mode” spoke directly to his middle-class clientele by ribbing the aristocracy.
By 1750, Hogarth had become disillusioned with his status in the art scene, due in large part to how little money his paintings went for at auctions. He got involved in charitable causes and began focusing on social issues like poverty in his work. Even a passing glance at poverty in 1750s London meant confronting the Gin Panic.
In February of 1751, Hogarth debuted a print duo, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.” It was well timed for the Gin Act of 1751, which effectively shuttered small gin distillers with the goal of wiping out much of the available product. “Gin Lane” captured a motley scene of poverty-stricken people in St. Giles at various stages of ruin thanks to the spirit, while “Beer Street” depicted happy, successful merchants and customers in Westminster coming together over a pint of England’s own healthful, beloved beer.
“Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” were hardly subtle in their moral judgments: Gin is bad, beer is good. People who drink gin will end up selling all their earthly possessions for another sip, they’ll murder their own children, they’ll die in the gutter. People who drink beer will help fuel the country’s progress as a world center of mercantilism and prosperity, they’ll commune with their neighbors, they’ll raise wholesome families. Hogarth released these prints at a time when the government sought to drastically reduce the quantity of spirits the working class could consume, and when marketing spirits as bad and “other” versus beer as good and “ours” was a key strategy.
As a set, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” succinctly capture this scramble with spirits. They also depict the resulting breakdown of social order, convey class judgments around drinking, contribute to the politicization of alcohol, and make plain the split between liquor and beer.
Because of the timing, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” are often viewed as a work of moral propaganda, and some have speculated they were commissioned by the government to help reach gin’s working-class imbibers. Tonkovich points out this is not the case, however, because that working-class target couldn’t have easily accessed these prints.
“These prints would not have been affordable for the working class,” she says. “They might have seen them in a tavern or through a window, but they couldn’t buy prints, so who is the audience for these? People of the press and the merchant class.”
The two prints, Johns notes, were luxury items in their day, inviting middle-class owners to vicariously live in that chaos while holding themselves above the roughery of the scenes on Gin Lane.
“‘Gin Lane’ invited the viewer to recognize the problem of gin-drinking in London in 1750, but also to enjoy Hogarth’s technical skill as a printmaker,” Johns says. “It was voyeuristic—people could look closely at this desperate position gin drinkers are in, and how the viewer relates is not at all straightforward, either. Are we sympathetic to the mother and baby at the center, or are we condemning them? That’s what makes this a powerful, lasting image. Ambiguity is a broader aspect of satire; it both engages with moral questions and is a form of entertainment.”
TEAM FERMENTATION VS. TEAM DISTILLATION
By the time “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” appeared in 1751, gin consumption had already dropped from a 1743 peak of 18 million gallons to seven million gallons. By 1758, it plummeted to under two million. Bad harvests drove grain prices up, and food costs rose while wages fell, making it impossible for London’s poor to continue affording gin. Industrialization was gathering steam, motivating anti-liquor efforts directed at workers, while stigmatization of drunkenness became a real, widespread perspective for the first time in modern society. Over the next two centuries, these causes, coupled with religious movements, led to the rising popularity of temperance and of course, in the United States, full Prohibition.
In ensuing decades, a number of artists engaged in satire targeted at the vice of drinking, like Goya in his print, “You’ll See Later,” circa 1816-20. Others took an even more straightforward approach, aiming to use their art as a tool to persuade the public. Inspired by Hogarth, George Cruikshank released a series of eight prints titled “The Bottle” in 1847, which he purposefully made inexpensive so that poorer classes could afford them. Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” are unique, however, in how profoundly they capture such a specific moment in time. And yet, they continue to feel relevant when applied to persistent attitudes toward drinking and vice in general, poverty and the government’s hand in it, and beer versus liquor. The print duo is still called back to today, albeit with contemporary updates: take, for instance, the Royal Society for Public Health’s 2016 commission of a modern “Gin Lane” retelling by Thomas Moore.
While art has long been a powerful medium to express individual views on society (as well as depictions of alcohol), those threads seemed to crystallize during the 18th century. Most prominently anchored by Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street,” this period gave way to further artistic exploration of the role that booze played in society, from sedate socializing to ruinous debauchery.
Think of Impressionist painters capturing the allure of absinthe followed by its lonely come-down, like Edouard Manet’s “Absinthe Drinker” or Edgar Degas’ “In a Café”; of David Wilkie’s 1812 painting, “The Village Holiday,” which seems to take pity on men weak for the sauce; of Peder Severin Krøyer’s 1888 work, “Hip-Hip-Hooray!,” with alcohol a source of cheer among a happy family. Much more recently, Richard Bellingham has used photography to work through his experience growing up with an alcoholic father.
As a writer, artist, and masters degree candidate in art history at Hunter University, June Scalia has researched different art movements’ portrayals of beer and how, from an artistic perspective, beer became seen as the drink of good, common folk. In addition to looking at the Dutch Golden Age and depictions of beer as a part of life, Scalia examined movements like American trompe l’oeil in the 19th century.
John F. Peto’s 1880 piece, “Still Life with Mug, Pipe, and Book,” expresses a nostalgia for the joy of idle beer-drinking lost in America’s new industrial rush. Scalia also discussed the context of alcohol in Cubism, like Picasso’s 1914 still life, “Ma Jolie,” in which the artist paints a bottle of Bass Ale. Cubist painters, Scalia writes, included everyday things in their average environments, like the Parisian café, presenting the revolutionary claim that art was for regular people with regular lives. This harkens back to the 18th century’s rise of art for the mercantile classes, when artists were suddenly able to paint scenes of daily life for the consumption of middle-class buyers.
Speaking by phone from her home in New York State, Scalia recounted the story of “Harvest Time” by Doris Lee. Lee was commissioned by an advertising agency working in the beer industry in 1945 to paint a scene conveying beer’s wholesome, all-American identity. In it, farm workers gather together for a home-cooked lunch, washed down with fresh beer.
“Beer has had this affiliation for a long time, and what the Doris Lee painting is getting after is that beer can be a substitute for food,” Scalia says. “As opposed to gin and spirits, it has such a low alcohol content that people can drink it all day and still be productive, which is essential to the American ethos.” Scalia adds that even during the Civil War, doctors were consulted and the consensus was yes, soldiers should drink beer because the calories would help keep them strong. Both Scalia and McCulla cited a painting that unites beer and battle: “Custer’s Last Fight” by Cassilly Adams (1888). Adolphus Busch had it reproduced as a lithograph; it hung in taverns as an advertisement for Budweiser, repackaging a work of art to broadcast patriotic values about beer.
The differing roles Hogarth ascribes to spirits and beer have persisted as societal attitudes ever since. McCulla says that after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, breweries began rallying together and distancing themselves from distilleries, thinking that if there were another clampdown on alcohol, it might only be for the higher-ABV spirits and not all-American, family- and community-friendly beer.
“Gin Lane” and “Beer Street,” and the works that would follow, mark the period of time when society first had to start thinking about all of this. Is beer safer and better than spirits? Why? How and when do we drink spirits compared to beer? Along with these questions came debates about how we as individuals and community members should interact with alcohol—reflections that are still echoing around the public domain today.
Words by Courtney Iseman
Illustrations by Colette Holston
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Atlanta based SweetWater Brewing Company has announced a new production facility, taproom, and restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado.
This week, SweetWater acquired Red Truck Brewing, a Canadian brewery that bought the brewery from Fort Collins Brewing back in 2017. Red Truck closed its doors in March 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic, and never reopened. The amount of the purchase has not been disclosed.
The 32,450 square foot space will see brewing and packaging equipment upgrades, as well as a taproom and restaurant overhaul.
Late last year, SweetWater was acquired Canadian based cannabis company, Aphria Inc., a sale highly motivated by the success of the brewery’s 420 Strain Series of beers.
Additionally, the Denver Airport will soon be home to a SweetWater airport bar location, joining Last Call Bar and Grill in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson Airport.
SweetWater ranks 11th in overall production volume amongst craft brewers in U.S. for calendar year 2020 according to the Brewers Association, currently distributing to 34 states.
The brewery opened in 1997.
The post Atlanta’s SweetWater acquires Red Truck Brewing, announces west coast brewery appeared first on Beer Street Journal.
While the saying sells t-shirts, it’s not far from the truth: “My other beer is coffee.” Many in the world of craft beer seek out the artisans of coffee who show the same amount of love to coffee that craft brewers pay to craft beer. As these brewers develop a love and appreciation for craft roasters, some brewers have found ways to utilize a roaster’s skill and attention to detail to elevate the brewery and its offerings.
The magic between Maui Brewing Company and Origin Coffee Company began in 2012 with a post Craft Brewers Conference meeting between Maui Brewing founder Garrett Marrero and roastmaster Heather Brisson-Lutz. Heather invited Garrett to visit her roastery to “experience specialty coffee on a more raw level.” After Garrett left, the two remained friends and returned to California and Hawaii and continued to talk about coffee.
“I’ve always loved good coffee,” says Garrett. “I had never looked at coffee in quite that detail. I didn’t have the knowledge of coffee that I have now. I love good beer, I love good whiskey, I love good coffee, I just didn’t know that much about coffee.” Something about the way the cupping elevated the taste of the coffee remained with Garrett. “That cupping blew my mind to how much coffee could change based on the process, something like the temperature that you bloom the coffee could have such an effect. Then knowing there wasn’t a good cold brew in Hawaii that was made at any scale, we saw that as an opportunity to create Origin for distribution throughout Hawaii.”
Fast forward to 2016 when Garrett offered Heather’s wife Kim a job as head brewer at Maui Brewing. Garrett and Heather then began to talk about the leaps and bounds that canned cold brew coffee had made in the coffee market and took this opportunity to create a business that realized the canned cold brew Heather and Garrett had talked about.
(Related: The Mad Scientist Behind Dozens of Medal-Winning Coffee Beers)
From there Heather remembers, “Origin Coffee Roasters opened up later in 2018… and found a home inside the new expansion of Maui Brew co. We set up our roasting facility and purchased a 25bbl cold brew brewhouse.” Origin Coffee Roasters then pushed forward and through partnership with Maui Brewing began canning Origin cold brew coffee.
“When you look at all of the things we do together and Maui Brewing is essentially a contract packager for Origin where we are canning the cold brew coffee on our filling line in order to supply that product to Origin,” says Garrett.
Origin coffee’s blend became Liquid Sunshine a mix of coffees designed to get the best flavor into the cold brew, and the coffee is more than just beans to Origin. “Heather has some great connections to many of these farms in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and places that are growing amazing coffee all over the world,” says Garrett. “Getting quality coffee direct from the grower, then we have that relationship that helps to develop. Then we can talk about a farm as opposed to a broker.”
Maui and Origin’s collaboration on beer dates back four or five years. In that time, the meeting of the minds between Heather, Kim, and Garrett has produced such beers as Grandma’s Coffee Cake Imperial Porter and Flat White Imperial Coconut Porter. “We were lucky having Kim as a resource to commission our brewhouse,” says Heather. “She still assists on our brew to this day.”
Beyond coffee collaboration, Heather is also starting to work with Maui Brewing’s distilling company, Kupu Sprits, to develop coffee liqueurs and different types of distilled beverages that utilize coffee, “potentially even a coffee cocktail in a can.”
As the word spreads about Origin, distribution of the beverage has grown from one island to many. Origin’s distribution started out on Maui only, and now stretches throughout Oahu and neighboring islands.
One thing I often forget outside of Maui Brewing is that everything made in this building is produced with solar energy. Obviously the roaster uses propane, but any electrical use in the roastery is the same electricity the brewery uses and we are one of the most sustainable buildings because we have a 1.2 megawatts of solar and batteries and biodiesel generators. Being made here at Maui Brewing allows that coffee to be made with sustainable energy.
For San Diego’s Modern Times Beer Company, roasting coffee dates back almost to the birth of the brewery, says Coffee Program Manager Tessie Warnecke. “Jacob McKean (our CEO/Founder) decided that one of our initial core offerings would be a coffee oatmeal stout,” remembers Tessie. “This would become Black House Coffee Stout, and the coffee used in the recipe was (and is) all roasted in-house, giving us a lot more control over the profile & consistency of the coffee used in the beer.” The brewery’s growth foreshadowed and echoed the growth of the coffee business – “Modern Times Coffee as a standalone division was not in the original business plan; it grew organically.”
Modern Times Coffee has been led by Tessie Warnecke since September of 2020. Prior to that, she “has been the Green Coffee Buyer and focused my attention on development of new products, as well as coffee education for staff and customers.” Tessie has seen Modern Times Coffee grow from humble roots, sourcing the coffee to be roasted 2 lbs at a time in one beer of Modern Times’s core lineup to its current state. Tessie recalls, “We didn’t sell an actual bag of the coffee itself until the year after the official opening of MT—all coffee that was roasted up until that point was for beer or cold brew on draft.” Modern Times’s current equipment investment in coffee “allowed us to really focus on the business of coffee, including launching our cold brew in cans. 7 years later, we’re roasting over 100,000 lbs of coffee a year (which is a lot for a small operation like us!).”
One of the offspring of Modern Times Coffee’s curiosity has been the proliferation of different blends of spirit barrel-aged coffee, that is coffee beans that have been rested inside spirits barrels to pick up the flavor and aroma of spirits like bourbon and brandy, for starters. But Tessie has discovered that while barrel-aged coffee is popular, one of the biggest challenges is a lack of reference materials. “There are no articles, references, or masters in this realm, which has made it one of the most exciting, educational, experimental, and all around beastly of product lines.” Tessie says that the way forward lies in experimentation and fascination with the potential new flavors that the team can discover. “We do quite a bit of sensory and quality tests, and we are always trying new processes to see how we can get the best results from the barrel aging process. Constantly asking questions on the amount of time in barrels, the type of barrels, how the moisture content and density is affected, what that means to roast profiles, which coffees work the best in which barrels, how temperature impacts the results.”
While both the brewery and the roastery release their own products, so many positives come from the collaboration between Modern Times Coffee and Modern Times Beer. Tessie describes the interplay between the two operations as “wonderful to see professionals from two very different industries able to talk shop and discuss flavors—even though the products are very different. If you “taste” for a living, you have the ability to calibrate your palettes much easier than the average person. This is a tremendous advantage that allows the collaboration process to work, not seamlessly, but with enthusiasm and passion from everyone involved.”
At their core, all coffee programs evolved from a shared love of coffee and beer, but at Massachusetts’s Tree House Brewing Company, the thought of adding a coffee roaster was the result of the brewery’s desire to make their coffee beer the best it could be.
Tree House Co-Founder and Head Brewer Nathan Lanier says that roasting coffee was “something I wanted to do since we began our coffee beer program in 2014, but the program took flight when the brewery worked on their “Shot Series” of beers. Each beer is named for a coffee order (Single Shot, Double Shot, Triple Shot, etc.), and Nathan says that his love of Double Shot Coffee Stout and his desire “to have the ultimate control [of the beer] through roasting was something we just needed to do. Internally, we try to outsource as little as possible because we think it contributes to a better end product.”
As Tree House Coffee evolved, so too did the Shot Series and Tree House Brewery’s use of coffee. Nathan says that Tree House’s “beers have benefitted from the addition of coffee, and we literally have dozens at this point, but our “Shot” series all use custom roasted blends to best meld with the base beer.”
Nathan also says that the synergy between Tree House Coffee and Tree House Brewery goes beyond collaboration at this point. Nathan and Coffee Program Manager Adam Bonaccorsi have wholly integrated the programs at Tree House. “The production staff on the beer side work directly with Adam and his team every day. There is a very tangible desire to relentlessly improve our offerings, and with the capability to sample roast, roast, and dissect our beans in house, this happens constantly,” Nathan stresses.
Ultimately, for Nathan and the staff of Tree House Brewing and Tree House Coffee, the energy that pushes both operations forward comes from the drive toward sustainability and the people involved.
“The leaders in the industry are doing tremendous things working directly with farmers to ensure they can comfortably subsist within an ecosystem that conspires to drive prices down. Coffee folks are amazingly passionate about what they do, why they do it, and what results from their work. It’s infectious and exciting to be a part of.
One of our biggest accomplishments this year was our first Direct Trade relationship. To meet the farmers who grow the beans we roast, and to develop a relationship with them, makes the cup more fulfilling in the end.”
The post The More Fulfilling Cup: Craft Brewers and Craft Roasters Find Common Threads Together appeared first on CraftBeer.com.
The honey should be of good quality—your mead will have flavors of the honey you use. If you like the subtle background flavors of the honey, it should make good mead.
Nutrients need to be dissolved in either must or water before being added to the larger volume of fermenting must. Stir or swirl your must gently before adding the nutrients to remove CO2 and avoid a honey volcano.
Mix water and honey well (I attach a blender to a drill and have my honey at liquid stage before starting). Gravity should be around 1.120. By mixing vigorously, you will oxygenate the must well, which is beneficial to yeast at this time.
Rehydrate yeast with Go-Ferm, add to room-temperature honey mixture, and allow to ferment for 24 hours. At 12 hours, you can mix the must again to introduce additional oxygen. After 24 hours of fermentation, add 5.1 g Fermaid O. At 48 hours, add remaining Fermaid O. At 72 hours, add 5.7 g Fermaid K and 7.1 g DAP. Add remaining Fermaid K and DAP when 1/3 of available sugars have been fermented (SG 1.080)
When your mead is done fermenting (several weeks)—specific gravity of about 1.025—transfer to new carboy for clarifying. You can add 1 Campden tablet (potassium metabisulfite) per gallon of mead and ½ tsp. potassium sorbate per gallon to stabilize fermentation and prevent renewed fermentation. If you want to avoid these, you will need to let your mead stabilize longer to make sure fermentation is complete and avoid bottle bombs.
The post Susan’s Traditional Mead + Bochet appeared first on American Homebrewers Association.
Mus tek cyear uh de root, fa heal de tree is one of many Gullah Geechee proverbs that fell on my ears during my childhood in Charleston, South Carolina. Though most sayings like this are didactic, I didn’t always understand their meaning when I was young. But now, at 42 years of age, I find their wisdom—the importance of taking care of the root before a tree can heal—helps make the ills of the society I inhabit more comprehensible.
Charleston, with its richness of culture and heritage, is often labeled one of America’s best destinations for travel. Still, most guides conveniently ignore the history of enslavement and segregation in the self-styled “Holy City.” That tangled identity is a truth I’ve known since I was a kid, and which I sadly witnessed again on a recent visit home.
Thanks to my enthusiasm for beer and brewing, I’m always excited to check out taprooms and alehouses wherever I go. That weekend was no different. I called one of my buddies, and we linked up at a brewery. Three hours later, we’d popped into three different spots, all within a quarter-mile radius. While standing in line waiting to order another pint, he nudged me and muttered a question: “Where are all the Black people?”
Depending on who you ask, there are two ways to answer that question, though neither gets at the whole truth. Going to breweries is some white-people shit. Alternatively: Black people don’t drink beer.
EDITOR’S NOTE
“Tek Cyear uh de Root” is a three-part series written by Jamaal Lemon—and with additional research and writing by Brian Alberts, Mike Stein, and Peter Jones—exploring the origins and evolution of the 19th-century Charleston Schützenfest. The annual shooting tournament and festival began before the Civil War as a celebration of German culture, but it soon became mired in Charleston’s racial hierarchy and the shifting goalposts of American whiteness. This series investigates the festival as a crucible where white supremacy, Black resistance, the local experience of Reconstruction, and shifting German-American ethnicity all fused together. These stories are also anchored in Charleston’s Gullah Geechee community and traditions, and will show how the early iniquities of the Schützenfest still influence the city’s—and the country’s—beer industry today.
Follow along as we explore this little-known chapter in American history, and tune in to the three-part, companion podcast series, which will be published on Saturday, July 10.
Countless historical events, legal policies, and social barriers have made it so that there weren’t many Black faces at that particular brewery on that day—nor at the two previous. Spend any time in the industry, and you’ll know that craft beer is overwhelmingly white and male. Like the unattended root of a tree, adverse issues continue to persist within the industry, distancing it further from its founding aims. In Charleston, one of the many reasons there are so few faces of color in breweries is homegrown, tracing back some 150 years—though less than a mile away from where we stood that day—to the Schützenfest.
The Charleston Schützenfest, a shooting competition and community festival transplanted from Germany, was held at the German Rifle Club’s grounds on the banks of the Ashley River for decades, starting in the 1850s. While club members took aim at targets and a traditional wooden eagle mounted atop a pole, other visitors enjoyed games of chance and skill, as well as music, dancing, and plenty of food and beer. Men and women, Black and white people, immigrant and native-born visitors were all welcomed under the banner of celebrating German culture—at least at first.
Schützenfests were common across the U.S. during the mid 19th century, one of many stages where German-Americans used their culture to help negotiate both local and national inclusion. Over time, however, the Charleston Schützenfest came to serve as a proxy for South Carolina’s winding path through the Civil War, white supremacy, and the denied potential of Reconstruction. Ironically enough, Black visitors were welcomed at the early Schützenfests, because their relationship with immigrant communities didn’t fit into the binary racial fiction that the slaveholding class maintained. But that would change, as the boundaries of whiteness shifted and promises of racial equality were systematically betrayed.
It’s a vivid story that we’ll tell in three parts, starting in 1855, when there was more drawing Gullah Geechee and German Charlestonians together than pulling them apart. The Schützenfest was nascent and relatively small-scale during this period, but the world it grew from foreshadowed much of what was to come, from the fruits of white supremacy planted in Charleston’s infancy to its modern-day beer scene. The grounds where this festival once took place can be seen as the cradle of Charleston’s contemporary craft beer culture. Though it has a population that is 44% African-American, the Holy City still has no Black-owned breweries today.
GOODS, SERVICES, AND NEGOTIATIONS
Pre-Civil War Charleston was what historians call a slave society, as slavery was so integrated into its politics, economy, and culture that it governed nearly every aspect of life.
The Holy City had a total population of just over 40,000 in 1860. About half were descendants of West Africans, also known as Gullah Geechee people, of whom around 3,600 were free Black residents, while about 17,600 were enslaved and heavily segregated. To add insult to injury, Charleston law assumed any Black person was enslaved unless they could prove otherwise. Any enslaved person in public had to carry a pass with explicit instructions. If a police officer believed they were deviating from the instruction, or they simply didn’t have a pass, they could be arrested or subject to public flogging. Under the slave code, Black Charlestonians could be—and were—barbarically punished for such offenses as carrying canes, wearing top hats in public, smoking cigars, and singing.
Police and white supporters maintained a culture of mistrust toward Black residents and anyone who might support them. A perennial debate in Charleston politics was whether the police force was well-funded enough, large enough, and strict enough on the Black population. White criminals could be sentenced to jail, while Black criminals were sentenced to whippings or workhouses. Displays of power—police and militia parades, imposing guard houses, prisons, and military schools, as well as frequent arrests—acted as a protective shell around the status quo.
Since colonial times, Black vendors, mostly women, had sold produce, eggs, potatoes, and other products near the wharves. Their voices gave Charleston a defining sound that rang out in melodic opposition to the clatter of marching steps and cannon drills. Their sales tactics were zealous and direct, but never random. Vendors incorporated West African modes of negotiation and dialect passed down by their ancestors into Charleston society.
Their distinct culture helped make the city’s markets famous nationwide, though white elites sometimes tried and failed to suppress their influence. Commercial spaces like these were special because the racial hierarchy was weaker there. As historian Ashley Rose Young has noted, the commercial relationships of the marketplace also served to renegotiate authority between enslaver and the enslaved—even if only temporarily, and only in that space.
Free Black Charlestonians worked in skilled trades far more often than their enslaved neighbors. They were carpenters, barbers, cooks, seamstresses, and fishermen. Very few owned businesses, and if they did, seldom for very long—they had virtually no access to credit or capital, and whites would never patronize their enterprises anyway. The enslaved were mostly restricted to unskilled and domestic labor, and often “hired out” (essentially rented) to work for other whites. Once hired, they wore metal badges marking their condition, a practice unique to Charleston, and poor white laborers occasionally asked the government to ban the practice of hiring out so they wouldn’t have to compete with Black slave labor. City leaders, overwhelmingly from the slaveholding class, always refused.
GERMANS IN THE HOLY CITY
German immigrants made up under 5% of the city’s population in 1860, or about 9% of its “white” population. That percentage slowly declined over time as local population growth outpaced incoming immigration. (Immigrants were rarely considered white themselves, except in cases where portraying them as white helped persecute a Black person.)
Many, along with some Irish immigrants, earned their livings as wholesalers and grocers, particularly in poorer and ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Frequently, these grocers purchased a building with apartments above their storefronts. Called “Dutch corner shops” (the term ‘Dutch’ referred to anyone who spoke a Germanic language at this time), these German grocery stores often doubled as saloons by adding barrooms to sell cigars, liquor, and beer shipped from Northern cities, as Charleston had no breweries of its own at the time. These shops became quite controversial among the slaveholding class, because they relied not just on alcohol sales to stay afloat, but also upon a Black clientele. They functioned as a space where Black consumers sought to carve out their own drinking culture, as a way to avoid and resist their oppression—as if to feel free, if only for the brief time it took to have a drink.
Consumer relationships, combined with cohabitation and shared discrimination from white elites, forged a closer social relationship between the poor German and Gullah Geechee communities that would soon shape the Schützenfest. It wasn’t harmonious—it was capitalistic, uneven, and at times contentious. It also stood apart from the city’s blatant, unreserved commitment to white supremacy.
These grocery stores also contributed to a broader relationship between the two groups. Many Germans clustered in the same northern and western wards of Charleston as the city’s Black residents. They shared streets and homes with their Black neighbors. German boarders sometimes rented a room from working-class Black families, and vice versa. Usually this was a platonic arrangement, but a few Charlestonians with one Black and one German parent do show up in later census rolls.
When immigrants, mainly German and Irish, first arrived in the United States, they soon found themselves swept up in this cycle of white supremacy and the persecution of Blackness. Nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, was rampant. But not all German immigrants engaged with Charleston’s slave society in the same way. Some subverted it, like Jacob Reils, a grocer who risked the death penalty by harboring fugitive slaves. Others bought in, like Charles Werner, who used enslaved labor to build a thriving iron foundry in the city, then used the profits from that to build the “Iron Palace,” an extravagant concert hall and Lager beer saloon. In its day, Werner’s palace probably did more to proselytize German-style Lager beer in white Charleston than any grocery store, because his approach embraced white supremacy and racial segregation.
Variations in immigrant behavior were usually generational. Older immigrants who’d arrived before the pro-democratic Revolutions of 1848 in Germany were richer, more politically conservative, and more vested in the slave society they found. They more often endorsed racial hierarchy and sought favor from white elites. Younger, newly arrived immigrants had witnessed, and often participated in, a revolutionary Germany which promoted cultural pluralism over aristocracy. They were less eager to assimilate and often bucked the status quo of their adopted home, including slavery and liquor laws, because they believed a society should grow to incorporate new communities. They were also poorer, and owned most of the small-time shops that welcomed Black patrons out of financial necessity, politics, or, most likely, both. Save for a few exceptions, they weren’t heroes or activists. Their ideology served them as immigrant outsiders in a new home and, when it came to beer culture, rationalized a little subversion here and there to make a buck.
Consumer relationships, combined with cohabitation and shared discrimination from white elites, forged a closer social relationship between the poor German and Gullah Geechee communities that would soon shape the Schützenfest. It wasn’t harmonious—it was capitalistic, uneven, and at times contentious. It also stood apart from the city’s blatant, unreserved commitment to white supremacy.
And it was growing. The sight of one or more Black Charlestonians outside an immigrant grocery store soon carried a well-known connotation. Police and onlookers spotted an enslaved Black person drinking a mug of beer, a gill (meaning a quarter-pint) of whiskey, or a tumbler of brandy with increasing regularity, and arrests for trumped-up “loitering,” public drunkenness, or rioting charges rose through the 1850s.
NATIVISM AND GROCERY STORES
As sites of beer consumption, places like the Iron Palace, groceries, and the Schützenfest were local engines of a national shift in beer culture. But that shift was politicized, contested, and racialized, especially in Charleston. Trading with the enslaved was illegal and subversive, not only in the name of racial hierarchy but also because enslaved African-Americans tended to pay for their goods with items stolen from slaveholders. Additionally, Germans tended to oppose restrictive liquor laws of any kind. As such, Black drinking at German groceries became a huge local issue throughout the 1850s.
The practice tended “to undermine the institution of slavery,” as Charleston’s mayor William Porcher Miles declared in 1857. A city judge, when sentencing an Irish shopkeeper in 1858, deemed it “essential” that “the interests of the slaveholding people should be maintained against any foreigners.” And he all but threatened vigilante terrorism if they weren’t, saying, “If the delivery and sale of liquor to slaves was to be carried on constantly, there was no telling how many fires and murders and thefts would be the consequence.”
Though it never came to that, historian Jeff Strickland has shown that Germans were hauled into court by the hundreds throughout the 1850s—at least 35 just in January 1854, another 40 in May and June of 1855, and more as time went on. If “loitering” was the only charge the city could make stick, these grocers typically faced a $20 fine, a substantial sum at the time. The longer the issue persisted, the more politicized it became. The late 1850s saw crackdowns, higher fines, and jail sentences.
In May of 1856 alone, 18 German grocery stores were fined for opening on Sunday, and 32 for operating without a license. Grappling with local liquor laws was a common sight in Northern cities, too—defending their beer culture was part of German-Americans’ broader pursuit of citizenship, prosperity, and ethnocultural acceptance. Black Charlestonians at these shops, free or enslaved, were regularly arrested on public drunkenness or “rioting” charges. They typically faced a fine of $3 to $5, whipping at the city’s workhouse, or up to a week of solitary imprisonment. The German and Gullah Geechee relations were viewed by Southern whites as a threat to the slave system, an imperfect merger that made it harder to maintain white supremacy.
The grocery store issue also stood in the way of Germans being considered white. European immigrants were “supposed” to be on the side of whiteness, slavery, and the belief in racial hierarchy. Until then, their own racial status was murky. Some white Charlestonians undoubtedly patronized German grocery stores. Some attended the early Schützenfests too. But doing so opened them up to criticism from nativists saying that “clanish and tribal” Germans would “try to make a Dutchman of him,” the derision being that the German was not fully white, and therefore not worthy of the established racial hierarchy.
A city judge, when sentencing an Irish shopkeeper in 1858, deemed it ‘essential’ that ‘the interests of the slaveholding people should be maintained against any foreigners.’ And he all but threatened vigilante terrorism if they weren’t, saying, ‘If the delivery and sale of liquor to slaves was to be carried on constantly, there was no telling how many fires and murders and thefts would be the consequence.’
Charleston’s Schützenfest tradition began during these years, occupying the same rocky middle ground as its German-American organizers. Though Germans retained exclusive access to the shooting tournaments, their Black neighbors were welcome visitors at the festival and took particular advantage of its games, such as climbing a greased wooden pole to claim prizes at the top. White Charlestonians attended, but their observations were detached and bemused. They found the dancing charming and the games silly, but they regarded the shooting tournaments with sincere respect. As a niche, curious event on the outskirts of town, it drew less white supremacist ire than the marketplace and the groceries, but it nevertheless offered one more space where racial lines might concievably blur. And just 10 years later, this same fest would inhabit an entirely different world.
A SEA CHANGE
Tensions over the grocery store issue, like the rot of the slave society surrounding it, were not resolved by time, civil discourse, or law, but rather by war. In April 1861, Confederate soldiers fired on Fort Sumter and started a war that would change Charleston and the nation forever. There was apparently no Schützenfest that year—the German Rifle Club’s shooting grounds, called the Schützenplatz, were being used to organize and train Confederate Army units.
For the most part, Germans in Charleston were pretty ambivalent toward the Confederate cause. Even so, military service or other support for the war was more or less required if they were to maintain any status in the community. Most volunteered for local militia service that allowed them to remain close to home. Immigrant Unionists who opposed the war could only express their opposition indirectly, such as providing cigars, food, and other comforts to Union prisoners of war who were brought to the city. As we’ll see in Parts Two and Three, Black Charlestonians would support the Union cause far more vociferously than their German neighbors once the slave system crumbled.
Some Charleston whites undoubtedly patronized German grocery stores. Some attended the early Schützenfests too. But doing so opened them up to criticism from nativists saying that ‘clanish and tribal’ Germans would ‘try to make a Dutchman of him,’ the derision being that the German was not fully white, and therefore not worthy of the established racial hierarchy.
German Charlestonians’ mixed support for the Confederacy would ultimately morph into a much stauncher support for white supremacy as their economic fortunes, ethno-nationalist outlook, and outsider status all shifted after the war. The Schützenfest is a colorful and integral piece of that story.
For now, let’s recall some familiar refrains in craft beer today: Women prefer wine; Black people just don’t like beer; going to breweries is some white-people shit. They sound simple, obvious, and timeless, and that’s part of their power, because any proposed work to change them therefore sounds massive and intrusive. But when we investigate just how much deliberate work goes into creating and normalizing exclusion—into maintaining social barriers for so long that it feels like they were always there—we can see that the disruptive might actually be a corrective.
The ugly truth behind feeding a society centuries of these assumptions is generations left with warped perceptions. Without the complex, nuanced truth, we’re all guilty of prejudging what we see in the here and now, and not taking proper care of society’s roots.
The result: prejudices that grow and feed on our communities, like Spanish moss on live oaks.
Up next: Read Tek Cyear uh de Root, Part Two — The Deliberate Reconstruction of the Charleston Schützenfest
Words by Jamaal LemonIllustrations by Colette Holston
Language 
American Craft Beer Week (May 10–16, 2021) is our annual springtime salute to local beer and local breweries. It’s an opportunity to honor the hometown gathering places that give our communities their unique flavor, because here’s the glorious truth: Local Beer Is Better.
We invite you to toast the local businesses that have endured tough times to ensure our glasses, growlers, and beer fridges remain full. Head over to your local brewpub or taproom and enjoy a pint, or grab a sixer or growler to-go.
Here’s to American craft beer!
The post Get Ready: American Craft Beer Week Is May 10-16 appeared first on CraftBeer.com.
