As we wade through the depths of human history, there has been one bright light guiding us forward.  It spread agriculture and spawned permanent civilizations.  It kept us safe and fed.  It opened our eyes and inspired our minds.  The study of it led to some of the most significant scientific and literary improvements in the human condition.  What was it that guided us forward through time?  A beverage fermented from cereal grains commonly referred to as beer!  Why is it only in the last 30 years that we’ve remembered to treat this partner the way it deserves?  Follow along and discover how our love affair with beer ushered mankind into the modern world.

Several millennia ago our ancestors were hunters and gatherers who scratched through life, surviving on what they could find.  As omnivores, humans were forced to use trial and error to determine which foods were edible.  The increase in human brain size was primarily driven by the need to remember which things were good to eat and have the ability to communicate that information to others.

Eventually, ancient man discovered that a certain seed growing on wild barley plants was good to eat if prepared properly.    In due course, people noticed that grains soften when soaked in water.  However, if left untended, these water-soaked grains would spontaneously ferment, or spoil.  Luckily enough, we are trial-and-error creatures so some adventurous soul tasted the “spoiled” water-logged grain… and beer was born. This new discovery was just the partner humans needed to propel their rise to dominance.  Since grain can be grown on throughout the world, beer spread rapidly from culture to culture, civilization to civilization. Throughout the ages, people taught each other how to prepare and eventually ferment beer.

The earliest evidence of people fermenting grains is from Jiahu, China, and dates to over 9,000 years ago.  Fermentation was tricky and misunderstood, but beer remained a staple of human existence because it was highly nutritious.   Almost every early religion had a patron “god” of beer to whom our ancestors prayed in hope of proper fermentation.  While we may question the usefulness of these prayers, ancient humans learned some practical lessons as well.  To make good beer, the water needed to be boiled – a step that (not so coincidentally) also renders water safe to drink.  Between boiling of the water and the resultant alcohol, brewed beer gave our ancestors a safe staple that allowed us to live close together in cities.  Beer allowed us to live in cities because as we all know the more people, or animals that gather together in tight spaces the dirtier those spaces become, think college dorm room.  Dirty spaces lead to polluted water supplies increasing the need to “process” this water into beer.

Every early agricultural civilization on Earth brewed beer in one form or another.  Europe, Africa, and the Americas all had cultures that – with little or no contact to ancient beer loving Middle Eastern civilizations – fermented grains independently.  As the fruit- and grape-rich areas of Greece and Rome rose to power, beer became a second-class beverage, relegated to barbarians.  However, grape-starved regions of the world did not abandon beer during this period, and many northern Europeans began to view beer as the beverage that kept them from becoming Romans. The Germans, Belgians, and Britons kept the spirit of beer alive.  Indeed, the Germans, and their beer, would eventually conquer Rome when it rotted in its own decadence.

Although the period after Roman rule is referred to as the “Dark Ages”, it was a Golden Age for beer. Beer-loving peoples ruled, and beer once again drove creativity and innovation forward.  The quest to develop our long-standing partner to its full potential began.

This was a time riddled with sickness and war.  All Europeans survived at the bequest of the Catholic Church after Rome fell. As fortune would have it, most monasteries followed a combination of Irish and German traditions – one of which required the production and distribution of beer by monks for the poor.  Monasteries in the Normandy region of France were granted hop gardens by Charlemagne around 800 C.E., and beer changed forever.  Around 500 years later, German brewers discovered that hopped beer lasted longer.  Beer could now be shipped cross-country.

With the rise of hopped beer, its production moved from monastery and home to the commercial brewery.  In order to provide enough beer to their ever-multiplying consumers, medieval brewers needed to create a consistent, quality product that could survive transportation.  This economic pressure sparked a spectacular age of innovation, as advances in beer technology spilled over into revolutionary scientific and industrial breakthroughs.

A brewer named Otto van Guericke built the first pneumatic pump in 1657 while trying to extract air from his beer kegs, an invention that eventually led to the development of the steam engine.  Another brewer, named James Joule, discovered that when pressurized, beer started to heat up – but if the pressure was released, it would cool down.  Physics students around the world study this principle today – you may know it as the first law of thermodynamics.  He also revealed why heat could be created by friction.

But the scientific progress that can be credited to beer is not limited to physics.  Louis Pasteur, while studying the diseases in fermentation of beer, discovered what yeast truly was: not magic, but a microorganism.  This discovery led to the practice of pasteurization, and inspired Pasteur to develop the “germ theory”.  Pasteur is now the father of modern medical science because he surmised that these same organisms could cause disease in humans.

As with many modern humans the consumption of a beer (or six) can kindle creativity and conversation.  During the Enlightenment Period, this inspiration was taking place in coffee houses of London, where free thinkers like John Locke, Ben Franklin, and Joseph Priestly met with their contemporaries to discuss new ideas.  These beer-fueled collaborations would lead Franklin to electricity, Priestly to the discovery of oxygen, and Locke to pen his ideas of liberty.  Many other British, French, German, and eventually American citizens gathered together around a few beers to produce the ideas that would change the face of the planet.

Only recently have Americans rediscovered that beer is not just a beverage to be mass-consumed in college or at sporting events. It is also a quality product that should be respected.  In the story just told, we can see how the production, consumption, and study of beer guided humanity towards the revolutions in industry and science that gave us the modern world.  So raise a glass and remember how beer guided us through the long journey to where we are today.   Never fail to appreciate how great a partner we have in our beer.

Very few people wake up one morning and decide they love India Pale Ales or Imperial Stouts much less young first time drinkers. Craft beer is in many cases similar to single malt scotch because most people have to make a concerted effort to truly appreciate it. Bitterness may be one of the main reasons because the taste is originally a sign of toxicity in plants. For that reason typically the palette must be trained in order to appreciate bitterness in plants like broccoli, or more importantly hops. So why do many of us put in this kind of effort to become beer lovers? For that matter why do perfectly rational normal seeming people decide to sort through piles of city, state, and federal regulations, put themselves into massive amounts of debt, and fight giant multinational corporations for the chance to become moderately wealthy at best? Other people will choose to become politically active in a way they have never been before in order to defend their right to drink beer. Not to mention the ever expanding amount of alternatives practically thrown our way. So why has beer persevered in the face of these challenges?

For the first nine millennia of beer’s existence there were few reasons not to love beer, it was safe, nutritious and high in much needed calories. Even though safe alternatives in coffee and tea have been available for centuries they were much too expensive and lacked the caloric value to appeal to the general populace.  In an ironic turn it should have been Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking work Studies on Fermentation, the diseases of Beer in 1876 that sounded the death knell for beer. Although Pasteur’s work greatly improved our understanding of the brewing process it also ended beer’s reign as a staple beverage by showing that water could be made safe simply by boiling it. In Europe, beer was safe due to the cultural memory and importance of it to nations like Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. In the fledgling United States this development came at just the wrong time; providing prohibitionists with the safe, alternatives they needed to gain ground in the fight against alcohol.

The German-Americans that controlled the majority of the American brewing industry had fought time and time again to show that beer was not a destructive substance. American beer flourished right up to the dawn of Prohibition in spite of many attacks. During the 13 year mistake that was American Prohibition the brewing industry went into rapid decline for obvious reasons. Also, during that era new alternatives to beer popped up in the soft drink industry, and Americans learned to drink liquor because it was much more profitable to smuggle in. When Prohibition came to a close the brewing industry would enter a whole new world where dieting, bland processed food, and sweet soft drinks would come into the mainstream. In order to survive this new reality breweries were forced to move towards light, dry, bland beer, welcome the American adjunct lager and its poster child Miller High Life. In the 40 years that followed Prohibition there seems to have been an all-out attack on the American palette.

Since beer was now a luxury good and no longer a necessary part of the human diet, large breweries could no longer rely on making a quality product with knowledge that everyone drinks beer. For centuries breweries prided themselves on making the best product they could to gain their market share. With so many alternatives and fewer beer drinkers than ever before, especially in the United States, new strategies would have to be devised. This strategy would involve going toe to toe with the liquor industry to be the product that got us drunk, think; “more flavor, less filling” and you will get the idea. Slowly but surely diet beers and other gimmicks began to hit store shelves and bar coolers. Fortunately, some young adults in the 1960’s and 1970’s began to reject the corporate culture of their parents’ generation including their beer.

How did the efforts of a few counter-culture entrepreneurs change American tastes again? What came to be known as the Craft Beer Movement started out very humbly with a few passionate enthusiasts preaching the good word. Now that craft brewing can really be considered to be in full swing, I would like to explore the motivations behind the passion sweeping many of us into it. Good history for me has never been a list of facts, but discovering the context in which they exist. This is why I am not going to list out a year by history of the craft beer movement up till this moment, but provide you with the context of the condition the beer world was in that dawn of the movement. Over the next months to a year I hope to have this discussion and explore what connects each of us to our favorite beverage and find out why we all learn to love beer.

For example, I am pretty sure my love affair with beer began at an early age. I grew up on the small dairy farm in northern Wisconsin that my family has farmed for over a century now. When I was young we lived in a trailer across the yard from my grandparents’ house so my Dad did not have to add a commute to his 16 hour days on the farm.  My Dad has run the farm with my Grandpa since he was in his teens, which meant Grandpa was always around.  Before my grandparents moved up to the lake to retire, which meant they stopped working Sundays, they had a bar in the basement with a kegerator. Like any boy of seven or eight I followed my grandpa everywhere. This included what he called Miller time, ironically since he was never a fan of Miller. As a family of German descent beer was never taboo in our house, although my Dad never drank, something about not enough time in the day.

On tap in the basement bar was always G. Heileman’s Old Style, until 1991 when the brewery went Bankrupt and Grandpa claimed it never tasted the same. He was pretty sure they stopped krausening it so he switched to Pabst instead, which was incidentally owned by Stroh brewing as well. As a child the part I loved was pouring the beer into the little pilsner glass he had with lunch.  This experience stuck with me as I went to college and decided to bar-tend to fund my education. Being a long-winded history major, I learned that if you could tell stories people tipped you better. I read as much about beer and liquor history as I could. The more I read, the more I appreciated and I began to dabble in craft beers. I dabbled mostly in gateway beers like Lienenkugel’s, Sam Adams, and yes occasionally even an Old Style. Now 13 years later my obsession has progressed to the point that almost every Saturday I give the tours at Lift Bridge Brewing Company. The more I thought about my own story, the more I was curious to find out what other people’s beer love stories. That is why I would like to build a cultural history of the craft beer movement to find out why, in spite of the odds, so many of us love craft beer.

Why do you love beer? Share your story below.

Every morning we wake up, watch, listen to, or read the news only to find that the discourse in our country has devolved into something that most of us can no longer stomach.  We cannot seem to have a debate without most of it revolving around assigning blame.  How does a nation designed and built for civil discourse arrive at this place?  What does this have to do with beer and alcoholic beverages in general or the lack there of?   The United States was built in bars, taverns and breweries.  It was alcohol (mostly beer) that relaxed the thinkers of the Enlightenment enough to spur the creativity and courage to invent the concept of liberty.  The founders of this nation took that concept to a new and dangerous level.

The idea of liberty was conceived in the coffee houses and salons of Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were not just drinking coffee, tea, and water as they penned the discourses that would usher us into the modern world.  The convivial, collaborative atmospheres that they wrote in were fueled in most cases by beer and wine.  Since these ideas were not popular with the monarchical governments of the era alcohol provided no small amount of liquid courage as well.  The philosophical heirs to this tradition, Ben Franklin and Joseph Priestly, spent their evenings in London coffee houses exploring the practical impacts of a society based on personal freedom while imbibing porter-Franklin’s ale of choice.  Franklin also had many people of similar mind in his native land of Britain’s American colonies.

The Americans who would eventually found our nation gathered in their local taverns and over a few local ales eventually let their rebellious ideas fly.  Key among them was Samuel Adams, a maltster by trade, who was known to buy rounds of drinks to encourage people to talk.  In many ways social drinking allow the United States to come into being.  So then, how did we get from a nation founded on convivial, social drinking to one where drinking and politics become far less social?  That change mostly occurred during an era referred to as Prohibition.

Since the Volstead Act of 1919 prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol Americans were forced into their homes if they wanted a drink.  After Prohibition ended people continued this tradition of drinking in their homes and the remaining breweries were eager to comply.  In the second half of the 20^th century American breweries would continue to drive their product towards home consumption.  Beer became a product to be consumed at home in front of the television, not among friends and neighbors.

With the rise of the interstate system beer could be easily transported across the country allowing the large brewers to become giants and these giants only cared about profits not community.  The interstate system also helped spur the move out of cities into suburbia.  Suburbs became increasingly spread out forcing Americans to drive to get groceries, beer, or even go to a tavern if that suburb had one.  Americans learned slowly but surely that beer and cars were not a great mix so we had one more reason to drink at home.  We have become more and more personally disconnected, no longer do most of us live in close knit communities.  Instead of walking down to the local tavern to have a beer (or five) with our neighbors over a few hours we exchange 140 character notes.  I for one have difficult elaborating on an idea in 140 characters.

Beer is unique among alcoholic beverages because a person can have a few and become more social without becoming drunk. That second drink seems to relax people just enough to let their guard down for an honest, even open-minded discussion.   It seems to be more difficult to find a place where a person can have a beer or two and find themselves becoming friends with the stranger on the barstool next to them, who may only live blocks away.  Though recently something momentous has occurred locally in Minnesota.  We have rediscovered the neighborhood bar, especially the taproom.

With the 4^th of July rapidly approaching we should remember the sense of community that our founders used to make this nation great.  The people who founded our country bravely drank a few beers and risked their lives to give us a place where freedom of thought and debate was encouraged.  This 4^th of July shut off your electronics and walk to your local taproom, tavern, or at least walk down the street and invite your neighbor over for a beer.  Isn’t it time we disconnected our toys and reconnected face to face with a couple of beers so the conversation can become civil again?