My First and Last Beer Book

Introducing my last look at the history of craft brewing.

I was in Annapolis this spring, where I met my cousin, his girlfriend and her kids for lunch. It was one of my first lunches out at a restaurant since the apocalypse. I remember because of the beer.

As some of you know, I wrote about beer a lot. I’ve produced podcasts, two books and gobs and gobs of blogs on my own and other people’s pages about beer. I was something of an evangelist. I imagined a future where America was great again in that every town had a tavern that made its own beer.

I organized pairings and events around drinking local, I railed against snobbery in favor of acceptance, “Drink what you like and be happy.” Beer was a dumb thing to fight about or argue over. I’ll admit it still sticks in my craw when the only beers you can buy cold are from massive breweries, but that doesn’t matter much now that I’ve switched to drinking Harp.

Back in Annapolis, my cousin asked me to choose a beer. Among the popsicle orange crush triple IPAs, national brewery standards and fruited low-cal seltzers, I saw a brown ale. It was from a Maryland brewery that I had never heard of, but I haven’t had my hand in since March 2020 or so.

Here’s my review: I hope it was sour on purpose.

It is 100% possible that I’ve lost my ability to taste and evaluate beer, but it is equally likely I was drinking the latest from the garbage beer revolution.

If the craft beer revolution came out of the financial crash as land got cheap and technical-minded people got laid off, the garbage beer revolution grew from the glut of a red-hot economy.

Money was free to borrow and, on the heels of the national downtown revival, cool places were cheap and the government would pay you to buy them. I feel like when our local homebrew legend, Doug Griffith, shuttered the legendary, “Extreme Brewing” the garbage beer revolution was well underway.

Changing Tastes

Doug closed down sometime around 2018, give or take a year. He had ridden a huge wave of homebrew enthusiasts. He’d started as one himself, which is how he found himself first peering through the windows of and then helping construct the local brew pub that would become Dogfish Head.

There’s no telling how many brewers started with Doug’s physical help and intellectual tutelage. There’s a chapter about him in my published book, Eastern Shore Beer, but there’s a lot more in my unpublished book, which we’ll get to directly.

It wasn’t so much that Doug couldn’t compete with Amazon or anything. People bought things at Extreme so they could ask questions and leave with exactly what they needed. Doug was just ready to be retired. It was as if he knew the revolution was over and that his side had won.

Homebrewing was an alternative for people who didn’t want what was available at their corner store. Once every filthy 7-Eleven east of the Mississippi had a craft beer section, it just wasn’t an issue. Doug got out like Seinfeld.

I was out to lunch again, recently, and had another mediocre beer from a Maryland brewery I’d never heard of. This one wasn’t sour, it was just a little “homebrew-y.” Then I remembered this was my dream, tiny breweries making beer for their hometowns. In my dream, the pints weren’t $12 and the beer wasn’t middling, but why wouldn’t it be? The innovation that made Budweiser Budweiser was its predictability.

For some reason, I imagined pride alone would have kept craft brewers on their toes but there’s a different audience now than there was a decade ago. Today’s beer drinkers came up on experimental beer. To them, all craft beer is good and all craft beer tastes exactly the way it is supposed to taste.

I lost faith in craft beer someplace between hazy, juice-bomb IPAs and craft seltzer. I don’t feel the responsibility to buy either craft or local anymore. On the rare occasion that I see something new in a cooler, I might give it a try, but my days of bringing home warm beer in hope that it might turn out to be good are over.

I have the same attitude to new “young” craft whiskeys: I’m glad you’re practicing but you’re not practicing on my dime.

Being Burley

My beer odyssey started in 2007 (or so, I think) when I covered the construction of what would become Burley Oak brewing. I didn’t know how books were written back then, so I decided to write one. Over the course of three or so years, I conducted interviews with Burley Oak owner Bryan Brushmiller and his staff and colleagues with the intention of writing a book I wanted to call Being Burley.

I spent a year or so writing and having it edited but couldn’t get it sold. It was in that process that I was contracted to write Eastern Shore Beer and Delaware Beer. My friend Tina Ludwick nee Dayton did the editing and asked about the finished product occasionally for a couple of years.

Lately, I’ve started getting some more paid subscribers here, and as a thank you and an enticement I’ve decided to start publishing what is essentially the final draft that I might have published independently if I had the cash at the time.

This series should take us through the summer, by which time I hope to have another book out to the publisher. If all that happens, I’m going to serialize my next true crime investigation here as well.

So that’s the plan. Sorry to draw you in to what turned out to be a commercial, but when I realized no one would read the chapters about Doug and Extreme Brewing, I decided I’d release the book. I’ll release the introduction for everyone tomorrow (Friday).

Keep the Faith,

Tony

Postscript

My latest review for the New York Journal of Books is out. The difficulty in writing it was that I didn’t “like” the book. It was well-written and probably a story worth telling but I didn’t have a lot of patience for the premise, which is that the Evangelical movement had been hijacked by hatemongers.

Everything about the history of religion points to sexual mania and violence. I don’t think good and evil are on a scale, but if they were the continued culture of subjugating women and raping children certainly outweighs whatever positive efforts have been made in the name of God.

I’ve got an essay about this rumbling around in my head, but the short version is that when I come across a good and decent religious person, I imagine their faith is incidental. After all, if you want to get into the do-gooder business (and you aren’t a billionaire masked vigilante) churches are the only ones hiring.

I’ve mentioned “Notes” and will keep on plugging it because it’s where I’m writing my shortform.

TR