A good brewery museum is worth supporting

The Christian Science Monitor’s feature “5 famous pork projects: Beer museum and more” includes, as you might have guessed, funding for the National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wis.

In 2004, The Potosi Brewery Complex restoration project received a $449,574 grant from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program to help renovate the building in order to attract tourism. Straddling the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, the renovated brewery became home to the National Brewery Museum, the Potosi Brewing Company Transportation Museum, a Great River Road Interpretive Center, and a micro brewery.

I don’t understand why this is a bad thing. As far as government projects go a half million dollars isn’t much. Efforts to create a national museum have failed elsewhere. Beyond the fact the museum houses rotating exhibits of items on loan from members of the American Breweriana Association there’s the Research Library. What could be more important?

A few photos from when we visited a couple of years ago:

2 thoughts on “A good brewery museum is worth supporting”

  1. Thank you for this, Stan. I saw this story, and my first response was confusion. If every $500,000 we spent generated three museums and a small business, our economy would be in unbelievable shape. This is just a case of people seeing something with the word “beer” and assuming it’s useless, instead of a longstanding and valuable part of local, regional and national communities. It’s just a lazy report by a lazy reporter. The CSM usually does better journalism than this.

  2. It does seem like a nifty idea for a museum. So nifty that I think money should be forcibly extracted by my fellow citizens to pay for it? Not so much.

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