If you could climb into a machine that would take you to any time and place, what beer related destination would you pick?
Here’s a sample answer: Sonoma, California, 1977.
21 thoughts on “If you could climb into a beer time machine . . .”
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Munich 1516
Albany, New York, 1850 and/or London, June, 1944
If it’s a time machine, can’t I take it anywhere for weekly vacations?
Please?
*Imagine my additions to the OCB! 😉
I guess I have to rename it a “One Time Machine”
Also, although I made the example short it would be fine to include a reason as well as place and time.
Chicago, 1893–see what won the other-colored ribbons.
There are going to be a lot of great answers but I would go back just a few years to the late 80’s to travel on the Beer Hunter trips while they were filming.
The East End of London, 1888, to drink porter, Burton and IPA, leaving the pub just long enough to catch Jack the Ripper in the act and hand him into Scotland Yard.
Andrew (brewer a) – Well, you made me change the rules a bit. The Beer Hunter footage at Pilsner Urquell (“we’ll never change”) makes me think it would be nice to take trips to Pilsner Urquell every 10 years going back 180 years or so.
I’d go back to 1868 so I could watch Scottish brewers dump tons of Saaz hops into their beer.
I’m going to sound like the Budweiser commercial where the bartender asks Joe Buck who he’d like to have a Bud with, and he answers his dad. I’d like to somehow go back and be of an age to drink with my dad and his late dad, which would mean drinking Michelob if at my grand-dad’s house, or Ballantine or Rolling Rock or my dad’s homebrew if at my mom and dad’s.
If adult me sitting with my dad and grand-dad somehow breaks the time machine rules, I’d go back to the 80s for the last gasp of Midwest regional brewery glory.
I would go on the Belgium trip that Sam Caglione, Vinnie Clorizo, Adam Avery and New Belgium’s founders went on. Thats where they talked, tasted and obtained their yeast cultures that formed the foundation of the American Sour Beers. It’s probably also where New Belgium hired their head brewer away from Rodenbach.
My answer will, of course, be predictable to all who know me:
Newark, NJ, anytime in the 1960’s, so I could enjoy Ballantine IPA again (and if I were really lucky, get hooked up with some just bottled samples of their 20 year old Burton Ale).
Would I be allowed to bring a few cases back with me? 😉
Ryan – Just to keep history straight . . .
The “Brett Pack” trip that Sam led was in 2006.
New Belgium’s founders visited Belgium in the 1980s. They hired Peter Bouckaert in 1996. I think they might have interviewed him during the Craft Brewers Conference in Boston.
I can’t have a beer TARDIS? I think that would be lovely, since I would like to do (among other things) an early medieval gruit tour to see what was actually turning up in the beer in different Northern European places. Come to think of it, that would have been a much, much better topic than my actual dissertation on amber in the Bronze Age.
No one is choosing the future? We’re reaching new heights in world beer culture right now, so it would be interesting to see what the landscape is 10 or 20 years from now. I’d be content to land here in Portland in 2021, but since the machine will take me anywhere maybe I’ll go transatlantic and land somewhere like Amsterdam, Bamberg, or Prague.
I wonder how many official beer styles will exist by then.
I’m lobbying for reducing the number of “styles” to three – beers brewed with bottom fermenting yeast, with top fermenting yeast and using spontaneous fermentation.
Gotta agree with Bailey. London during the heyday of porter. I’d say 1815, so that way I could taste the Burtons and IPA’s as well.
I’d go back to the pub where I had my first pints of Timothy Taylor Landlord. I don’t remember the name of the place or where it was exactly so I’d like to make note of that! I was taken there by a couple I knew only through a email list — ain’t the Internet great? This was well before the rise of rating sites, though, and I had Landlord because it was local and on the handpump, not because of any hoopla I’d heard.
Stan – splitter!
14th April 1989.
So I could tell myself not to drink eight pints of Burton Ale and end up getting lost on Doxey Marshes. And deciding to sleep in a pond.
Stan says: “I’m lobbying for reducing the number of “styles” to three”
LOL….YES. Please. I’ll sign that petition (and I know a lot of other ‘good beer’ lovers who would too).