Is there a year that changed beer?

Damn you, Eric Asimov. My plan was to follow the lead of Jeff Alworth and avoid posting the rest of the week, but sometimes words are written that demand conversation. Today in his blog and in a story (well, the story would be tomorrow if you prefer newsprint) Asimov writes about the 1982 vintage in Bordeaux.

I care not about that vintage. Actually, I’d love to taste those wines, but ain’t happening, so we can move on. Instead, notice the point he makes about how the wine world changed in 1982. “It’s a clear dividing line between the end of the old way of making and thinking about wine, and a new way that, for better or worse, defines our current age,” he writes. And there’s more.

If you could transport yourself back to 1982, you’d find a much more constrained world, where great wine meant Bordeaux and Burgundy, with perhaps some Champagne thrown in. The Rhône? In a great shop you might find Rhônes in a section marked “country wines.” Italy? Straw bottles of chianti, perhaps some dusty bottles of Barolo and a lot of awful Lambruscos and Soaves. California? Just moving out of the jug wine era into the age of white zinfandel.

Except for the great names, wine was still largely a local business. As had been true for centuries, most of the different wines of the world would be sold within 100 miles of where they had been made.

Beer was a local product in 1982 and it was not. Heck, by 1882 in the United States local was in trouble.

So was there a year that changed beer?

On second thought, maybe this is a local question. Perhaps there was a year that changed beer globally, but as likely different years in the UK, in Bavaria, in Bohemia, in the north of Germany, in Flanders, in . . .

I’m leaning toward 1918 myself.

16 thoughts on “Is there a year that changed beer?”

  1. I’m pretty sure Sam is not that old.

    I’d vote for the year Jack McDonald started his brewery. I think that was a few years before they legalized homebrewing.

  2. I can think of a few key moments in beer history. An Important year for Craft beer was 1978 when it became legal for home brew. In 1981 Coors began distribution across the Mississippi river. Budweiser using refridgerated railcars in 1876. Louis Pasteur proved the existence of “living organisms” that caused fermentation in 1860. A very important date in US beer history is 1918 with the Volstead act.

    All of these dates are just brief snap shots of the rich history of beer. Each one can be considered a turning point where a deep impact was made in the social history around us.

  3. 1840 in this neck of the woods, when cold fermenting became mainstream (which incidentally, was around the time Dreher started bottom fermenting in Austria and Sedlmayr started to modernize Spaten)

  4. For me in the US, it was around 1984-85 when the 2 managers of a small, classy restaurant in Libertyville, IL started serving some of the Merchant DuVin beers.

    They also subscribed to a “boutique” brewery newsletter out of California that reviewed different west coast beers with actual labels glued in place illustrating the articles (anyone remember this?).

    These 2 entrepreneurs introduced me to some of these brews that they brought back from trips and as the years went on, introduced me to more local breweries that started popping up — had me do the recon work for the first brewpub in Wisconsin and hosted a pub-crawl between Capital Brewery in Madison and Lake Front Brewery in Milwaukee sometime in ’89 or ’90. They also hosted beer tasting and appreciation classes and were always being enthusiastic about discussing and drinking new beers.

    Sadly, one of these managers succumbed to a debilitating disease in the late ’90s, but his partner went on to open the beer room he’d always wanted — right next door to, and with the backing of the owners of that first establishment (read about it here: http://lewbryson.blogspot.com/2009/02/chicagoland-afternoon-flatlanders-and.html).

    These were the times that opened my eyes to what beer could (should?) be and led to a much bigger understanding and appreciation of the beverage — from North America to Europe.

  5. I’d agree that the ratification of the 18th amendment in 1918 (1919?) was certainly _very_ significant for ‘changing beer’, since it essentially almost singlehandedly caused the demise of so many local and regional breweries and changed the landscape of the industry once it was repealed years later.

    But I’d definitely also have to put in a strong vote for 1977, the year Jack McAuliffe opened his New Albion brewery. His was the first small scale commercial brewery and while it wasn’t around for very long, he showed that it could be done. Although Fritz Maytag was an earlier proponent in the late 60’s of ‘beer with character’ (although there were still a few old brands around that qualified), McAuliffe essentially started the revolution from which we now enjoy the benefits (as well as the occasional agony of too much choice. LOL).

  6. Peter & Amy – I think Sam was born in 1969 and is 42. The Professor for noting it is Jack McAuliffe and 1977.

    A couple things. I was being a little flip by mentioning 1918. That’s the year that E.S. Salmon cross-pollinated the hops that became Brewers Gold and essentially changed hops forever.

    The way I asked the question probably shifted away from something I was sort of hoping for. That’s if there was a moment like this: “It’s a clear dividing line between the end of the old way of making and thinking about wine, and a new way that, for better or worse, defines our current age.”

  7. Is there agreement that pilsner was invented, whole cloth, in 1842? Because that was certainly an important year. (I tend to doubt single-origin stories, but maybe it’s good enough for blog commenting.)

    In the US, I think 1977 is the big year. Jack McAuliffe founded New Albion and Jackson published World Guide to Beer. If you wanted to expand it just a bit you could add 1978 for both the Carter homebrew act and the founding of Merchant du Vin. Between 1976 and 1979, several threads came together in American brewing that had been fomenting (fermenting?) for several years. They were different doorways into “good beer” broadly defined: homebrewing became a major thing, importers started to provide drinkers with something other than dreck, Jackson provided important context, the first craft breweries were founded, and pubs like Portland’s legendary Horse Brass started serving as hubs for like-minded people to come together and drink beer. It all happened in that four-year period at the end of the 70s.

  8. “It all happened in that four-year period at the end of the 70s.”

    I wish I was 10 years older to have been (good) beer-centric in that era. As it was, in my area, we didn’t really know from some of the smaller breweries until a few years later — but even then it was an awakening.

    To the notes about the evolution of lager in Europe — no discounting that at all, considering my favorite beers of today.

  9. Clearly, 1978. Only because, as an avid road-tripper and craft beer enthusiast, I’ve been telling people my two favorite presidents are Dwight Eisenhower (interstate highway system) and Jimmy Carter (homebrewing). (What’s that you say? Economic, social, and foreign policy should also matter in selecting favorite presidents? Details, details.) While I do think, if forced to choose a year in response to Stan’s question, it would have to be 1978, Jeff’s thumbnail assessment of the late 70s is right on.

  10. I would think Germany could mark the year 1516, the year the Reinheitsgebot was enacted. It changed their brewing landscape in such a way that to them it severly limited what they could brew.

  11. @Jeff, yes. It is true that Pilsner Urquell was first brewed in 1842 and likely is that it was as pale as it is today.

    @Jon, I would say a bit later, 190something when the Bavarian Beer Law had to be adopted by all the other members of the German federation (or 1870, when the German states united into one country, the condition Bavaria put was that its beer law be applied in the whole country).

  12. 1842 is surely the defining year in the history of beer, purely because of Pilsner Urquell.

    Imagine the industrial world without every brewery at the time wanting to make a version of pale Bohemian lager; no Anheuser-Busch and their “Budweiser”, no Heineken, no Carlsberg. Sure they might not be the greatest beers on the planet these days, but would “craft” beer exist without the brewing behemoths to act as a counterpoint?

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