The most recent The History of the Web newsletter focused on travel and the internet in 1997 (or somewhere between 1996 and 1999), which got me thinking about beer in that context at that time. What follows is certainly not the definitive history of beer on the internet, or even beer on the internet in 1997. It’s mostly an excuse to post the sketch of Beertown I remember vividly, for whatever reason.
Backing up a bit, in September 1994 All About Beer Magazine published a story headlined “Tapping the Net.” This was about the time the Netscape browser launched. Thus AABM provided, first, a primer for those who recently received an AOL CD in the mail, and second, a guide a guide to resources that remind us there was/is more to the internet than the web. Not surprisingly, I can’t link to the story because AABM didn’t begin publishing online until 1996.
(Let’s get the disclosures out of the way now. I created the first AABM website, and am properly embarrassed to revisit it. I also worked fulltime for The Real Beer Page/The Pro Brewer Page, which we’ll get to soon, from 1998 until 2003 and part time for 15 years after that.)
Because there is no AABM link, I have scanned the various lists [view the pdf here]: a guide to usenet groups, to mailing lists, to ftp sites, to bulletin boards and to a few World Wide Web pages. You’ll notice the urls are rather long. Although domain registration was free before 1995, hosting a site was another matter. It was a different time.
By 1997, a few beer sites operated out of their own domains, which makes them much easier to find using the Wayback Machine. The logos here are the size they originally appeared, although I have converted gifs to jpgs. Just another reminder the era of dial-up connections was much different. [Here’s a bit of dial-up nostalgia – be sure to turn on the sound.]
The image is missing in this 1997 page from Beertown, the umbrella site for the National Homebrewers Association, Association of Brewers, etc. I grabbed the drawing from a 1999 page.
The Real Beer Page debuted in 1994, although it didn’t serve from its own domain until 1995. By 1997, it housed the largest collection of beer-related stuff on the internet. I use the word stuff because I’m not sure how to categorize burps (which are still around, if you know where to look.)
Real Beer officially launched The Pro Brewer Page (now ProBrewer) in 1997. Lots of jobs still being found here, lots of used equipment still changing hands.
Brewing Techniques began publishing in 1993, moved online in 1996 and ceased operations in 1999. The link is to a 1997 page.
I’ll quit showing you logos now and finish with just a few more links. As noted, All About Beer began posting content online in 1996. Here’s a front page from 1997.
The Discovery Channel created a Michael Jackson Online site in 1996, in part to support an interactive, but not really that interactive, CD it was selling. The Beer Hunter site which is still online today, although it has not been updated since he died, launched in 1998.
Finally, a couple more links from 1997: Brew Your Own magazine and Stephen Beaumont’s World of Beer, which celebrated its first birthday in 1997. That we can look at long gone posts from that second site are one more reason to support the Internet Archive. Beaumont sold (you would have, too; admit it) the domain name to the World of Beer chain of drinking establishments and a bit of history with it.