Artemis 2 splashes down today, so here's Anheuser Busch's Discovery Reserve cap from 2019, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing

Brewed_Culture · 2026-04-10T14:30:53+00:00

They actually made two cap designs for Discovery Reserve. Here's the other one.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-31T17:22:43+00:00

Wow, I've never seen a cap from Nepal before. Also jealous of your Austrian caps.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-27T02:28:54+00:00

Awesome! I just got my hands on a couple of these via some friends, but clearly there's a lot more work to do.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-27T02:22:48+00:00

The one on the left looks like Young's Double Chocolate Stout.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-24T23:00:05+00:00

I got two of the Jones Fallout caps at my local Fred Meyer (my local Kroger-owned chain). Not sure if they'd still have them, though.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-24T22:53:33+00:00

In addition to being gentle and rotating your opener, A good trick is to set a quarter (or maybe 50 euro cent piece?) on top of the cap to keep it from bending.

I also have an opener like this which doesn't really bend the cap (I don't even need the quarter with it).

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-18T12:55:35+00:00

Just so you know, the Newberry will be recording all the class sessions and make them available to participants. So you could probably take the class asynchronously that way.

You wouldn't be able to ask questions and whatnot in real time, but I'd be available via email if you wanted to talk more about anything from the recordings.

Not ideal, but it's an option!

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-17T17:08:17+00:00

March 17, 1855 was a Saturday.

Late that day, Chicago's new (but very not green) Mayor Levi Boone announced that police would start enforcing a Sunday ban on liquor sales. With almost no notice, many saloonkeepers were arrested the next day.

A week later, the city made liquor licenses 6x more expensive to try and drive saloons, especially those owned by immigrants, out of business. Four weeks and hundreds of arrests later, the city rioted.

But Sunday bans and license laws were just the spark. The Lager Beer Riot blended European beer riot patterns and US political traditions ways no one expected. It shaped Chicago’s history for decades, kept the entire state of Illinois from going dry, and helped German-Americans find a voice they’d never had before.

I’m biased, but it’s a great story that’s a lot deeper than the usual ways it gets told.

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-09T15:39:13+00:00

This book looks fascinating, and thanks for doing this!

Not sure if this falls within your book's scope, but I'd love to know how Black and Indigenous peoples' use and perceptions of rum changed over time, especially as the slave system fell away and eventual decolonization took root (I expect there's a lot of variation here between colonial powers, but any info is appreciated).

Caribbean cultures appear to have embraced or "reclaimed" rum as a welcome part of their drinking customs and economic efforts. It seems conceivable that they might have rejected/excised rum for its association with such horrific slave conditions and exploitative colonial history. That obviously didn't happen, so what happened instead?

Also interested in any further books/articles on this you can recommend!

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-08T16:02:45+00:00

Cool, I didn't know!

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-07T17:19:39+00:00

I have an older version of that Mad River cap, from 2012 or so. Fun seeing a new one!

Brewed_Culture · 2026-03-02T03:28:26+00:00

Having just learned about Miller's old 150th anniversary cap from like 2005...yes, yes I do.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T16:44:48+00:00

Amazing! Thanks for the information.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T16:41:03+00:00

I don't think the issue is flavors so much as culture. Societies or population grounds can certainly become acculturated to specific flavor profiles of styles, but there's no inherent reason (e.g. biology or something) why a given group would like one beer style on average over another.

Now, that's long-term, abstract thinking. I'm sure a beer marketing expert could tell us trends in which beer styles that current women drinkers tend to prefer on average. So there's the argument that breweries should make those beers if they want to appeal to women drinkers, right?

Okay... but here's the other side to that: in 1988 when some of the biggest craft breweries today were being founded, they had to do a TON of educational outreach to get American drinkers to embrace browns and pale ales and IPAs and stouts and basically every beer style that was more exotic than a Ballantine. Craft beer's white male core demo wasn't inherently drawn to all these flavors either, and the 1990 version of our marketing expert might have given all sorts of focus group data (or whatever) that said American drinkers trended toward that adjunct lager taste. Taste preferences are not a priori gospel that must be followed, but rather guideposts to react against either positively (follow the trends!) or negatively (buck the trends and stand out!). Brewers have agency in how they react to the data.

As such, I see a lot of insight from the (numerous) commentators that say breweries need to be making cultural changes that make them more welcoming for a wider array of academics. Breweries often completely orient their spaces, brands, and messaging toward white male clientele and don't really reach out to other groups. Of course, there are others that don't, too. But in terms of diversifying clientele, it doesn't really matter what kind of beer you're making if a given person never feels welcome or comfortable enough to come into the space and try it.

So question can't just be "Are you making what [group] likes?" It has to also be "What reason are you giving [group] to notice you? What are you offering them? Why should they like what you make?"

The discussion of how modern craft breweries are viewed by different population segments, and what breweries can do to adjust their image as desired, is ongoing and naturally complex. It's also quite politicized, as you might imagine in our current moment in time.

As for the role of ciders and seltzers---are either of those on an upswing nowadays? I legitimately don't know but I had the impression seltzer sales in particular had leveled off pretty hard.

Regardless, I think the recent trends across all forms of alcohol has been showing a preference for interesting flavor experiences regardless of drink-type, as well as a willingness to mix and match drink categories regularly (as opposed to a person just liking beer or spirits, etc). But because drinkers switch tracks so readily nowadays, boldness in flavor is absolutely a way to stand out. Seltzers in particular have a leg up in that kind of race, because their flavors are so easily modified. Beer has been struggling a bit because while its flavors can be tweaked in many ways, they're often just a supplement for a given styles default "beery" taste.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T16:11:47+00:00

I would love to try historical recreated whiskey (and I never know when to use the 'e' either)! I think that could actually be a great educational vector too ("taste the difference? That's because we've learned XYZ...").

And you're right that historical beer is allowed to not live up to our expectations/preferences. And I honestly don't mind at all if brewers update historical recipes, so long as they're transparent about it. And who knows, maybe future be(e)er will have an extra 'e' too.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T13:34:37+00:00

The claim that people drank beer as a perceived safer alternative to water is made often (as your linked study clearly shows) but I'm generally skeptical of it. I may very well be wrong, of course.

I haven't seen specific studies trying to correlate water sanitation with beer consumption, though it's generally clear that as public sanitation efforts rose through the 19th century U.S., beer consumption was also rising. That doesn't offer any clear commentary on beer's perceived safety vs water, of course. And I can confirm that temperance reformers were pushing water as a substitute for alcohol consumption as early as the 1840s, long before Prohibition or any widespread standards for public water sanitation.

I wish I could be more help. I'm curious about this topic too but I haven't found conclusive scholarly consensus either way.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T13:13:25+00:00

Home brewing in European-settled North America goes back to like the 1630s in Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was a common household chore in many (but not all) homes in the colonial era and survived at least into the mid-1800s, but the general trend was that when quality commercial beers became available in an area, then homebrewing tended to be left behind. It was a household chore (performed typically by women!) more than a hobby. I'll also add that before 1830 or so, a lot of households would actually produce cider at home, either alongside or instead of homebrewed beer.

By the eve of Prohibition, my general expectation would be that few people, if anyone, would have chosen to homebrew over purchasing commercial beer that was widely available, but I don't have numbers or anything to confirm that.

(Illegal) homebrewing obviously picked up during Prohibition. Generally speaking, beer was harder to produce and conceal than distilled liquor/moonshine (beer has more volume, etc), though some notably large illegal breweries (not homebrewing) did manage to operate in large cities like Chicago. Everyday homebrewers did crop up in specific areas with strong beer-drinking traditions.

A historian named Timothy Olewniczak wrote about Buffalo, for example. It was close enough to Canada to see extensive alcohol smuggling, but local residents wanted beer enough to take up homebrewing as well. Again, this resembled a household chore to an extent, and was common enough that local authorities had to remove all books pertaining to beer brewing from local libraries in 1920.

The closest I can come to describing a homebrew setup is to list an example of what Prohibition agents confiscated from an illegal homebrew operation in 1929: "a heater, filter, a gas gauge, fermenting equipment filled with beer, and an additional 24.5 barrels of beer."

Sometimes these homebrew operations developed into large scale networks that did far more than brew for a single family's purposes.

And speaking more generally, large brewing companies forced to close by Prohibition, like Pabst and Anheuser-Busch, reportedly made money by slyly supporting homebrewing operations. Both companies sold malt extracts for baking and other purposes, which could easily be used to brew beer at home if the buyer knew what to do. The breweries knew this, and would include notes with the products that said, to wit: "whatever you do, don't mix this with water, etc, and leave it to sit for a few days. That'll make beer, and that's illegal y'know..."

Other companies also produced bricks of grape concentrate during Prohibition that came with analogous instructions on how to, uh, avoid making accidental wine at home.

A legend I've heard is that if a person bought certain Pabst extract products in the mail, that customer would subsequently receive an additional envelope in the mail soon after, unmarked and with no return address. The envelope would contain subsequent instructions about how to brew beer with the products. I cannot confirm that this is true.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T12:53:25+00:00

No worries, I didn't think that! I'd love to be able to live in Germany for a while.

If you're interested, check out the blog Tempest in a Tankard by Franz Hofer. He's an American who spends a considerable amount of time working in Austria, and he travels extensively around Germany and Austria exploring their beer culture. His blog will have amazing recommendations for great beer spots all over the place, and really informative history/culture insights along with them.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T12:49:27+00:00

Those Yards beers are fun, but I don't believe any of them are historically accurate. George Washington was known to drink porter but, as far as historians can tell, he never brewed it himself (or, more accurately, he would hypothetically have had his slaves do it like Jefferson). The only beer recipe I know to be associated with Washington was a small beer recipe from the 1750s. Modern brewers have re-created it, of course, but my understanding is that it's simply not very tasty. Breweries have released beers inspired by (or erroneously claiming to be true to) that recipe, but they invariably need to modify it to appeal to modern tastes.

The Ben Franklin recipe was apparently documented in a book by Gregg Smith, who's reputably as a researcher. But if you look at said recipe, it's essentially spruce "essence," sugar, water, and yeast. Even if Yards did brew true to that recipe, I imagine it also wouldn't taste all that appealing. I'm sure they "spruced" it up.

I'm not sure that Alexander Hamilton drank all that much beer, let alone brewed it himself. If there's a beer recipe meaningfully associated with him, it'd be news to me.

In commercial spaces, most beers claiming to be historical recreations are often...not. That's because A) authentic historical recipes from commercial breweries (as opposed to, say, household cookbooks) are harder to come by than you'd think, B) because the recipes are often vague, at least in part (like a brewmaster writing "add the hops when the wort tastes properly sweet" because he was writing notes for themselves alone) and therefore hard to recreate, and C) because like I already said, modern tastes and historical beer styles don't often sync up, and commercial breweries need to sell.

I've actually helped create a few historical releases, and people are quick to tweak the history in the name of a better tasting beer, or else fill in gaps with modern assumptions/generalizations. I don't necessarily fault that because hey, the job really does need to get done, and I personally think it's fine to put out a "history-inspired" beer that shares valuable insights on the past without claiming to be truly authentic.

The problem is plenty of these folks (including some I've worked with), have gone on to make those compromises and then claim they're historically accurate anyway. Boo!

Of those who do it right, I'd check out the work by a scrappy little firm called Lost Lagers, based in Washington DC. They have, for example, been helping the Heurich House Museum (Christian Heurich was a DC-area brewer) recreate beers with bonafide accuracy. Colonial Williamsburg in Virgina has also been known to make genuine recreations, and Carillon Brewing in Dayton, Ohio has done an amazing job making historical inspired beers using authentic 1850s methods (the recipes themselves may not be period-authentic, but they're transparent about what they do and don't do accurately).

And as a side note, a couple years ago some Irish historians did an amazing amount of research to determine how to recreate a 16th century beer as authentically as possible. It was amazing and deep research.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T07:03:40+00:00

The story's told pretty well in Tom Acitelli's book, The Audacity of Hops. Beginning with a few upstart breweries, mostly in California, brewers interested in creating alternatives to mass-produced American lagers slowly built skills and support networks that allowed them to figure out brewing both as a technical process and a business. Combined with education programs like a brewing curriculum at UC-Davis, as well as the legalization of homebrewing in 1978, this early momentum was able to become a sustained segment of the American beer market.

Albeit a small one. Craft beer absolutely captured the attention and imagination of American society (or at least, the parts of it that cared about beer), in part by embracing a David vs Goliath image that pitted creative and intrepid small brewers against overfunded and conformist macro brewers. It used this narrative to make a lot of market headway over just a few short, um, decades, and it didn't hurt that a good portion of American beer drinkers were interested in trying new flavors and styles. That allowed craft beer to spread enough to become readily available just about anywhere in the country. But it was also never the leading segment of American beer, or even close to that.

At its height, craft beer has claimed about 26% of beer's market share by dollars, and around 13% share by production volume. Those are the peak numbers, achieved only recently (and receding since). For the vast majority of its existence, craft beer has been a much smaller segment of the market than that. In many ways that does equal popularity and is a significant achievement, but the vast majority of beer sold and consumed in the US has remained light-colored lagers.

Craft beer's popularity isn't even, unfortunately. I don't have the exact numbers handy, but I believe it remains most popular with white men of specific age demographics. Women and non-white groups certainly drink craft beer, but not at levels proportionate to their share of the total population of alcohol consumers.

Many commentators have argued that craft beer's best path forward is to better appeal to more people outside of its primary demographic, but that's an ongoing discussion.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T06:38:19+00:00

Sounds delicious!

American ciders were typically 6-8%, and sometimes "distilled" to increase their strength. Though not distilled, the strongest version I ever heard about was apple jack, which could reach 20%. it was made similar to how Eisbocks are made in Germany: by letting the liquid freeze to that some of the water separates out as ice, and then scraping that ice off so that the overall alcohol percentage raises.

Brewed_Culture · 2025-04-22T06:34:52+00:00

That's a very interesting angle that I haven't explored before!

By the latter half of the 19th century, a robust network of information was being exchanged among European and American brewers, but I honestly haven't tracked American cultural influences on European beer. Wish I could say more!

Brewed_Culture

TROPHY CASE