From the jacket:
"In this first-ever history of American beer, Maureen Ogle tells its epic story, from the German immigrants who invented it to the upstart microbrewers who revived it."
In the Beginning, There Were Germans.
Ambitious Brew opens with an engaging scene from 1844 wherein we find a young and eager Phillip Best pulling together the equipment that he needs to start his brewery. He’s the first of a handful of German immigrants who would become the beer barons of the later nineteenth century. These men of industry and the companies that they built are the stars of the first half of this book. With unabashed admiration, Ogle recounts the impressive rise of the beer barons paying particular attention to the fortunes of two companies – Anheuser-Busch and Best Brewing which would later become Pabst.The Century that Changed Beer
The nineteenth century was a revolutionary one for beer. When it opened lager was little more than a curiosity confined to a few German breweries. Most beer was dark ale with a short shelf life that restricted shipping to a very small area. Beer in America, according to Ogle, was virtually non-existent and of no consequence whatsoever. American’s preferred rum and cider because of the former’s transportability and the latter’s ease of production. By the end of the century advances in every part of production from kilning to yeast and from brewing to shipping had transformed beer into an industry. German immigration provided the men to head this industry like Phillip Best and Adolphus Busch and the population to support it in its early days.Prohibition on the Horizon
By the twentieth century beer was widely available and, though much of the beer market was still regional, the big players were already thinking on a national level. Unlike today when a buffer of distributors exists between retailers and breweries, the pre-Prohibition beer scene was one of tied pubs and often unscrupulous sales agents. The tied pubs were owned or indebted to brewers and were therefore required to serve only the beer of that brewery. In the battle for dominance big and local breweries saw to it that pubs were as ubiquitous as Starbucks is today.At the end of the nineteenth century a strong Prohibition movement began. Though this wasn’t the first in the country’s history – previous movements had embraced beer as the drink of temperance when compared to rum – this would prove be the strongest and the most devastating to brewers. When the United States sided against Germany in World War I an anti-German sentiment also began to work against the German brewers who, according to their opponents, had been growing wealthy by plying their evil drink upon the American public.
Repeal and Revival
When Prohibition failed the breweries and their owners assumed that relief had finally arrived but this wasn’t the case. Ogle explains that for a generation and a half the American public had been told that beer was evil. It had lost its place in daily life and the battle to regain that position would be a difficult and costly one for the breweries that had survived prohibition. One of the toughest aspects of this battle lay in the flavor of beer. There had been a trend before prohibition to brew lighter beer. The brewers learned that the lighter they made a beer in color and flavor, the better it sold and this trend only strengthened after repeal. Many brewers felt that their product was already light enough and resisted for which they paid dearly. Those that followed the trend survived.But survival was about all that the beer companies could do during the fifties and early sixties. From repeal on, beer sales steadily slide down despite a slight increase during World War II thanks to the government’s mandating that breweries produce a certain percentage of their beer for the Army. What saved beer was the baby-boomers finally reaching drinking age. The boomers were no more fond of beer than their parents but their sheer number necessarily led to an increase in sales though not an increase in the percentage of the population that consumed beer.
