In Defense of Big Beer

Page 25 March–April 2008 in defense of big beeR Mark C. smith amBitious BreW: the storY oF american Beer Maureen Ogle Harcourt http://www.harcourtbooks.com 432 pages; cloth, $25.00 Books on beer have flooded the American market. Not only are there dozens upon dozens of new books, but also websites and online bookstores have located and often republished historical sources. Most of the contemporary works involve the microbrewery craze, especially how-to works on how to brew or at least recognize quality lagers and ales.Yet, important academic works have emerged as well. The Alcohol and Drugs History Society founded in 1979 has done excellent work, especially on the understudied subjects of the drinker and drinking. Foremost among these are the edited collection Drinking: Belief and Behavior in Modern History (1991) and Madelon Powers’s superb anthropological study Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (1998). Political historians such as Richard Hamm and David Kyvig have resurrected the constitutional issue of the interstate commerce of alcohol and the ineptitude of the brewers at the Prohibition threat. Ogle is swimming against a tide of popular adulation of the small microbreweries and their creativity, independence, and even ambition. Maureen Ogle’s contribution to this movement , Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, concentrates on the history of the beer industry, especially the largest corporate breweries, and the constant changes in technology necessary to meet the changing demands of American consumers. Beginning with the Best family who developed Pabst, the first of the great Milwaukee breweries, Ogle demonstrates how the initiative and ambition of founders coupled with attention to product and markets created those few businesses that would eventually develop into regional and, later, national institutions. She emphasizes the character and personality of these individuals and, more importantly, of their sons and occasionally daughters. She clearly believes that companies that lose their familial base die out. Indeed, she sometimes takes on an almost mystical tone regarding the connection between families and beer; of the Coors family, she declares “their engineering talents, a passion for precision and machinery having been imprinted in the Coors DNAat conception.” (Don Baum’s Citizen Coors:An American Dynasty [2000] provides a very different view of the Coors family.) Actually a more accurate title for this book would be Ambitious Brewing Families: The Story of Corporate Beer. Ogle freely admits to a “great man” theory of history, individuals “who ranged through their days oblivious to indecision or failure, dismissive of doubt and human frailty.” Her greatest men are the Bests/Pabsts, the Uihleens of the Schlitz Company, and especially the Buschs of AnheuserBusch , and in the new generation, Fritz Maytag of Anchor Steam and Jim Koch of Sam Adams beers. Ogle praises these hard-eyed entrepreneurs, emblematic of a society where everyone thrives through the untrammeled success of the few. She supports big beer in bullying its suppliers into near-bankrupt prices, its buying up of saloons and displacement of independent saloonkeepers at the turn of the century , the crushing of the skilled unions, establishing pools and monopolies, and shutting off distribution systems to smaller companies. She offhandedly notes the Buschs’s triumph “over lesser men,” sees the first Adolphus Busch “as brilliant an entrepreneur as brewing or any other industry would ever know,” and portrays his equally ruthless son August as “a man who ‘never did a mean thing.’” Another of her and Anheuser-Busch’s shared enemies is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which criticized the beer industry for directing its advertising toward the young. Ogle retorts that numerous studies—none of them cited or their funding examined—show that neo-Prohibition of agencies like the Center and not advertising increases drinking among youth. Ironically, Ogle writes well and informatively of the role of advertising in increasing beer sales throughout her text. Ogle’s prose is lively and engaging, although at times overwrought. She has two different individuals “helming” their breweries and another sharing the helm by page fifty-one. Her desire to keep up the pace of her style leads to numerous inaccuracies. One would be hard pressed to find a history text...