Taplines

There must have been something in the water in Northern California in the late '70s, because the region produced craft brewing legends in scads. Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman joins Taplines today to bring us back to that heady milieu and highlight how two of his Golden State contemporaries in particular helped him keep the brewery's now-iconic pale ale flowing in those early years. One was Fr...

In 2011, Chicago's Goose Island Brewing Co. sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev, kicking off a decade-long acquisition spree by the macro brewer... AND a snarling debate over the ethics of individual firms "selling out" the craft brewing "movement." John Laffler would go on to co-found Off Color Brewing just a couple of years later, but when news of the sale broke, he was heading up Goose Island's vaunte...

Don’t call it a comeback, listener, but today Maureen Ogle is making her triumphant Taplines return to take us back to the frontlines of the Light Beer Wars, that ferocious 20th-century struggle for swill-based supremacy between America’s emerging macrobrewers. After talking about how Philip Morris and the Original Lite Beer from Miller hit the brewing industry like a less-filling freight train in...

The year was 1965 when a young Fritz Maytag acquired 51% of a failing San Francisco concern known as "The Steam Beer Brewing Company." The success the industrial scion had transforming what we now know as Anchor Brewing Co. is the stuff of beer industry legend, and many point to it as the moment American craft brewing was born. Joining Taplines to tell us how the "Gentleman Brewer" handled his fir...

Pabst Blue Ribbon has been sold in these United States since the late 1800s. It's fine, nothing special. But around the turn of the 21st century, something... changed. People started drinking PBR. Like, cool people, and a lot of PBR. What happened next would become the stuff of brewing industry lore, as this middling lager basked in the word-of-mouth indie sleaze cachet that big corporate beer bra...

The gag, codified as it was on slapdash websites like Bros Icing Bros, was simple: hide a Smirnoff Ice for your bro to find, and he’d have to get down on one knee and chug it. But even at the time, icing's social and commercial impacts were a bit more complicated, and its legacy is a fascinating example of how the early social internet shaped (and scandalized) the beverage alcohol business. Joinin...

Conventional business-school wisdom is that most consumer boycotts won't work, because it's almost impossible to put organize a big enough group of customers to make a difference in a big company's bottom line. But starting in 1957 a coalition of labor unionists, Chicano activists, LGBTQ+ advocates, and more began a powerful boycott against Coors Brewing Company over the company's policies and pol...

In the early Aughts, as the craft brewing industry recovered from its slump the prior decade, macrobrewers started to realize that they couldn't just ignore the beardos and their bizarre "microbrews" anymore. But as they say, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. We tapped our pal Anat Baron, the creative force behind the revelatory 2009 documentary "Beer Wars" and the former general manager of Mike's...

A lot of people know that in 1978, the Carter administration loosened federal laws about homebrewing with a stroke of the executive pen that has been partially credited with launching the craft brewing industry. But far fewer know what that pivotal moment was actually like. So we called someone who did: Charlie Papazian, the iconic founder of both the Brewers Association and the American Homebrewe...

Throughout the Aughts, craft beer's popularity rose roughly in tandem with social media, and in 2010, the two would collide at Northern California's Russian River Brewing Co. Husband-and-wife team Vince and Natalie Cilurzo opened the taproom one wintry Saturday expecting a low-key day slinging pints and growlers of their triple India pale ale, Pliny the Younger, but what they got instead was one o...

The Original Lite Beer from Miller hit American supermarket shelves in 1975 — and from then on, nothing was the same. To learn how the beer that we'd come to know simply as Miller Lite lit the fuse on the intense, decades-long campaign of corporate competition known to industry insiders simply as "The Light Beer Wars," we're joined by Maureen Ogle, historian, and author of "Ambitious Brew," a vita...

Introducing Taplines, a brand-spankin’-new podcast about the modern history of American beer, only on the VinePair Podcast Network. Each week, contributing editor and columnist Dave Infante will interview a different guest about a triumph, tribulation, or turning point in the evolution of the United States’ multibillion-dollar beer industry. Think brewing icons, industry insiders, outspoken outsid...