Good Beer Hunting

You’re listening to a special-edition, three-part podcast series about Charleston’s Schützenfest, a mid-19th-century German gun and beer festival that initially was a diverse and welcoming environment, but which gradually evolved into a site of white supremacy. In our first two episodes, we delved deeper into both the history of the fest itself and the kinds of beer you might see around Charleston in the 19th century. Now we’ll take a more contemporary view by talking to people living in, advocating for, and brewing in Charleston today. First, I speak with a childhood mentor of mine, Mr. Sammy Backman. Mr. Sammy isn’t a brewer. He runs Backman’s Seafood, and has spent more than 50 years fishing South Carolina’s coast. The same fundamental forces that transformed the Schützenfest have followed Mr. Sammy’s boats his whole life. But in turn, he’s thriving, and he’s taught me since my childhood about the indelible mark Gullah Geechee communities continue to make on Charleston life. Next, I catch up with KJ Kearney, host of Black Food Fridays on Instagram, who’s worked tirelessly to help Gullah Geechee communities be better recognized and included in the Holy City. On his Instagram series, KJ educates fellow Charlestonians about Black food traditions by preserving Gullah foodways and history. We talk about the power of food and beverage history to erode racial barriers, our love for (and our frustrations with) Charleston, and KJ’s work to make things better. Finally, I talk with Jaime Tenny of Charleston’s own Coast Brewing Company. She discusses her brewery’s need to better include new communities, and how much learning she still needs to do before that’s possible. As our conversation shows, many breweries don’t know how to foster authentic inclusion within their spaces, even if they do know that it’s on them to learn. Join us in finishing our journey through the Schützenfest, Charleston, and the centuries-long work of racial oppression. Here’s 60-year Charleston native—and part of my village—Mr. Sammy Backman.

You’re listening to a special-edition, three-part podcast series about Charleston’s Schützenfest, a German gun and beer festival that initially was a diverse and welcoming environment in the mid 19th century, but which gradually evolved into a site of white supremacy. In our first podcast, we spent a lot of time exploring how African-Americans were excluded from the Schützenfest and later the craft beer industry. Now we explore a simple question: “What were they drinking at the Schützenfest, and what were those excluded from the Schützenfest drinking?” We have Mike Stein and Peter Jones, president and CEO of the Lost Lagers beverage research consultancy, respectively, to help answer that question. Mike and Peter were also researchers for the three-part editorial series that went out on Good Beer Hunting this week—if you haven’t already, give those stories a read. In this episode, they’ll talk about indigenous ingredients, enslaved brewers, and some of the first Guinness beer to reach the United States. After this, tune into Part Three of this podcast series, where I meet up with Mr. Sammy Backman of Backman Seafood, KJ Kearnery of Black Food Fridays, and Jaime Tenny of Coast Brewing Company, to talk about the influence of exclusion in Charleston and in their respective industries.

Charleston, South Carolina:, a city with a villainous history and a place I call home. From the palmetto-lined streets to the many saltwater creeks and whiffs of pluff mud, The Holy City is a place of geographic charm with a history rooted in exclusion and racism. It’s also the subject of this three-part podcast series, which explores a lesser-known chapter in the city’s past. The Charleston Schützenfest, a shooting competition and community festival transplanted from Germany, was held every year at the German Rifle Club’s grounds on the banks of the Ashley River beginning in the 1850s. The fest was a place where German-Americans used their culture to help negotiate both local and national inclusion, and Black Charlestonians were initially welcome to join in. But white supremacists soon began using it too, and by the 1870s the Schützenfest was the premier expression of militant racism in Reconstruction-era Charleston. This gun and beer festival was held just outside the Wagener Terrace section of the city, where around six breweries operate today. It could very well be the blueprint for how modern-day exclusion operates within Charleston’s beer spaces. The event allied the Gullah Geechee people—formerly enslaved West Africans—and German immigrants during a time of social and political upheaval, but eventually it drove them apart. Lost potentials like these still reverberate in taprooms across the country today—calling forth false assumptions like: “Black people don’t drink beer” or, “Going to breweries is some white-boy shit.” Mus tek cyear uh de root, fa heal de tree is a Gullah Geechee proverb denoting the importance of addressing potential problems and issues in their infancy. In writing about the Schützenfest, we tried to better understand the roots of Black exclusion from 21st-century beer spaces. For the full story, check out our three-part article series, published on Good Beer Hunting this week, where we recount the origins and evolution of the fest; discuss the resurgence of white supremacy in Charleston after the Civil War; and celebrate the parades, food, fishing, and myriad other ways Black Charlestonians have thrived even while enduring racial oppression. Together, both the editorial and podcast series explore the lineage of the city’s suppression of African-American advancement socially and economically, and reveal how the Schützenfest’s legacy still shapes Charleston’s beer spaces today. Reading all three parts will give you the foundation and historical context to break down these constructs yourself. Then join us for three podcast episodes that go even further. In the first episode, Brian Alberts expands on the vast research compiled for this project, explains a little more about the Schützenfest, and shares some ways the story goes even deeper than we could fit into the written series. In the second, historians Mike Stein and Peter Jones walk us through the types of beer we would have seen in 1800s Charleston, and how they fit into our broader story. And in the third episode, we head to Charleston to get a contemporary point of view: Mr. Sammy Backman of Backman Seafood, KJ Kearnery of Black Food Fridays, and Jaime Tenny of Coast Brewing all speak on the influence of exclusion in their respective industries, and how they want to move forward to make Charleston's food and beer scene even better.

Through her business—Zymology Labs, based in Essex Junction, Vermont—Amy offers analytical testing, training, and consulting for the fermented beverage industry. And she’s working to expand the conversation on beer quality in both producer and consumer circles. Although Amy spends much of her time in her own lab space, she’s no stranger to brewery environments. She was a keen homebrewer in college, and the “What’s Brewing?” and food science courses she took during her chemistry degree led to her lightbulb moment: that she wanted to pursue a career in beer quality. After a course and apprenticeship with the American Brewers Guild, she got her start in the cellar at Burlington, Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewing Company before ultimately running their lab. It was there she started wondering what smaller breweries did without the same access to equipment that she had, and the idea for Zymology Labs was born. Despite the name of her business, Amy is quick to remind us that quality isn’t just about the lab. She actually prefers the term “quality program,” as it indicates that there are many processes breweries can have in place to help monitor their product without requiring their own lab setup. Passionate about demystifying what a quality program entails and how to set one up, Amy talks us through some of the basic steps any brewery can take to get started. We also discuss the difference between a quality program and a sensory program, and how they complement each other. We then turn our attention to some of the quality issues that have hit industry headlines of late, ranging from ABV mislabeling to exploding cans. Amy helps to shed some light on what causes these issues, how they can be prevented, and how prevalent they actually are. You’ll hear Amy stress that quality isn’t just about preventing things from going wrong. It’s about making sure as many elements of the brewing process as possible go right, so brewers can provide a consistent product for their customers. And if quality’s not a priority for your brewery? As Amy says, there are thousands of other breweries out there for consumers to choose from.  

Intangible, hard-to-define terms like “local,” “craft,” and even “ethical” remain debatable within beer spheres, but they’re far from limited to one industry. Longtime beer writer and more recent bean-to-bar chocolate expert David Nilsen touches on these topics and more in his newest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Cacao, Brewing, and the Price of Nostalgia — Toward a Better Future for Chocolate Beer,” which was published on June 8, 2021.  In this episode, David and I discuss the preconceived notions Western consumers tend to have about chocolate, including where it comes from, how it should taste, and the often unknown—or at least overlooked—human cost behind each exquisite bite. Chocolate is far from just a one-dimensional snack found at supermarket checkout lines and in Halloween buckets. Instead, it can be as varied, complex, and multifaceted as malt or hops to beer drinkers, and the many cultural overlaps between beer and chocolate may surprise you. They certainly surprised me, as did the often-invisible, but pervasive human rights violations that exist in the cacao supply chain.  In our conversation, David explains the hard truths behind what it takes to transport goods from the global South to the U.S. and how we can all be more informed, more ethical, and more responsible consumers. He defines what “bean-to-bar” really means, and how his personal interest in beer dovetailed into exploring the world of chocolate. He also discusses how the chocolate industry was literally built on the backs of enslaved people, how those human rights abuses continue today, and how a small group of global producers are shaping the future of the industry in response to that. And in addition to those in-depth topics, we’ll hear David talk about what makes him happy, and how the shared flavors of chocolate and beer can spark the imagination.

I first heard about Keyatta Mincey-Parker from Donnie, a wine buyer at my local bottle shop. As Donnie rang up my purchases, she told me how Keyatta had created a community garden for bartenders during the summer of 2020, aptly named A Sip of Paradise Garden. The garden’s mission is to provide a healthy and safe space for bartenders to recharge, and during the height of the pandemic, the space quickly became popular. My interest was piqued, and I found myself diving into Keyatta’s story. I learned that she fled Liberia with her family when she was 12 years old, and how she adapted to her new home in the U.S. while holding her culture close to her heart. I was impressed by how Keyatta wove her love of family into her work, and how her desire to improve her community shined through all her accomplishments, whether it was giving bartenders a space for a respite during an incredibly tough year or providing young women in Liberia with alternatives to sex work. In this episode, we discuss Keyatta’s love for family, and the incredible strength her mother showed as they fled Liberia in the ’90s. We also talk about the complicated feelings of receiving recognition and accomplishments as a Black woman. She shares how she came up with the idea for A Sip of Paradise Garden and how everything came together magically in the midst of a pandemic. But if there’s one thing you need to know about Keyatta, it’s that she’s committed to thriving no matter what life throws at her.  

Over the past couple of decades, brewers and beer historians have recreated a growing number of formerly lost beer styles, like Grodziskie, Merseburger, Horner Bier, and others. Many of those styles come from the traditional brewing regions in Europe. But almost any country with any brewing history at all has its own lost beer styles. Sometimes, those recipes are completely indigenous. Sometimes they were imported from other places and subsequently modified in the new country, becoming their own unique types of beer. Today I’m talking to Michael Stein, the author of a recent piece from our Source Material series, “A Lager Darkly — In Search of Culmbacher, One of America’s Great, Extinct Beers,” published on March 17, 2021. In his story, Michael explores the largely forgotten Culmbacher beer, originally from what is now the German state of Bavaria, but which grew in popularity in the United States in the 19th century, apparently changing substantially in the New World.  As we discuss, Culmbacher was once very common in America, though it disappeared almost completely during Prohibition, and never regained its previous status. But as we hear in this episode, a recipe discovered in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has been re-brewed, allowing modern beer lovers to taste something that has been extinct for most of a century.

If you follow news in the beer world, May 2021 became synonymous with the word “reckoning” as a wave of stories about sexual harassment, assault, and inappropriate behavior toward women were shared from across the country and world. Massachusetts brewer Brienne Allan was the catalyst for this, first sharing her own experiences on Instagram, then asking other women for their own stories, and amplifying their voices. This started on social media, but quickly became national news for industry publications, newspapers like the Boston Globe, NPR affiliates around the country, and beyond. Two of the writers who have extensively covered this story and its fallout are my colleagues at Good Beer Hunting, Beth Demmon and Kate Bernot. In this episode of our collective series, we’ll hear from both of them about what it means to report on these kinds of stories, how to tell them fairly and accurately, and the toll it takes as someone who has to synthesize all of these traumas and relay them to readers in a journalistic way. You can read numerous stories by Beth and Kate right now on Good Beer Hunting, and there will be more in the future as reverberations continue to impact the industry and the way people and businesses seek to do better to protect others.

What does it take to succeed in one of the country’s most competitive markets for craft beer? That’s at the core of this conversation with Sam Pecoraro and Tom Cook of Portland, Oregon’s Von Ebert Brewing. As founder of the brewery, Tom has become acutely aware of changes necessary for his business, which has included a rush to get beer into cans, and then get those cans into grocery stores as more drinkers have shifted purchase behavior to chain retail due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sam, head brewer for the company, has a lot to live up to—and that’s from his own doing and the skill of his team. Von Ebert has been recognized numerous times in the last two years for their innovation and specific beers, including a medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Nothing Noble IPA, a challenging feat in the most-entered category at the annual competition. All of these things come into play for how Sam and Tom see their business now and in the future, and in our conversation you’ll learn how they’re using the things that they’re learning now to make sure they can continue to be a mainstay in Portland. And as you stick around, you’ll hear us banter about whether that future includes a comeback for English Mild, a malt-forward, low-ABV beer that is far more at home in the drinking culture of the U.K. than with the hop-mad IPA drinkers of the U.S. How can a business compete in a beer-loving city? What’s the next style we could be drinking in bars and taprooms? Answers are coming.

Today, lager beers represent the comfort zone for most American beer drinkers…and a stereotyped monolith for many craft breweries to rebel against. But 170 years ago, lagers were both the outsider and the trendsetter. Their arrival caused ongoing debates over what beer was, what it should be, and the role alcohol ought to play in American social life, to take a sharp turn. This debate was anchored in beliefs about beer and public health that were simultaneously centuries old, and ever-evolving. Beer was at one time or another compared to poison, called to testify in court, and blamed for epidemics…and that’s just the beginning. We’re kicking off the Source Material podcast with a 3-part series looking at some of the ways lager beer paired with questions of public health in 1800s America. We’ll begin with a basic question: can lager beer make a person drunk? The answer may seem obvious today, but in the 1850s it seemed like that question could only be settled in court. Let’s explore why in Lager Beer, Governing Bodies Part 1: Overruled.