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 Fritz Maytag, Anchor Brewing's "gentleman brewer." The other was Jack McAuliffe, who founded the New Albion Brewing Company in 1976, only to close up shop half a decade later. How did this tiny, failed brewery change the course of one of the industry's most successful firms? Listen on, listener. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 vaunted barrel-aging program, and he joins Taplines today to put us in the room for the moment craft beer's corporate cooption hit a whole new gear. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 mid-’70s in our first outing, this episode is all about the second half of the conflict, after Schlitz went down swinging, and big bad Anheuser-Busch got involved in earnest. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 first few years at the helm of this storied brewery is Dave Burkhart, a three-decade Anchor employee, the author of "The Anchor Brewing Story," and a personal friend of Fritz's to this very day. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 brands would kill for. Joining Taplines today is Steve "Stix" Nilsen. These days, he's the vice president of "cult indoctrination" at Liquid Death, but from 2009 to 2018, he was part of the lifestyle marketing team at Pabst tasked with boosting Blue Ribbon’s bona fides in the scene — like, *every* scene — without going bust. It’s PBR, it’s Stix Nilsen, it’s the Blue Ribbon hipster halo, and it’s right here right now, on VinePair’s Taplines. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Joining Taplines today to discuss icing’s indelible, low-ABV legacy is Brandon Wenerd, the publisher of BroBible dot com, which covered the viral phenomenon in real-time as the Aughts came to a close. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 politics that lasted three decades. Here to tell us about a pivotal turning point in what's believed to be the longest boycott in American history is Allyson Brantley, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history at University of La Verne and the author of "Brewing A Boycott." Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hard Lemonade, to take us back to the days when Anheuser-Busch tried to clone craft beer with so-called "crafty" knockoffs — and how it used its powerful distribution network to make sure those beers got to supermarket shelves, even though nobody wanted 'em. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Homebrewers Association. Listen in as Charlie takes us back to the pre-Carter era of bland adjunct lagers, clandestine garage brews, and the early, barely legal days that would eventually bloom into the American craft brewing industry as we know it. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 of the first major examples of the craft beer industry's online-ratings hype machine. Joining Taplines is Natalie Cilurzo herself to tell us all about that fateful February when Russian River's fortunes changed for the better—and craft brewing's semi-notorious "line culture" was born. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.