I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map…

Dan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:48:23 +0000

In talking with my boss yesterday about brewing in Buffalo, she reminded me that the Erie County website has a map of Buffalo from 1894. You can click on the red numebrs in each section to zoom in, and there’s a surprising amount of detail provided: the type of building, number of floors, business name, etc. I think I was most surprised that the city has been essentially unchanged in the past 114 years… there’s just so much more stuff! My street had one house on it, and my mom’s had none. Some street names are different, and some had alternate names (Colvin was also ‘Niagara Falls Boulevard’? Really?)

To keep this slightly brewery related, we followed some of the directions on Peter Jablonski’s Edifices of Buffalo Breweries and found quite a few on Plate 34 (a little over halfway down on the lefthand side, by Washington and Burton).

(Don’t care about Buffalo? St Louis has a similar map from 1875)

Brewing in Buffalo

Dan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:19:16 +0000

There’s a post or two itself in the train of thought of how I get here, but for now just accept that we’ve arrived.

I’ve recently started reading Shut Up About Barclay Perkins. I really should have started when I was linked to his post on whether Kolsch was an ale, but for some reason I didn’t add it to my Bloglines section (creating the ‘Beer/Brewing’ category) until Ethan recommended it.

It’s great reading if you’re interested in some of the aspects of brewing that most people would consider dry. He has tables of historical original gravity comparisons! Who would be interested in that?

Oh, right. Me.

I realized that, while I want to get better at brewing, I also just have come to love beer. As I have a bachelors degree in history, I also sort of like reading about the history of things… why not combine the two? We went to Barnes and Noble tonight and I figured I would pick up a book on something beer related: the history of brewing in the US, maybe something a little farther back, European, Belgian, German, whatever.

Except that Barnes and Noble doesn’t have any of that in stock, with the exception of Ambitious Brew, which seems a little more… mainstream? Than I’d like. I know stuff is out there, though, so when we got home I left Elizabeth to enjoy her new Nora Roberts books while I looked around. From SUABP I found AbeBooks; it didn’t have anything I needed, but it seems like it could be useful for the future.

Well, what would I specifically be interested in? Buffalo seems like it could have a nice brewing history… and a quick Google reveals that I was right. There’s an entire book about the city’s brewing history, Rushing the Growler. It’s out of print, but parts of it are available online. ‘Crap,’ I said. ‘How am I going to get it? Oh right, I’m a librarian.’ Luckily, the central branch has three copies. Hopefull I’ll get to read it soon… and maybe they have more on the subject!

One final link that I need to look at more: Buffalonet’s brewing ‘unindexed picture archive.’ There doesn’t appear to be much else to the Buffalonet brewing site, but the old beer ads and photos could contain some nifty gems.

I think I have a new sub-obsession.

Edit: In case anyone is interested, I’ve set up a del.icio.us feed of links I’ve found about brewing history in Buffalo. Most of the links seem to be fairly old (linking to pages that no longer exist, in some cases), and as this post is on the second page of Google for ‘buffalo beer brewing history’ half an hour after it was written, it appears that there isn’t much, at least online.

Dan Conley » Buffalo

I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map…

Brewing in Buffalo