Brewing in Buffalo
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.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:45 am
Hey Dan-
looking through RTG/Stephen Powell’s sources and bibliography isn’t very enlightening, it turns out. Most everything is old newspaper articles, books on Buffalo businesses and one or two first-person accounts. This one shows up a lot, and would I think be very interesting:
Beer & Malt. The Buffalo Express Number 1888 p. 52 1888
also, source 14 on page 162, the Brewers Convention souvenir program- that’s probably at either the Historical Society library or Grosvenor Room at downtown library.
But what we’re after is honest-to-goodness brewing records if/where available. And, what about archives of the old German-language papers from the 1850s-WWI/Prohibition? Not that they’d publish recipes, but might have more info than Steven did. But even American industry records of that era might well be in German, just thinking. Anyway, when Simon Pure went out of business in 1971… where’d the books go? Same for Iroquois… Lang’s in 1952… how do we find *that* out?
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:03 pm
here’s the souvenir book- not available to purchase at this time and doubtless expensive were it to come up; worth keeping an eye out for though:
http://www.beerbooks.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?ACTION=thispage&thispage=inside/1501.html&ORDER_ID=817145695