Here’s a fun little piece of history I stumbled upon yesterday while searching for something wholly unrelated. If you’ve followed music with any seriousness, I probably don’t have to tell you who Robert Christgau is. Christgau has been the rock critic at the Village Voice for over thirty years and has published several books of his music criticism over the years. His column was de rigueur when I lived in New York City (and was a musician) in the late ’70s. According to his new website, he — and over half a dozen others — were fired from the Voice at the end of August when new owners took over management of the paper. Christgau will soon be contributing to Rolling Stone and NPR’s All Things Considered, and has put up most of his writing from over the past 37 years at his website. In addition to his writing about music, Christgau also has written on other topics including, surprisingly, beer. In 1975, he co-wrote a piece, with Carola Dibbell, entitled “The Great Gulp: A Consumer’s Guide to Beer.” It was published in the April 1975 edition of Oui magazine, a men’s magazine that was owned by Playboy until 1981.

It’s a fascinating little time capsule as the pair write about almost fifty domestic beers, many of which are no longer around, along with a a dozen popular imports The piece starts out with a short history of beer and an explanation of the methodology they used to rate the beers. Written two years before Michael Jackson’s ground-breaking first beer book, it’s a surprisingly earnest attempt at writing seriously about beer.

Here, for example, is their review of Anchor Steam Beer:

ANCHOR STEAM BEER (San Francisco, California) This product is the last example of America’s only indigenous brewing process. The main feature of the invention is air-temperature fermentation and its mother was an ice scarcity during San Francisco Gold Rush days. The beer also contains four times the usual amount of hops, the flower that gives beer its bitterness. “Steam” just means carbonation. Our bohemian friends found it winy, but we found it one more instance of San Francisco’s chronic confusion of eccentricity with quality. B

Check it out. It’s interesting to compare how they were writing about the beer versus today. Notice, for example, the way they discuss hops. Hops are not written about lovingly, the way we might but always if the hops are perceivable, it’s considered a negative. A very interesting look back.

I say “yes” to writing about beer, they say “oui!”
This is the April 1975 issue, in which Christgau’s
beer article originally appeared.