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Beer Shower at the World Series

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baseball
This was too funny not to share. Today, October 2, in 1959, during the World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers, White Sox left fielder Al Smith had something of an unpleasant time. In the fifth inning, an excited fan in the outfield leapt to his feet, and in the process accidentally knocked over the beer that had been resting on the top of the outfield wall.

The spilled beer and cup rained down on Smith, hitting him square on the head, and dousing him pretty thoroughly. At first he thought it was intentional, but the field umpire assured him it had been accidental. After the game, they learned that the fan was “Melvin Piehl, a motor oil company executive, who later stated that he was trying to catch the ball so it would not hit his boss’s wife.” The White Sox went on to lose this second game at Comiskey Park, and ultimately the Dodgers won the 1959 series, four games to two. Luckily, Ray Gora of the Chicago Tribune snapped a picture at precisely the right moment and captured a piece of history.

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Beer In Film #83: Microbrewers 1981-1996: A Photo History

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Today’s beer film is really just a slideshow to music, but it’s such a great collection of photographs that it’s worthwhile anyway. The book, MICROBREWERS: 1981-1996: A Photo History, features a wealth of historic photographs of many of the pioneers of the craft beer industry taken by David Bjorkman, who co-founded New Brewer magazine in 1983 with Victoria Thomas and Charlie Papazian, and documented the nascent beer industry from 1981 to 1996 before moving to Mexico. The handmade book includes “over 300 photos of the first microbrewers in the United States” and can be purchased from Blurb. I bought it when it first came out in 2009, and despite its high price tag, it’s an awesome collection of photos. The song, by the way, is the traditional Irish song “Beer, Beer, Beer” performed by The Clancy Brothers.

California BrewMasters Coffee Table Book

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This looks like a fun project. Photographer Nick Gingold is creating a portrait of California brewers, a coffee table book, that’s entitled California BrewMasters. He’s photographed at least 45 California brewers and each profile will include an interview.

The book is expected to be published in June of this year, and the brewers featured are a veritable who’s who of California’s beer scene.

I first met Nick at the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival last summer, when he was showing off some of the great photographs that will be in the finished book. He’s been working on the book for over two years. To complete the book, he’s turned to Kickstarter to raise the remaining funds to get it printed. Pre-order it through Kickstarter, and you’ll both get it for less than retail plus be one of the first to have it shipped directly to your home. There’s also additional levels at Kickstarter, with more schwag including bottle openers, growlers, t-shirts, a poster and even signed copies of the book.

Here’s how the book is described at the Kickstarter page:

California BrewMasters is a collection of interviews and photographic portraits of some of California’s best brewers. I’ve traveled to over 45 breweries around every corner of the state talking to the men and women responsible for the golden state’s most delicious brews. I’m launching this Kickstarter to create a beautiful, 200 page, 10″x10″ hard cover coffee table book to share this project with the world. We plan to have it ready for distribution by June.

As a photographer and craft beer fan, I wanted to create a project that hadn’t been done before. I noticed that while a lot of books were written about the beer itself, or as a guide book to which breweries to visit, no one had really been paying attention to the men and women responsible for all this delicious beer we have. What’s going on in the mind of Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman’s? How does Mitch Steele from Stone brew such delicious IPAs? Why not talk to them and find out, and better yet bring their faces out of the brewery and onto the page in, so you can really get a connection to the guy spending countless hours bringing you a fresh, delicious, well crafted product to sip on?

So a little over two years ago I set out to do just that, and today we have the project you see before you. I photographed these brewers in their natural environments, in the brewery and in the communities in which they work and live. We would then interviewed them, having an open conversation about their history, their philosophy to brewing, what they look for in a good beer, their thoughts on the current state of the craft beer industry, you name it – we tried to ask it. These interviews will be transcribed and edited to go hand in hand with each portrait.

And finally, here’s a few examples from the book, to give you a flavor of the portraits:

Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing.

Ben Cook of Hangar 24 Brewing

Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing

Ignacio “Nacho” Cervantes from Pizza Port Carlsbad

History’s First Photo Of People Drinking Beer

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Twitter lit up last night with tweets of an old photograph taken in 1844. It was Boak & Bailey who I saw tweet it, so h/t to them, although it appears to have been bouncing around the interwebs since at least July of 2012. Although neither the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one of the originals is located, the National Portrait Gallery, where there’s another, or on Wikipedia, confirms or denies it, many sources posting it have indicated that it’s the first photograph taken depicting people drinking beer, in this case Edinburgh Ale. According to the museum, the photographers were David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The people in the photo are identified as James Ballantine, Dr. George Bell, and D.O. Hill. It was printed on salted paper from a paper negative. I like the idea that it is the first photographic record of people enjoying a beer, but I’d prefer to see more proof. It seems likely, of course, since according to one account it was taken just six years after the very first photograph of a human. But I suppose until someone shows me one that’s earlier, I’m going to take their word for it.

This is the photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

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Whereas the photo that’s at the National Portrait Gallery is more grey than brown, and is identified as an Calotype print.

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It also includes the following caption.

The skills involved in producing calotypes were not only of a technical nature. Hill’s sociability, humour and his capacity to gauge the sitters’ characters all played a crucial part in his photography. He is shown here on the right, apparently sharing a drink and a joke with James Ballantine and Dr George Bell. Bell, in the middle, was one of the commissioners of the Poor Law of 1845, which reformed poor relief in Scotland. Ballantine was a writer and stained-glass artist, and the son of an Edinburgh brewer. On the table are three glasses of ale. According to a contemporary account, Edinburgh ale was “a potent fluid, which almost glued the lips of the drinker together”.

“Glued the lips of the drinker together,” that’s one of the oddest descriptions of how a beer tastes I’ve ever read. It makes me want to try an Edinburgh Ale. I’ve get to working on that time machine.

Hamm’s In San Francisco

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Hamms
A friend and regular reader sent me this old photograph of the Hamm’s brewery sign at night, taken in San Francisco around 1954, the year the Hamm’s Brewery opened. It’s a nighttime shot of the iconic Hamm’s sign on the roof of the brewery that was located at 1550 Bryant Street. When it was built, “it was the largest commercial sign on the West Coast.” The brewery closed in 1972, and sign taken down three years later, in 1975. According to Wikipedia, it was a “20-by-80 foot sign, with a 3-dimensional 13-foot beer chalice on top, [and] appeared in the first Dirty Harry film. In the early 1980s, the beer vats were first squatted and then rented out to punk rock bands. Known as “The Vats,” the brewery was a center of San Francisco punk rock culture with about 200 bands using individual vats as music studios. The building was renovated in the mid 1980s and converted into offices and showroom space.” In 2012, the Chronicle did a piece about the sign’s fate, What happened to the Hamm’s Brewery sign?, that included additional photos taken during the day, but the sign looks most impressive at night, and it was even animated, with neon rings of beer turning on and off in sequence, so the glass of beer looked like it was emptying and then filling up again.

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A Little Love From Philly Beer Week

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philly-beer
A native of Pennsylvania, Philly Beer Week is my second favorite beer week (after our own SF Beer Week, of course). Since attending the very first PBW, I’ve tried to come back every other year, which should have been this year. Alas, I have a book due at the end of next month, and I didn’t feel I could spare the time to frolic (ahem, I mean work) in the City of Brotherly Love.

The Homebrew Chef, Sean Paxton, is out there right now doing a beer dinner, and my good friend, fellow beer blogger Bryan Kolesar — who writes the Brew Lounge, sent me the photo below (taken by the incomparable Jennie Hatton) of Sean, Bryan and the Hammer of Glory. Thanks to Bryan’s keen fashion sense, at least I can be there in spirit. Thanks guys, I sure wish I could be there with you.

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Fun With Beer Cans & Photography

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In honor of today being “Beer Can Day,” the anniversary of the first beer can’s introduction by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey on January 24, 1935, here’s an amazing use of a beer can. Now this is recycling, or perhaps more correctly repurposing.

For many years, people having been making what are called “pinhole cameras” out of a variety of materials, really anything that keeps out light can be used. Essentially, they’re a very simple, homemade camera. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. “A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.” But they’ve become very popular again in the last ten or so years, a kind of backlash as a result of the rise of digital photography. There’s as simple and low-tech as possible, yet still create interesting images.

At least two photographers have been in the news lately, making time-lapse photographs with pinhole cameras made from beer cans. The first, a student at the University of Hertfordshire — Regina Valkenborgh — put her beer can camera “next to the university’s radio telescope at its Bayfordbury Observatory.” According to the Daily Mail, the pinhole camera recorded the sun’s movements over a six-month period of time, “[f]rom solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view.” How cool is that?

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The second, photographer Justin Quinnell, was featured on the Discovery Channel’s website. He’s captured a variety of time-lapse pinhole images using “emptied beer cans and about 50 cents worth of other supplies, such as duct tape and regular photography paper. While the cameras only took about five minutes to build, they had to withstand six months of ‘wind, rain, hail, and being thrown in the trash.'”

When asked which beer cans he preferred, Quinnell responded. “My choice would be lager or Guinness although often, when I teach larger groups, I have to rely on what is left in my neighbors recycling boxes.”

This photo is of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, England, from December, 19 2007 to June 21, 2008.
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This one is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, also in Bristol, from December 17, 2007 through June 21, 2008.
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And this last one was taken by the gravestones of Blance, Grace and Dorcus, over three months in the spring 2008 in the Eastville Cemetery, Bristol, England.
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You can many more of Justin Quinnell’s work at his website, pinholephotography.org, including a galley of more from the Slow Light Collection, which is where the above photos came from.

Now that’s a pretty cool use of beer cans. Happy Beer Can Day!

More From This Year’s Anchor Christmas Party

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If you saw my post from the Anchor Christmas Party a few days ago, my friend Mike Condie — who’s a much better photographer than I am — sent over some of the pictures he took at the party and I thought I’d share those, as well.

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The Celebrator crew.

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Alec Moss and Tom Dalldorf.

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Me with brewer Mike Lee and Bob Brewer.

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Bob Brewer showing me Anchor’s new bottling line.

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Ron Silberstein, from Thirsty Bear, and Anchor co-owner Keith Greggor.

Thanks for sharing, Mike.

Photographing The Pioneers

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While doing some searching yesterday for beer pioneers, I found once more the book of photographs by David Bjorkman entitled MICROBREWERS: 1981-1996: A Photo History. Bjorkman co-founded New Brewer magazine, which is today the in house trade publication for the Brewers Association. The book came out a couple of years ago, self-published as a blurb book by Bjorkman, and I bought a copy right after I got a press release about it.

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It’s filled with great black and white photographs of the very early days of craft beer and includes a lot of folks still making great beer today. Here’s how the book is described at the website:

In this homage to American microbrewers, international photojournalist David Bjorkman has created a photo gallery of brewers and breweries from 1981 to 1996. This collection of rare photos captures the early years of specialty brewing as the industry began its meteoric rise into the hearts of admiring beer-lovers nationwide.

Those were heady years filled with the pure joy of brewing. Brewers with big dreams opened their microbreweries, brewpubs and contract brewing companies on shoestring budgets, and succeeded in establishing their unique place in the history of American brewing. “Hand-crafted,” “fresh,” “flavorful” were how they described their beers, and it was the start of something special.

David’s photos document the pioneers and players who came to brewing from different backgrounds and disciplines, but who all had a passion for beer. Some became industry leaders, with their names, faces and beers known to beer-connoisseurs across the nation. Some shot to fame, but for lack of money or know-how fell into history. But all were dynamic and visionary, intense and driven to give beer their best.

Here are photos of the first microbrewers in the United States; of early Great American Beer Festivals; of Batch #176 being brewed at the Widmer Brewing Co.; of the Mendocino Brewing Co. team; and of hundreds of brewers across the country.

These photos provide a veritable “who’s who” of the early microbrewing industry, a history worthy of a place on every beer-lovers book shelf.

Below is a photo-collage video of many of the photos from the book. How many people can you identify?

The 30th Great American Beer Festival Judging

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gabf-2011
Right now I’m out in Denver, Colorado judging at the 30th Great American Beer Festival. Because it’s the 30th year, after orientation last night, they took an impromptu group photo of all 167 judges, or at least as many as would fit in the photo. See if you can find me (hint: I’m a little to the left and two-thirds of the way back). Recognize anyone else? There’s plenty of other faces in the crowd that you probably know.

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Click on the photo for a larger view.