Carolyn Fath Ashby
The Drink that Made Wisconsin Famous: Beer and Brewing in the Badger State (University of Minnesota Press, $50) is the Riverside Shakespeare of Wisconsin beer histories. It is the college textbook you didn’t want to lug around in your backpack. And, unless you’re taking a history of beer course at the Siebel Institute, the good news is you don’t have to.
The book is well illustrated, but less a coffee table book than an encyclopedia — encyclopedic in the best way. About half of The Drink that Made Wisconsin Famous is devoted to an era-by-era narrative of the state’s brewing history; the second half to an alphabetical listing of Wisconsin towns and cities and each and every brewery they’ve hosted over the years, with whatever historical details are available.
Author Doug Hoverson teaches history and government at a prep school in the Twin Cities area. He got into the stories of Midwestern brewing through his interest in local history, not so much out of a passion for beer: “I enjoy a good beer,” Hoverson tells Isthmus in a phone interview, “but the origin of this was touring older cities while on vacation. So many old buildings had been a brewery at some point, or there would be a spot where a brewery had been.”
He started with Minnesota. Hoverson’s first book, The Land of Amber Waters: The History of Brewing in Minnesota was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2007. It’s about half the size of the Wisconsin volume. “Not only were there more Wisconsin breweries, but some of the big brewers were around longer and were more influential,” Hoverson says. “Minnesota has Hamm’s, but that’s nothing compared to Miller, Pabst, Schlitz and Heileman.”
One difference Hoverson sees between Minnesota and Wisconsin beer culture is that Wisconsin has “a better developed sense of tavern culture throughout the state.” For most of the post-Prohibition era, Wisconsin led the nation in the ratio of draft beer consumption to canned and bottled beer, says Hoverson. That helped sustain the smaller town Wisconsin breweries: “That draft culture you really only see in Wisconsin.”
The Wisconsin project took Hoverson 11 years — “They got Apollo to the moon in eight,” he jokes. Research and writing came while juggling his day job, spending summers and spring breaks doing research.
There are 794 breweries listed in The Drink that Made Wisconsin Famous. Keeping them straight was “not just a matter of numbers,” says Hoverson. “In the pre-Prohibition era, there were a lot of name changes.” Hoverson discovered some breweries thought to be three or four different companies were really one, recorded in different years under a different partner’s name.
Hoverson also discovered several breweries not recorded in any other writing. This came through painstaking primary source research. He combed the 1850 and 1860 census records “page by page” for anyone whose occupation was listed as brewer, for instance. (He “spot-checked” from 1870 on.) He checked the federal excise tax records from “when they started taxing beer in 1862 to fund the Civil War.”
The extremely thorough credit reports of R.G. Dun & Co. took Hoverson to the Baker Library at Harvard Business School several times, to hunt through the 140-year-old ledgers.
It was a lot of grinding research, says Hoverson, but he credits local collectors of beer memorabilia who shared valuable information and primary source material, and the Wisconsin Historical Society: “This is a much better project because of them.”
