- Anna Blessing
- Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan
In the introduction to Locally Brewed: Portraits of Craft Brewing from America’s Heartland, Anna Blessing writes, “In part this is a book about beer, but mostly it is a book about people: the craftspeople and artisans who brew the beer.” And—spoiler alert—that’s exactly what it is. Blessing has deftly pinpointed what’s most interesting about each brewer’s story and spends several pages, illustrated with photos of the brewers, beers, and breweries (taken by Blessing herself), telling it.
You can enjoy the book even if you don’t care about beer—though it helps if you do. I was familiar with most of the breweries in the book, but I didn’t know the story of how Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Day went from a crowd of ten people the first year the beer was bottled (2004) to 100-odd the second; by its third year thousands were showing up for the release, and the event has been attracting beer nerds from across the country ever since. Or how the founders of Short’s Brewing ran out of money halfway through the construction of a larger brewery, and were saved by a customer who wanted to be a Mug Club member so badly that he invested $250,000 in the business. Or that Pat Conway, co-owner of Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, is working with U. of C. archaeologists to create a beer the same way the Sumerians would have done it (he hasn’t succeeded yet). And Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery made not only the first fruit beer released since Prohibition (a cherry lager, in 1992), but also the first USDA-certified organic beer (1996), and the first government-certified gluten-free beer (2006). When its pumpkin lager came out in 1989, it was the only commercially released beer of its type in the world.
