‘Tapped Out’ visits history of craft beer
Orland Park writer’s Midwest guidebook published after 25 years
Today, thousands of breweries populate the Midwestern states. Many people do not even need to leave their hometowns to sample from the taps of a craft brewer.
But in the early 1990s, the beer industry was an entirely different story. Most enthusiasts still swore their allegiances to one of the behemoths: Miller, Budweiser or Coors. “Craft” beer was not a thing. Beyond the big brews, there were only microbrewers — and to try their beverages, one probably had to get in the car for a small vacation.
That is exactly what Orland Park resident Marty Nachel did, time and time again, in 1995. He documented the places and people he met along thewaywith the intention of immediately publishing a guidebook.
His book wouldn’t see the light of day for another 25 years, when Nachel in August self-published “Tapped Out: A Look Back at Midwestern Craft Breweries 25 Years Ago” through Amazon. But the journey that led to the paperback release started even longer ago, and its context has been altered by a quarter-century of the beer industry’s growth.
“This is a historical text now,” Nachel said. “It’s no longer the guidebook itwas intended to be.”
‘Noway I could keep up’
In 1991, a librarian at Clemson University named Steve Johnson published a book called “On Tap: The Guide to U.S. Brewpubs.” But the industry was growing so rapidly that Johnson quickly followed it with “On Tap U.S. East”
and “On Tap U.S. West” in an impossible attempt to stay current.
Nachel met Johnson through a newsletter the latter published called World Beer Review. Nachel was a reader who offered to contribute.
When Johnson hatched a plan to keep up with the beer industry’s growth in the United States by splitting the country into regions and calling in his friends for help, Nachel was tapped to write the “Midwest” book. He was assigned Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, where he visited 54 microbreweries — including Great Lakes, Goose Island, New Glarus, Bell’s and Lakefront— and wrote profiles about each of them.
“I was really, really into beer,” Nachel said. “So just to get to visit those breweries in other states was a lot of fun.”
While he primarily visited the breweries in his book solo, his wife and children sometimes packed into the van to go somewhere with him. He even planned a few family trips around brewery visits and vice versa.
But Nachel saw the proverbial writing on the wall for the project, even in the midst of it.
“By the time I completed my first go-round, more breweries had opened up in my wake,” Nachel said. “There’s noway I could keep up.”
Even with the divide-and-conquer approach, Johnson quickly realized that the exponential growth of the industry would always make these types of books a challenge to write. Only a couple of the regional editions of “On Tap” ever got published, Nachel said, and Johnson pulled the plug on the project before the Midwest edition evermade it to print.
It did little to stifle Nachel’s interest in writing about beer. He published several other books, including “Beer for Dummies” in 1996 and “Home-brewing for Dummies” in 1997.
He got to knowa lot of beerand the people behind it well, but when the guidebook project was canceled his chance to share their stories was, too — at least for some time.
The files containing Nachel’s writings from those Midwestern trips in 1995 remained on a computer drive. Theywere also in the back ofhis head for a quarter century.
“Whenthe calendar turned 2020, I thought, ‘Hey, it’s been 25 years since I did this,’ ” Nachel said.
He pitched to publishers the idea of releasing the old book, as is, as something of a historical artifact— to be appreciated for what it and the beer industry were at the time. But while the industry has continued to grow, the public’s appetite for beer books isn’t what it used to be. The rejectionswere expected.
“It was a long shot, and I knew it,” Nachel said. “I knew thatmy nuclear
optionwas to self-publish the book. It wasn’t about selling books so much but to tell this story.”
‘Unquestionably better now’
A major reason “Tapped Out” no longer serves as a guidebook is that more than50% of the spots it features have closed over the last two-and-ahalf decades. Many of these brewers were casualties of being the early adopters of a major shift.
The core beer drinkers simply were not ready to take the leap, Nachel said. And some of the brewers did themselves no favors.
“They made a lot of mistakes, essentially,” Nachel said.
Much of the beer during that era also left something to be desired, he said.
“It really was just glorified homebrew,” Nachel said. “It would not stand up to today’s standards. It’s unquestionably better now.”
But there was still something special about those times, Nachel said andmany of the breweries that left an “indelible impression” on Nachel were the ones still standing. But for a young guy who enjoyed drinking beer, there also was an excitement that cannot be replicated today with
howrefined the industry hasbecome.
“Itwas kind of theWildWest back then,” Nachel said. “The magic has kind of worn off. It’s easy to be jaded now.”
Nachel is hoping “Tapped Out” captures a bit of that pivotal era. While the book contains editorial notes in italics, “RIP” next to some of the defunct brewpubs and a prologue to give the text context, Nachel has otherwise left the profiles as they would have appeared 25 years ago. “Tapped Out” is a time and place for the beer industry: Midwest, 1995.
Nachel said it was a bit of a trip to see it all again through today’s lens.
“The first thing that comes tomind is how far we’ve come,” he said, noting there are now1,400 breweries in the six states he covered. “It’s almost quaint looking back on what we had 25 years ago.”
As he writes in the prologue, “I thought it would be interesting to revisit this projectandshare a narrow slice of not-too-distant American craft beer history. If there is a positive takeaway here, it’s that these beer pioneers paved the way for the current wave of successful craft breweries that followed their lead.”