History of brewing has local flavor
Beer has been brewed in Columbus since before the city became Ohio’s capital.
Curtis Schieber traces the beverage’s history during the past 200 years in “Columbus Beer: Recent Brewing and Deep Roots,” a well-researched and comprehensive book.
Schieber, who reviews concerts for The Dispatch and who has been conducting his own experiments in home brewing since the early ‘90s, opens with a chapter about the wave of craft brewers that hit the city in the same decade that he started brewing.
Here he interviews some of the major players in the then-new craft-beer scene during a period in which some breweries succeeded and many failed as they attempted to introduce new beverages to Columbus drinkers.
He then backtracks to the ■ 19th century, when brewers trained in Germany moved to what would become known as German Village, setting up large-scale productions there.
Those as interested in beer’s role in urban history will be intrigued by the buildings left behind by these brewers, many of whom lost their businesses to Prohibition. Photos and descriptions of the buildings that are still standing make it possible to take a selfguided tour of that past age.
Some of the most entertaining passages in the book focus on the advertisements used to sell beer, such as one that asserted: “Beer is adapted to the organism of the adult in much the same way as milk is to that of the infant.”
Schieber keeps his focus deliberately local, averting his gaze from the behemoth toward the north of town that dispenses “corporate American suds.”
Black-and-white photos are as much a part of the book as the text, giving a taste of beer’s history in Columbus. Assembled from private collections as well as from the Columbus Metropolitan Library and other historical collections, with more-recent photographs taken by the author, they include beer-bottle labels, maps, vintage beer ads and shots of assembled laborers — many in their teens or younger — in addition to the photos of the buildings where beer was produced.
Schieber finishes up the volume with an appendix on 40 local breweries active in central Ohio as of September 2017. He offers entertaining mini-reviews on each, so that readers looking to sample the variety of local brewing will have a starting point. One brewery operates “a taproom that looks like your college kid’s apartment,” and another mixes “ingredients and styles as if throwing darts at a board, tapping loud combinations of extreme hops.”
These glimpses of the present state of brewing gain depth from the context in which they are placed, in a story where a single key industry provides insight into how life has changed in Columbus during the past two centuries.