BEER IS NOT JUST A DRINK
It’s a cultural boom. And a Smithsonian scholar is on the case
When she was hired three years ago to serve as curator of the Smithsonian’s American Brewing History Initiative,
Washingtonian magazine called her position the “Best Job Ever.” For the first six months, though, Theresa McCulla spat out every beer she tasted—she was pregnant.
Since then she has made 30-odd research trips, sipping, documenting, collecting and interviewing. Among the brewers, maltsters and product designers she has tapped for oral histories are pioneers such as Charlie Papazian (“one of the more substantial and rewarding relationships I’ve established during my time at the museum,” she says) and Annie Johnson, the first AfricanAmerican awarded Homebrewer of the Year (2013), who has worked with a Seattle company that manufactures semi-automated homebrewing equipment aimed in part at people with disabilities.
Traveling to Random Lake, Wisconsin, McCulla met with woodworkers who design and produce 80 percent of America’s barroom tap handles. “Tap handles are often the first line of communication between a beer drinker and a brewer,” says McCulla, who has a doctorate in American studies from Harvard and a knack for finding cultural history in seemingly unremarkable objects. She has collected early annotated homebrewing recipes, beer labels from former upstarts like Sierra Nevada, even the vibrating tabletop football game that Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, bought at a thrift store and retrofitted to shake hops into his boil kettle, thus inventing “continual hopping” and becoming a demigod to hop-heads nationwide.
“America has the most creative and dynamic small brewing industry in the world,” McCulla says. Curiously, many of the most important American innovators weren’t initially focused on business. “Microbrewing and craft brewing grew out of grass-roots movements like do-ityourself culture and the counterculture. These brewers defined themselves as united in a struggle to make beers that were individualistic, and they created a new wave of small businesses, often with quirky personalities, that emphasized causes like environmental sustainability and community engagement.”