On the American Craft Brewing Hall of Fame
Last year, writer Marty Nachel launched the “American Craft Beer Hall of Fame,” and last week the organization announced their initial class of inductees. Although I was invited to submit nominees (and did), I have been ambivalent about this project from the start. I ultimately didn’t vote in the election, and I thought I’d leave it to others to comment on the inductees. Surprisingly, few have. I did throw it out for discussion on Bluesky, and the resulting conversation made me think it’s worth at least a brief comment. (Of course, what follows is not brief, despite my intentions!)
What follows is mostly criticism, but I want to acknowledge the good intentions and hard work of Marty and the other folks working on the project. I do understand the impulse here—it’s why we collect memories in archives and museums. I just think this one misses the mark a bit.
The announcement was well-organized and well attended, streamed live from multiple locations and featured a number of luminaries in the beer world. In canvasing input, the organizers seemed to get a lot of participation from voters. In other words, there seemed to be an appetite for this project within the industry. But for outsiders looking in—or this one, anyway—I am left wondering what the goals were.
People love to recognize accomplishment in their fields, and a hall of fame is one way of doing it. But my first question is, how are we measuring this accomplishment? Here’s the mission of the ACBHOF, which sort of describes their intentions:
“The American Craft Beer Hall of Fame has been established to honor, celebrate, and commit to history those people who are responsible for initiating, sustaining, and promoting the American craft beer industry. This Hall is to ensure that the memories of their contributions and achievements will not fade with time.”
It’s a broad remit, and one of the things that emerged on Bluesky was what kind of contribution and achievement you mean to honor. For example, Greg Noonan was very influential among the New England brewers who would go on to pioneer the region’s iconic IPAs. But his Vermont Pub and Brewery wasn’t a commercial juggernaut. His fellow New Englander Jim Koch built one of the largest breweries in the US, but it’s hard to find any lasting legacy in terms of the way the industry developed. So which one was more influential depends on what you’re measuring.
Who did they choose? Well, Jim Koch made it and Greg Noonan didn’t (and he didn’t make the pool of candidates taken to voters). The inductees include owners/founders of five breweries, two writers, an importer, and Charlie Papazian, whose category I’m not sure how to characterize. Here they are:
Fritz Maytag (owner, Anchor Brewing)
Michael Jackson (journalist)
Charlie Papazian (founder of the American Homebrew Association and Brewers Association)
Ken Grossman (founder/owner, Sierra Nevada)
Fred Eckhardt (journalist)
Jim Koch (founder, Boston Beer)
Bert Grant (hop researcher, founder of Yakima Brewing and Malting)
Charles and Rose Ann Finkel (founder/owners, Merchant du Vin)
Jack McAuliffe, Suzy Stern and Jane Zimmerman (owners and founders of New Albion)
It is a predictable list. These are the most famous and lauded figures in the craft realm (more on that in a moment). Countless books and articles have documented their work. If you polled people to predict who would be on this list, you’d come up with most of these names. So why am I ambivalent?
I guess it starts with the “craft beer” part of this endeavor. I have already written about why I think the conceptual framework of a separate “craft” industry is ill-considered. That notion will get more strained over time as the kinds of companies making beer and the kind of beer they make blend together. But it goes beyond that.
To begin with, it means excluding the accomplishments of people in the beer industry more broadly. To take one example: by far the most popular style of beer made in America—one now also made by small breweries—is light beer. Joseph Owades was the principal figure who developed the techniques to make it. A very important figure in American brewing! I am not the right person to trot through these kinds of figures, but there are a lot of them as you go back in history. Bert Grant, who led the effort to pelletize hops, is one of those figures, but he would never have made this list had he not started his own brewery.
But more significantly, I am increasingly uncomfortable with the mythos of craft beer. The entrepreneurs who started breweries in the 70s and 80s were bold figures, for sure, but they also reflected with a burgeoning artisanal movement all across food and beverage. Small-scale cheese-makers and vintners and bakers and on and on were attacking industrial production the same way the first small breweries did. Indeed, little breweries have been around forever (or ten thousand years, anyway), and the combo of Prohibition and industrialization meant that the 50-year period without startups was the outlier. We can admire these small producers without creating the whole origin myth of a new kind of beer and brewing,
Finally, craft beer has been built around the familiar “great man” framework applied to rock musicians, movie directors, and others. I fleshed out this argument more fully here, writing at the time, “While a myth can give events a structure, it also edits out discordant information. In choosing a myth, we reject other factual arrangements. By selecting a framework of craft beer that echoes the frontier myth, we miss other stories right in front of us.”
This perspective began to change during Covid, when we started to reconsider the dominant White and male narratives in craft beer. The inclusion of Suzy Denison (Stern), Jane Zimmerman, and Rose Ann Finkel on this list is a clear acknowledgment of that shift. Their names, particularly Suzy’s and Jane’s, were usually completely scrubbed from earlier accounts. This is an example I used in the “great man” post:
After hearing the story of how Jack McAuliffe “started the revolution” at New Albion dozens of times, I was so struck in hearing about his partner years later—a woman. In so many ways talking only about Jack follows the contours of that old myth: a man with a singular vision, irascible, irrepressible—maybe even a little unlikable—defies all convention to build the first brewery and change beer forever. Except that the story is really one of two founders, Jack and Suzy Denison. Suzy’s story is not Jack’s. She was the junior partner, yet she was very much a partner. And remarkably, it illustrates how early women were a part of craft brewing. Her part in that story may complicate the narrative, but she makes in far more interesting.
Still, the list lacks much diversity. Organizers created four categories of membership for the Hall, including brewers—yet inducted none of them. That would have been a great place to start. Two names in particular are indispensable: Teri Fahrendorf and Garrett Oliver. Both were working brewers whose beer elevated their founding-era breweries (Brooklyn and Steelhead); they stand as examples of how brewers often define their brewery more than their owners. But more than that, they persevered as members of highly underrepresented groups in the industry. And even more than that, their legacies will end up being defined much more by the way their later actions, Teri founding the Pink Boots Society, Garrett founding the Michael Jackson Foundation. These efforts have literally changed the face of American brewing. Both made the list of nominees; neither was selected for induction.
One more example that complicates the story of “craft beer.” In 1970, roughly the same time Fritz Maytag took over Anchor Brewing, Wisconsinite Ted Mack did exactly the same thing in Oshkosh, buying People’s Beer. Ted’s story is every bit as interesting as Fritz’s though very different. A Black man, Mack was using the brewery as a vehicle for wealth-generation withing the Black community, as a way of giving power to Black voices in Wisconsin. Like New Albion, it failed, but the reasons had to do with race, not commerce. It was perhaps a footnote in terms of commercial success, but it may one day stand as a more important precedent than many of the early craft breweries. In order to do so, more people need to learn about it—exactly the kind of visibility the ACBHOF might have provided. (I did nominate Ted, but he didn’t make the list of nominees.)
And I guess that gets back to my confusion about why the Hall of Fame exists. Elevating the less-heralded figures who shaped American brewing is certainly a worthy effort. Using the Hall to reshape the way we think about brewing (as well as craft brewing) would be a worthy effort. But at least after an initial round of inductees, it seems like the Hall has chosen to celebrate they already celebrated. Maybe this project isn’t for me, or the public generally, and that’s fine. Industries get to define whom they celebrate. But again, looking from the outside, it seems like a missed opportunity.