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Nature’s Brew: An Environmental History of Modern American Brewing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2026

Cody Patton
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Abstract

Nature’s Brew uses the relatable history of beer to explore the history of capitalism in the modern United States. More than simply a commodity history, this interdisciplinary dissertation adopts both environmental history and business history lenses to tell a more-than-human history of American brewing and industrial food production from the nineteenth century to today. Nature’s Brew argues that the unique biological and material properties of the organic, mineral, and chemical components used to produce a can of beer played crucial roles in shaping the development and environmental footprint of American brewing. Without human entanglements with things like yeast, hops, alcohol, barley, coal, water, pesticides, and aluminum, the transition to large-scale industrial brewing or even modern craft brewing—which are often not as distinct as craft brewers insist—would not have been possible. By looking at the key ingredients and materials found in beer, Nature’s Brew demonstrates that non-humans were vital in shaping the brewing industry’s trajectory and influenced, enabled, and limited brewers’ choices at critical junctions. The approach used in this project allows us to evaluate the creation of modern capitalistic food systems from a unique perspective, the micro-level. Placing material things under the historical microscope encourages historians to understand how these systems are not purely human endeavors under complete human control.

Keywords

beverage industriesenvironmentcommoditiesindustrialization

Information

Type
Krooss Prize Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , First View , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Business History Conference

Nature’s Brew: A Summary

Modern beer is weird. I’m not just talking about a funky dill pickle sour, a chocolate peanut butter milkshake stout, or a bourbon-barrel aged maple amber ale. Many craft beer enthusiasts would consider those beers intriguing, if not a little strange. Despite the variety of beer now available to consumers, however, even a can of everyday lager, like Budweiser, Coors Banquet, or Miller Lite, is a historical abnormality.

Humans have been brewing beer for at least 10,000 years, but brewing has changed dramatically in the last 200 years.Footnote 1 For thousands of years, brewing was carried out primarily by women using local grains, herbs, fruits, and open-air fermentation.Footnote 2 Most of the beer was relatively low in alcohol and destined for household consumption.Footnote 3 Only in the last two centuries has the modern brewing industry taken shape. By “modern,” I mean an industry that relies on intensive capital inputs, standardized products and brands, marketing, global distribution networks, disposable packaging, and scientific expertise. Even today’s craft brewers—who often pride themselves on their experimental brews and local or regional connections—are a product of this transformation.

Nature’s Brew asks how this radically different brewing industry emerged in the United States.Footnote 4 The dissertation’s exploration of modern beer begins in the 1850s—with the rising popularity of lager beer in American drinking culture—and continues to the present day with the emergence of craft brewing. I argue that the modern beer industry took shape because of the unique biological and material properties of beer’s organic and chemical components (yeast, hops, barley, and alcohol). Of course, humans and the business and political systems they create are also vital to this story. Yet, without human entanglements with things like yeast, hops, alcohol, barley, coal, pesticides, cans, and bottles, the transition to large-scale industrial brewing, or even modern craft brewing—which are often not as distinct as craft brewers insist—would not have been possible.Footnote 5

Through this more-than-human approach, the dissertation highlights the role non-humans played in creating the modern $100 billion brewing industry. In doing so, it offers a history of American beer radically different from past scholarship on brewing. Previous scholars have focused intensely on the history of individual brewing corporations, the “great men” behind them, or beer’s political, economic, and social aspects.Footnote 6 My dissertation is the first history of brewing that tells the story of American beer through the stuff found in a pint glass.

The dissertation shows how non-human agents significantly shaped the actions of individual brewers, brewing corporations, and the economy at large. For example, the yeast needed to make lager, the most popular style of beer globally, requires cold temperatures. As a result, brewers became critical early investors in artificial refrigeration during the nineteenth century.Footnote 7 Thus, because of lager yeast’s need for cold, brewers played a vital role in creating the modern cold-chain economy. Furthermore, the fungus downy mildew is particularly adept at killing hops. Its rampage through Pacific Northwest hop yards in the 1930s resulted in growers’ reliance on synthetic pesticides and encouraged brewers’ investments in the mildew-resistant hybrid hops that would launch the craft beer revolution a half century later. Non-humans were vital in shaping brewing’s trajectory and influenced, enabled, and limited brewers’ choices at critical junctions.

My focus on more-than-human entanglements stems from a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship stressing the importance of non-humans in creating all aspects of human society.Footnote 8 This work, broadly called “neo-materialism,” highlights the importance of matter, literally stuff, in a society that often takes it for granted. As the neo-materialist historian Tim LeCain states, our histories and cultures developed “in significant part from a broader world of intelligent and creative animals, plants, metals, and other material things,” and not solely from human “intelligence, creativity, culture, power, [and] technologies.”Footnote 9 Without human-thing partnerships, the brewing industry or large social, political, and economic systems like capitalism would not exist.

Nature’s Brew also joins a collaborative effort between business and environmental historians working to demystify the connections between corporations and environments.Footnote 10 Notable books in this vein include John Soluri’s Banana Cultures and Bart Elmore’s Citizen Coke. Both works show that the importance of supply chains and the material and social factors that underpin them, and not just firm organization or managerial strategy, play a substantial role in the history of business. This growing body of work has succinctly demonstrated that firms are voracious consumers of raw materials and therefore have significant connections to the environment.Footnote 11 Firms are rooted in nature.

This multi-disciplinary approach has driven business history in new and exciting directions. The collaboration between business historians, environmental historians, and historians of capitalism offers a critique of the Chandlerian paradigm that has dominated business history since the late 1970s. In his classic work The Visible Hand (1977), Alfred Chandler stressed that the organization of vertically integrated firms was the most critical aspect of American business. While a significant contribution, the Chandlerian paradigm ignored the importance of firms’ raw materials, the landscapes that originate them, and the connections between policy and supply chains.Footnote 12 By branching out from the Chandlerian paradigm, historians are telling compelling stories that resonate with today’s problems, particularly the significant relationship between corporations and the climate crisis.

Nature’s Brew complements this growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship but also pushes it forward. The dissertation argues that not only are firms connected to the natural world through extraction, but that they also need the agentic qualities of non-humans to co-create capitalist enterprises. The materiality of non-humans—their inherent properties, such as yeasts’ capacity to turn sugar into alcohol independent of humans or hops’ natural production of flavorful chemical compounds—mattered in the making of capitalism.

This neo-materialist approach allows us to see the creation of modern capitalism from a unique perspective, the micro-level. Instead of viewing capitalism through a global lens, placing non-human agents under a historical microscope allows us to study capitalism from the perspective of truly small things, the nuts and bolts that make the system possible. Brewers’ relationships with small things ranging in size from microscopic fungi to individual grains of barley and 12-ounce aluminum cans resulted in immense changes and impacts on the brewing industry, society, and the environment.

As industrial brewers worked to control the minutiae of brewing, they required massive amounts of capital inputs and expenditures. Notable examples include multi-story coal-fired ice plants, canning machines, national marketing campaigns, and investments in scientific research. Even craft brewers, who use their relatively small size as a key marketing device, rely on the capital structures and supply chains developed by big brewers over the last two hundred years. Once we consider the material components of beer as serious historical actors in the creation of the modern brewing industry, it becomes clear that small things often have incredibly large impacts on capital development, culture, politics, and the environment.

While the dissertation focuses on brewing, this approach is not unique to beer. All modern industries depend on everyday things’ biological and chemical properties, ranging from the cotton plant’s ability to produce a workable fiber to copper atoms’ inherent conductivity and malleability.Footnote 13 If we want to better understand corporations, indeed, global capitalism, historians need to engage with the materiality of even the smallest things that make these systems possible.

This environmental and business history of beer also offers insights into how studying past connections between humans and more-than-human things can help us envision relationships that will foster a more sustainable future. Since the field’s inception, environmental historians have documented how human economic activity, primarily in the form of capitalism, ruins environments.Footnote 14 These stories have immense value. They have shown us what happens when humans take a narrow, short-sighted view of their place in the world. If we continue to exploit the Earth without a second thought about soil, climate, or other life forms, we end up with disastrous consequences.Footnote 15 Examples include the Dust Bowl, the near extinction of the American bison, the horror of modern slaughter and henhouses, the exploitation and poisoning of marginalized people worldwide, and even things like a global trade in radioactive blueberries.Footnote 16 At the same time, however, our relationships with agentic things also allow humans to accomplish some truly incredible feats. And by better understanding the history of these relationships, perhaps we can find new entanglements that offer novel solutions to our most pressing problems.

If there is one thing that studying the history of modern beer has taught me, it is that flexibility and creativity, rather than control and standardization, result in much more dynamic and adaptive solutions to problems. When brewers and consumers embraced rigid views of beer, they often experienced increased financial struggles and negative environmental impacts. Notable examples include lager brewers’ transitions from natural ice to ice machines that caused substantial urban pollution, their insistence on using legacy barley cultivars unsuited to drought during the 1930s, their determination to sell beer in single-use containers despite consumer satisfaction with returnable bottles, and their continued demand for hop varieties that must be grown with abundant pesticides. Cultivating flexibility—a willingness to experiment with new more-than-human relationships as hurdles inevitably arise—offers an antidote to the rigidity that accompanies a capitalist mindset rooted in the false notion that humans are masters of the natural world.Footnote 17

What Is in a Beer?: Organization

The dissertation uses a thematic and chronological organization to tell the story of modern American brewing. Each chapter addresses an important ingredient used to make beer, including yeast, barley, and hops. Since alcohol is also an important component of beer, it also receives its own chapter. Finally, because all these ingredients and components are frequently served to a customer encapsulated in a disposable can, beer cans receive a chapter as well.

The five thematic chapters—beginning with yeast and then moving on to alcohol, malt, cans, and hops—are arranged chronologically, with some necessary overlap. This arrangement highlights critical moments in beer’s history when more-than-human agents influenced the industry’s development. Each chapter emphasizes the importance of even the smallest components in creating a modern capitalist enterprise.

The first chapter, titled “Industrious Microbes,” begins in the 1850s and explores how new scientific research on yeast and other microorganisms contributed to the intense capitalization and standardization of the American brewing industry during the late nineteenth century. Lager yeast requires cold fermentation temperatures and hygienic environments to produce a consistent and proper-tasting lager. As a result, lager brewers became critical investors in artificial refrigeration technology by the 1870s. The massive and expensive coal-fired ice machines turned breweries into voracious consumers of fossil fuels, all to satisfy the cold-loving yeast.Footnote 18 In essence, the biological needs of the tiny lager yeast led brewers to invest in huge, capital-intensive artificial refrigeration plants if they wanted to avoid the volatility of naturally harvested ice and seasonal temperatures while also producing a standardized product. Due to their partnership with yeast, leading scientific brewers were able to create national brands and produce them on an industrial scale independent of region or weather, a feat unprecedented in human history.

“Beer Bodies,” the dissertation’s second chapter, focuses on the alcohol and carbohydrates found in a pint of beer. During the turn of the twentieth century, arguments over the impact of beer on American society and bodies reached a fevered pitch. This chapter explores the history of Prohibition through the effects of ethyl alcohol and carbs on the micro-environment of the human organism.Footnote 19 The ability of microscopic components found in beer to alter human behavior and physiology shaped the national rhetorical strategies of brewers and their dry antagonists, such as the Anti-Saloon League and Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Both camps enlisted allied scientists and dietary specialists in their battles over temperance, and each group of specialists offered competing views of the impact of beer on the body. This chapter argues that the ethyl alcohol and carbohydrates in beer need to be viewed as active historical agents in both shaping prohibitory policy and the marketing and political campaigns of the brewing industry, one of the nation’s largest, both before and after Prohibition.Footnote 20

The third chapter, “A Different Kind of Dry,” explores the impacts of barley shortages on the brewing industry as it worked to reestablish itself after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. The scorching heat and lack of rain during the 1930s were not only responsible for the infamous black blizzards of the Dust Bowl but also withered fields of malting barley used to brew beer in the upper Midwest. Throughout the 1930s, brewers struggled to secure quality malt—their primary ingredient—at profitable prices due to drought-related shortages.Footnote 21 As a result, many brewers who could not weather the double punch of reduced post-repeal demand for beer and expensive ingredients collapsed in the decade after repeal. Additionally, because of the malt shortages, brewers took a renewed interest in the procurement of their principal ingredient. As a result, the industry allocated significant funds toward grower education and new cultivar breeding that shaped the development of the modern malt growing industry in the United States. While there are several contributing factors that explain the rise of a handful of big brewers in the United States after Prohibition, this chapter is the first to argue that climate-related supply chain issues played a role in the industry’s post-repeal development.

“Selling Single-use,” the fourth chapter, evaluates the emergence of single-use beverage containers—metal cans—in the American brewing industry from the 1930s until the 1970s. In 1935, American brewers became the first in the carbonated beverage industry to implement single-use containers, pre-dating the soda industry by several decades.Footnote 22 Brewers saw cans as an opportunity to market their product as a “home beverage” by focusing on the lightweight and quick chilling aspects of the steel, and later aluminum, containers.Footnote 23 “Selling Single-use” demonstrates that consumers during the 1930s, however, initially rejected one-way containers because they were inferior to reusable glass bottles. The chapter argues instead that the use of canned beer in soldiers’ rations during WWII became the turning point in engraining single-use packaging in American consumer culture. This chapter follows the post-war adoption of canned beer into the 1970s and concludes by evaluating the environmental legacy of brewers’ promotion of disposable cans over returnable glass bottles. This history provides insights into current debates concerning the environmental costs and the liability of single-use product packaging in addition to highlighting the strengths and shortcomings of steel and aluminum as single-use beverage containers.

The dissertation concludes with a chapter on hops titled “Mites, Mildew, and Anheuser-Busch.” Today, hops are arguably the most iconic ingredient in beer thanks to the popularity of craft brewing. The final chapter explores the history of popular hop hybrids, like the Cascade and Centennial, that were imperative to the craft beer revolution that began in the late 1970s. Rather than repeating the often celebratory, counter-cultural history embraced by craft brewers—that their product is more authentic and natural and otherwise separate from big beer through their embrace of hops—this evaluation of American hop production upends that traditional narrative.Footnote 24 Instead, this chapter demonstrates that many modern hop varieties championed by craft brewers were developed in response to traditional cultivars’ susceptibility to diseases using financial assistance from federal and state governments and big brewers like Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Schlitz. These new varieties were then grown using pesticide-intensive agricultural methods. As a result, the modern brewing industry, particularly the craft beer segment, is heavily dependent on synthetic pesticides to secure one of its key ingredients due to hops’ inherent vulnerability to downy mildew infection. Indeed, so many chemicals are used that several studies have found that hop pesticide residues carry over into a consumer’s pint glass.Footnote 25

Nature’s Brew teaches us about the microorganisms, chemicals, metals, plants, policies, and people that shaped the American brewing industry. Their histories illustrate that a pint of our favorite brew contains much more than beer. Indeed, when we consume a can of beer, we drink a living beverage with both deep connections to and significant impacts on our economies, environments, and bodies.

Footnotes

A book version of Nature’s Brew is forthcoming in Fall 2027 from University of California Press.

References

1. Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2021), 109. Recent archaeological evidence in Jordan suggests beer and bread making may have begun 14,000 years ago.

2. Slingerland, Drunk, 17–31; Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 10–12.

3. Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy, and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 80.

4. This question draws inspiration from Alfred Crosby, who encouraged historians to ask simple questions because even they have complex answers, and complex questions are often too difficult to test. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biologic Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6.

5. I draw from archaeologist Ian Hodder’s work for the term entanglement. Hodder describes a human-thing entanglement as an assemblage of humans and stuff that increases human capacity to act in the world. These assemblages are open systems with numerous variables, and one group of entanglements is often linked to another. A very basic example is the creation of fire. Humans, wood, oxygen, and flint form an entanglement necessary to start a fire. But variables such as wood saturation, wind, weather, and humidity constantly change and rearrange this entanglement. As more variables are added into an entanglement, it grows increasingly complex, such as the massive infrastructure and global supply chains behind a match used to light the fire rather than a stone. Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 45, 67, 159–163; I use Bruno Latour’s definition of agentic things or actants. Latour states that an actant “implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action.” Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47 (1996): 373.

6. Thomas C. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company: The History of an American Business (New York: New York University Press, 1944); Stanley Baron, Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962); Roland J. Plavchan, A History of Anheuser-Busch, 1852–1933 (New York: Arno Press, 1976); A.M. McGahan, “The Emergence of the National Brewing Oligopoly: Competition in the American Market, 1933–1958,” The Business History Review 65, no. 2 (1991): 229–284; Martin Stack, “Local and Regional Breweries in America’s Brewing Industry, 1865 to 1920,” The Business History Review 74 no. 3 (2000): 435–463; Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006); Martin Stack, “Was Big Beautiful? The Rise of National Breweries in America’s Pre-Prohibition Brewing Industry,” Journal of Macromarketing 3, no. 1 (2010): 50–60; Ranjit S. Dighe, “A Taste for Temperance: How American Beer Got to Be So Bland,” Business History 58 (2016): 752–784.

7. Mikael Hård, Machines Are Frozen Spirit: The Scientification of Refrigeration and Brewing in the 19th Century—A Weberian Interpretation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 19.

8. Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. J. Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 196–223; Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory,” Soziale Welt 47 (1996): 373; Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House Publishers, 2001); Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Hodder, Entangled; Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the Word: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

9. LeCain, The Matter of History, 8.

10. The work of Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers provided some of the earliest calls for the collaboration between business and environmental historians, who, until the 2000s, frequently talked past each other instead of with each other. Christine Meisner Rosen and Christopher Sellers, “The Nature of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of Business,” Business History Review 73 (Winter, 1999): 577–600; Christine Meisner Rosen, “The Business-Environment Connection,” Environmental History 10, no. 1 (2005): 77–79.

11. Important works showing the connections between production and consumption include Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Press, 1985); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Bartow Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015); Green Capitalism?: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century, eds. Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Anna Zeide, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

12. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977). For an excellent survey of Chandler’s work, see The Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business, ed. Thomas McCraw (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988).

13. LeCain, The Matter of History, 245–301; Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 104. When writing about slave labor camps in the American South, Fiege noted, “For various biological and environmental reasons, cotton resisted complete systematization and thus weakened the farmers’ and planters’ power over their kingdom.” Fiege suggested the term “King Cotton” means that cotton mastered Southern slavers just as much as they had mastered it.

14. Foundational works in the field of environmental history that utilize the declension narrative include Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 25th-anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

15. For an important work encouraging environmental historians to move beyond the declension narrative associated with the field, see Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 171–185. White encouraged rejecting the binary that all work must equal environmental destruction and argued that scholars can uncover more nuanced relationships between humans and the natural world through the study of human work with and on nature. Ted Steinberg, “Down, Down, Down, No More: Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 260–266. Steinberg furthered the critique of the declension narrative and asked environmental historians, “How do we say goodbye to the declension narrative without losing the moral force associated with it?” Nearly two decades later, this question remains largely unanswered as environmental historians continue to debate the use of this narrative structure.

16. Worster, Dust Bowl; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Kate Brown, “Chernobyl Is on Your Breakfast Table,” in Feral Atlas, eds. Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, accessed February 23, 2023, https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/chernobyl-is-going-global.

17. Many scholars have written on this topic. For excellent examples of how capitalist systems seek to simplify, rationalize, and control the environment, see Worster, Dust Bowl; Cronon, Changes in the Land; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 8, 11–51, 21.

18. John E. Siebel, “Yeast and Fermentation,” Western Brewer: Journal of the Barley, Malt, and Hop Trades 1, no. 2 (September 1876): 37; Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Chicago and Manchester (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14.

19. This theoretical approach draws heavily from the works of environmental historians, historians of medicine, and food studies scholars. Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006); Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Carolyn De La Peña, Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Ellen Griffith Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Zeide, Canned, 163–185.

20. The brewing industry was the nation’s sixth most capital-intensive on the eve of Prohibition. K. Austin Kerr, “The American Brewing Industry, 1865–1920,” in The Dynamics of the Modern Brewing Industry, eds. Terry Gourvish and Richard Wilson (Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 1998), 156.

21. Jacob Ruppert, “Ruppert Urges Five-Cent Beer,” American Brewer 67, no. 10 (October 1934): 13; F.H. Elwell, “Beer Costs, Prices and Profits,” American Brewer 68, no. 11 (November 1935): 51; John C. Weaver, “Barley in the United States: A Historical Sketch,” Geographic Review 33, no. 1 (1943): 63; Catherine N. Jacott and Scott A. Boden, “Feeling the Heat: Developmental and Molecular Responses of Wheat and Barley to High Ambient Temperatures,” Journal of Experimental Botany 71, no. 19 (October 2020): 5740–5751.

22. Elmore, Citizen Coke, 227–228.

23. For more on the centrality of the “home beverage” campaign to brewers post repeal recovery, see Nathan Corzine, “Right at Home: Freedom and Domesticity in the Language and Imagery of Beer Advertising, 1933–1960,” Journal of Social History 43 no. 4 (2010): 843–866.

24. Jeff Rice, “Professional Purity: Revolutionary Writing in the Craft Beer Industry,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 30, no. 2 (2016): 236–261.

25. Douglas B. Walsh, Sally D. O’Neal, Ann E. George, Daniel P. Groenendale, Ruth E. Henderson, Geoffrey M. Groenendale, and Matt J. Hengel, “Evaluation of Pesticide Residues From Conventional, Organic, and Nontreated Hops Conventionally Hopped, Late Hopped, and Wet-Hopped Beers,” Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists 74, no. 1 (2016): 53–56; Martin Dušek, Vladimira Jandovská, and Jana Olšovská, “Tracking, Behavior and Fate of 58 Pesticides Originated From Hops During Beer Brewing,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 66, no. 38 (2018): 10113–10121.