Food historian Jeffrey Pilcher opens Hopped Up by reflecting on how America’s beer market has changed across his lifetime: Drinkers rediscovered traditional European beer styles at a time when Molson’s mass-produced Canadian lager appeared exotic, craft brewers revived and reinvented these more flavorful styles, and international capital executed a hostile takeover of Anheuser-Busch. Though familiar, this litany highlights the key themes of Pilcher’s ambitious global history. Tracing pale lager’s rise to worldwide ubiquity alongside capitalist markets, industrial production, and globalization, Hopped Up foregrounds questions of taste and the social construction of beer styles like pilsner, porter, or IPA. The introduction of hops allowed brewers to participate in the commercial revolution; the industrial revolution expanded and standardized production; and twentieth-century efficiency improvements prompted brewers to seek global markets. Yet Hopped Up complicates narratives of industrial capitalism destroying local brewing traditions. Such “beer styles were not simply the pre-modern legacy of regional differences” but, Pilcher compellingly argues, were themselves the result of technological and socioeconomic changes (p. 43).

Pilcher develops this narrative across seven chapters. The first sets the stage with a wide-ranging outline of the chemical processes involved in brewing, how they shape beer’s taste, and the social meanings of this ubiquitous product across the rise of civilization. The action, however, begins in earnest in Chapter 2 with the high-medieval addition of hops to beer. With their preservative powers making long-distance trade in beer possible, he argues, this prompted not only the birth of large-scale commercial brewing in Hanseatic trade centers but also the emergence of distinct names to help consumers—and tax authorities—distinguish between their products. As these techniques spread across Europe, new brewing centers like Munich and London perfected methods for controlling fermentation and heating malt. Chapter 3 begins with the invention of pilsner in 1842, when brewers adapted these techniques to imitate Bavarian beer with local ingredients. Its rise over the ensuing decades would coincide with the application of science and industrial processes to brewing on both sides of the Atlantic. This allowed brewers to standardize distinctive styles like pilsner, Munich and Vienna lagers, and Kölsch, while differentiating their products on an emerging international market. In Chapter 4, Pilcher shows these styles being marketed across empires and postcolonial nations where their “taste associations gave viscerally sensory expression to social signifiers of modernity and exclusivity” (p. 110). Chapter 5 argues that growing economies of scale combined with beer’s status as a showpiece in twentieth-century nationalist struggles to help brewers capture nationwide markets from Belgium to Maoist China. This laid foundations for further concentration after the liberalization of international trade and capital markets covered in Chapter 6. Increasing consumption of imported beer, Pilcher argues, fed “a glamorization of consumerism that facilitated and justified growing corporate power” even as brewers worldwide sold an increasingly homogenized product (pp. 173–174). Meanwhile, leveraged buyouts disciplined corporate behavior by saddling companies with increased debt. Finally, Chapter 7 offers a history of the craft beer movement, stressing its international reach and “the language of taste” it cultivated (p. 214).

For business historians, a revealing point of comparison is Thomas Cochran’s seminal entrepreneurial history of The Pabst Brewing Company, which for decades stood as the notable work on the subject. Hopped Up reflects a broader ferment in beer history that makes a work of global scope possible. This perspective is illuminating. Where previous work like Cochran’s treated America’s brewing industry solely as the beneficiary of European technological advances, brewers, and traditional beer styles, Pilcher uncovers the bidirectional flow of brewers and knowledge across the Atlantic. With the “industrialization of brewing t[aking] off in American societies almost simultaneously with the growth of lager beer in Central Europe,” the application of science to brewing depended on “knowledge networks that spanned the globe” (p. 85). For example, Pilcher shows Heinrich Beck working in an Indiana brewery before “he introduced North American industrial methods to the St. Pauli Brewery of Hamburg” and started his eponymous Bremen concern (p. 112). Pilcher also extends Martin Stack’s critique of Cochran’s uncritical acceptance of industry narratives about quality while contributing to the broader history of consumption. Examining “taste as an agent in shaping the commodification of beer, both as an independent sensory experience and as an instrument of social distinction,” Pilcher offers an invaluable analysis of beer styles’ construction (p. 14). In this, his analysis of the lifestyle journalist Michael Jackson’s work helping construct craft beer’s “community of taste” represents a particularly important contribution (p. 227).

Still, a work of such chronological and geographical ambition necessarily faces limits, which make questions of scope and analytical emphasis especially important. On one hand, Pilcher includes extended analyses of the commodification of pulque in New Spain and sake in Tokugawa Japan. These reveal striking parallels with the rise of commercial beer production in early modern Europe, but neither fermented agave nor rice wine fit more clearly into the global history of beer than the omitted mead or grape wine. On the other hand, Hopped Up only tangentially treats brewers’ shift from marketing their products exclusively on draught at watering holes of various sorts to selling single-use packages primarily for home consumption—a significant shift not only for their marketing strategies but also sociologically. It likewise joins Cochran in treating the nineteenth-century industry as one dominated by corporate giants—despite joining Stack and Anita McGahan in acknowledging that the rise of truly national brands awaited the twentieth century. Finally—despite stressing beer’s changing interaction with sexual, racial, and class hierarchies and the “corporate authoritarianism” that came with financial “raiders priz[ing] firms with unionized workforces, whose salaries could be cut to pay off the debts that financed buyouts”—Hopped Up largely neglects beer’s labor history (pp. 173–174). Pilcher’s limited treatment of labor thus underscores the importance of Stephen Mihm’s recent call for “serious sustained engagement by business history with the labor question” (Stephen Mihm, “Presidential Address,” Business History Conference, Atlanta, March 15, 2025).