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| Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer | 
 enlarge | Author: Maureen Ogle
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $1.97
You Save: $13.03 (87%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 17623
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0156033593
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780156033596
ASIN: 0156033593
Publication Date: October 8, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 14 | | NEXT » |
 How the beer industry became industrial. . . . November 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a business history of brewing in America. What is especially fascinating is the story of the rise of the great brewing families and the impact of Prohibition. Ogle is willing to tackle the difficult business of the rise of microbreweries and the gradual absorption of the industrial giants by multi-national corporations.
In a day when the largest American-owned brewery is the former micro, Sam Adams, Ambitious Brew is the perfect book to see how it happened.
Lynn Hoffman, author of Bang Bang
Great Book May 2, 2008
My wife bought this for my birthday, and I completely enjoyed it. Shortly after finishing it, I was in St. Louis and toured the Budweiser brewery. This book made it much more enjoyable of a tour.
 Interesting survey of American lager-brewing history March 9, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a great book if you're looking to learn something about the history of American lager brewing, and in particular about the giants (and now-deceased giants) of the industry. It covers quite a bit of ground I have never seen covered in any other book on the subject.
The author does have some biases which I think do color the book a bit. She has a contrarian tilt which seems to lead her to the view that big "industrial beer" from the giant lager-brewers is a better product than it really is. She does not seem to be as familiar as might be hoped with brewing itself, and consequently does not appreciate the extent to which the American brewing industry compromised product quality by relying on highly tannic, six-row malts and the notoriously bad-smelling Cluster hop, for example. And her interest in American brewing does not extend to ale (apart from the ales of the microbrew era); she seems to accept all too readily the notion that American ale-brewing in the pre-lager era was a cesspool of bad beer.
The upshot is that the book is perhaps a bit too favorable to the point of view of the great national brewers, and to their insipid style of high-adjunct, low-hop lager. But the early history of the large brewers is fascinating, and she shows genuine interest in the microbrew movement and its impact upon American tastes. A very, very enjoyable book.
Amazing history of American Brewing February 29, 2008
This book is a must have for a homebrewer or anyone interested in the history of American entrepreneurs. The history of American beer is really the story of the American dream. German imigrants came to this country with almost nothing. Some of them went on to build the biggest breweries in the world. The story is counter to much of what I had thought. Apparently there was a time when Budweiser was one of the best beers in the world - who knew? This book also is a fascinating look at Americans' conflicting views of alchohol.
A stimulating epic of fascination, competition and passion for beer January 20, 2008
Ambitious Brew takes you on a journey through America, often peering with a European's eye at the wealth of opportunity in an unfolding land. Maureen Ogle's tale gives little attention to the colonists, but begins with German immigrant Phillip Best in the mid-1840's. Throughout this complex story, she is like Cezanne, creating the picture with pieces of paint until the canvas takes form and presents the picture as a whole.
Ogle not only tells of the development of beer, but also connects this development with key pivotal points in history - points that had served to initiate new patterns within American society. The story swings back to the seventeenth century, when rum from the West Indian and Caribbean plantations seized the market; then surges forward again, to the early nineteenth century, when "...fourteen thousand distillers were producing some twenty-five million gallons [of whiskey] each year..."
Her findings portray such giants as Adolphus Busch, August Uihlein, and Frederick Pabst as men who fell into brewing by accident, and not by design. Rivalries for market share between the largest brewers were a constant, dampened only by occasional waves of temperance talk...indirect prejudices aimed at specific groups - saloon owners, corporate magnates (seen as sleazy crooks by the general public), German immigrants (targeted as a result of anti-German sentiment following WWI), liberated, loose women, and those who professed atheistic beliefs.
Ogle closely analyzes the events that lead up to Prohibition, but passes quickly through the dark days like Alice through the Looking Glass. She compresses the years following WWII, portraying the post-war beer world as a conglomerate of marketers and accountants, vying for the bottom line.
The tale regains its initial drama at the launch of the microbrew movement, ignited by a preference for pure, locally-produced products, championed by people such as Mike Royko, Gordon Bowker, and E. F. Schumacher. Stories of guts and ambition come alive - tales of Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, Ken Grossman, Charlie Papazian, John Siebel, Jim Koch, and the debut of light beer. She applauds Michael Jackson for his book The World Guide to Beer, a work that empowered a generation of brewers to see themselves as the large, complex community that they had become.
AMBITIOUS BREW is a stimulating epic, filled with stories of fascination, competition for market share, and steady, unflinching focus by people who never saw themselves as particularly special.
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