Author: Tom Acitelli
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Acitelli on History - Web Only -
Acitelli on HistoryBallast Point Turns 20: A Backroom Brewery’s Billion-Dollar Arc
August 8, 2016 - Tom Acitelli The Ballast Point brewery launched in 1996 out of the back of a then-four-year-old homebrew supply shop in the Morena neighborhood of San Diego, near the University of San Diego. The first beer the brewery released was Ballast Point Copper Ale (which Ballast Point renamed Calico Amber and then California Amber). Jack White was the... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryWhen a Struggling Yuengling Rushed Toward the Light
July 19, 2016 - Tom Acitelli On June 25, 1986, a Wednesday, D.G. Yuengling & Son started production on its first-ever light beer. It called it, simply, Yuengling Premium Light, a lower-calorie variation on what was one of its most popular offerings, Yuengling Premium. It was an auspicious event for what by then was the oldest brewery in the United States. The... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryThree Beer Experts Walk Into a Bar: The Origins of the Cicerone Certification Program
June 23, 2016 - Tom Acitelli On a July evening in 2006, Ray Daniels, Lyn Kruger and Randy Mosher stopped in at a basement bar in Durango, Colorado, well-known for its beer selection. The trio were in town to teach an advanced homebrewing course through Durango’s Fort Lewis College and the Siebel Institute, the esteemed Chicago-based brewing school where Kruger was... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryCan You Believe It? It’s Been a Quarter-Century Since the First Micro-Brew Cans
June 8, 2016 - Tom Acitelli On Monday, June 17, 1991, new Mid-Coast Brewing Co. formally unveiled its Chief Oshkosh Red Lager at a Hilton hotel in downtown Oshkosh, Wis. The event would now otherwise be unremembered 25 years later were it not for one thing: Chief Oshkosh Red Lager came in cans. Mid-Coast Brewing was the brainchild of Jeff Fulbright.... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryDelivering Beer in a Box
May 23, 2016 - Tom Acitelli On page 154 of the second edition of the Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Beer, published in 1988, author Michael Jackson described a brewery called Golden Pacific: “Beer-in-a-box was an early innovation from this micro-brewery in Emeryville, a borough in the urban agglomeration between San Francisco and Oakland. The initial product, Golden Pacific Bittersweet... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryNew Belgium Brewing: From the Basement to Nationwide in 25 Years
May 3, 2016 - Tom Acitelli By June 1991, Kim Jordan’s days off as a social worker began with calls to customers to see which beers they needed. She would then spend the afternoons delivering them around the greater Fort Collins, Colorado, area in her Toyota Tercel station wagon, picking up her son from first grade along the way (he... View Article -
Acitelli on HistoryBoos and Beer: That Time 20 Years Ago David Geary Defended Bud, Jim Koch
April 12, 2016 - Tom Acitelli There were three keynote addresses scheduled for the National Craft-Brewers Conference and Trade Show in Boston in May 1996, one for each day of the annual conclave for smaller brewers now known best as the Craft Brewers Conference. Charlie Papazian, long-time head of the Association of Brewers behind the conference, would give one of the... View Article -
Acitelli on History - Web Only#beer: When Breweries First Started Tweeting
March 23, 2016 - Tom Acitelli On Tuesday, March 21, 2006, at 9:50 p.m. Pacific time, Jack Dorsey, a New York University dropout-turned-tech-entrepreneur, sent this message via a new social media app he helped develop: “just setting up my twttr.” It was the earliest message of what became Twitter. (Dorsey’s firm did not acquire the now-famous domain name for several months,... View Article