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Interview with Maureen Ogle

Author of :

Ambitious Brew

The Story of American Beer.

What has surprised you most about the reaction to Ambitious Brew?

Two things… First I have been astounded by how positive the reviews have been. I really didn’t quite expect that. But, I can’t say that I was surprised by the animosity that has come my way. So it’s been a mixed bag.

I am delighted by the great reviews… On the other hand, within the beer community there is a small group of people who are not at all happy about the book. They have not hesitated to let me know. And that’s fine. As a writer you know that is part of the deal.

Which group are we talking about?

Beer fans, people who support craft-beer, as you know, can be very fanatical about their support of craft-beer. One thing I didn’t realize is a lot of them have a skewed perception about the reality of brewing. I can’t tell you the number of people who came up to me and told me that “Everybody drinks craft-beer these days. No one drinks Budweiser.” This of course, statistically, is complete nonsense. I didn’t say that to those people but their fanaticism has blinded them to the reality. It’s those people who really are unhappy with the book and how the book challenges their perception of beer in America and the myth that the big brewers added corn and rice to their beer after World War Two. They don’t want to hear this they don’t want to know it, they think I’m an idiot; I have been called an idiot… It doesn’t bother me but I didn’t realize how fanatical these people could actually be.

You mentioned the word myth and I saw it a number of times in the book. Being an historian would you speak to the point that myths are important to people, and civilization.

They are immensely important… I think that in a society like the United States, that in a very fragmented society. There is a lot of social isolation and that is why people naturally glom onto something whether it is right wing politics, or moveon.org or craft beer. What holds people to craft brewing is that they have to believe that there is a bad guy out there and that craft-beer is going to save us and triumph over the “David” that is going to slay the “Goliath.” I think it is a way that they can anchor themselves in a world that doesn’t often make a lot of sense. And I’m … I have my own set of myths that I believe in and I think that became obvious in the book and I wasn’t really aware of it until I finished the book. Clearly, part of my mythology is that I truly believe in the optimism of America. I believe in the American Dream. I don’t think I thought that way a year ago because I was not as aware of it as I am now… I think myth is something that everybody needs and it just so happens that I completely inadvertently challenged a foundational myth for a group of people who are really into beer.

You did write a history book and history is your forte. Perhaps there is a comment on how the need to hold onto a myth when the real history is not understood?

I think that is true. But the bigger issue is, and this is something I have been confronting professionally, is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what history is, how people do it, what it can mean to us. And I blame people like myself and others in the academic historians. I no longer have a university position. I left academia in 1999 and the reason I did was because I was so frustrated by the snobbery. Academic historians are their own breed of snobs. They don’t want to deal with the public; they don’t want to write for the general public. So my covert goal, which I rarely mention is that I want to bring good solid history to a general public that never, gets exposed to it. Most people go to school and memorize a set of dates and think that is what history is. They think it is boring and they don’t want to know any more about it. For example, there was a guy on a (on line) forum that said “She doesn’t know anything about history. In her book she admits that she doesn’t know anything about beer so how can she know anything about the history of beer.” I can’t criticize him saying that. He doesn’t understand the study of history. He doesn’t understand that someone might want to write a book on the history of something to learn about that history. It took me five years to write this book. But in his mind there is “The” history of beer and he knows exactly what it is and if something doesn’t conform to that myth he just doesn’t want to hear it.

Here is another example. The other great deal of criticism I have been getting is that the book begins with the German immigration in the 1840’s. I had a very good reason for doing that, which I explain in the book, but I guess I didn’t do a good job of explaining it. That is because before that, what happened didn’t have that much historical significance.

If you want to write about beverage alcohol in colonial America it isn’t beer that is important. It is rum. But Don Russell at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who writes under the name of Joe Six-pack, is a very nice guy, a good journalist, I am quite fond of him… he tore me to pieces in print because I didn’t write a book about beer in colonial Philadelphia because he thinks that’s where everything happened. I got news for him … there isn’t much to say about it. People don’t understand how historians do history because historians don’t communicate with the general public. They can’t be expected to understand why I started when I started. I started with what was historically significant and ignored anything that wasn’t historically significant. That is not what a lot of people want to hear.

In writing history for “the masses” what is the most difficult aspect of writing history?

The first thing you have to do is tell a story. I have been asked why I didn’t include “X” brewery that was open for five years in the 1850’s? Well if I did that I would have a 2,000 page book that no one would want to read. What you want to do is writ a story that people want to read. And history is after all a story. So that is what you are doing is writing a story. The other issue is doing good history. I don’t know how many other books on the history of beer that you have read but most of them are based on other works that were not written by historians and do not contain a lot of actual facts and they don’t have any research in them. I am not criticizing these people. I just tried to do something different. I wanted to do an actual history where I sat in libraries for five years and researched and on the other hand I needed to take what I had learned and sort through all of that, I left out more than I put in, and create this compelling narrative. Of course when you are done I hear she doesn’t know anything about history. Well, behind every sentence there is at least three weeks of research.

What aspect of the book pleases you the most?

What pleases me the most is that I actually found a compelling story, one that nobody had found before. I ‘m really proud that I brought to Americans a part of themselves that, let’s face it, for the most part they didn’t know anything about. Nobody treats alcohol with respect in this country. I took an almost taboo subject about which Americans have almost schizophrenic feelings about and I treated it with dignity and I told a story about what it means to live out the “American Dream.” I am very proud of that.

The flip side of that question is what part of the book are you most disappointed in?

If I could do one thing over again I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I just wasn’t thinking. And this is kind of a small thing. I don’t know why I didn’t interview Paul Camusi who was Ken Grossman’s partner. I don’t know how that got by me. I feel really bad about that in retrospect. I also wish I had re-interviewed Jack McAuliffe I found Jack quite by accident, nobody had heard form him in years and I was so afraid that he would get away from me that I interviewed him long before I even got to that part of the book and if I had it to do all over again I would have re-interviewed him because by the time I had done a few interviews I had more of an Idea of what I was doing. Generally I deal with dead people not living people. So those are two things that I regret. And in retrospect I whish I had done a better job of explaining why I began in the 1840’s instead of 1644. I clearly make the importance of that position clear to people. And that is really fundamental to why the book is structured the way it is.

What’s next?

You are writing a book on “meat” next? How did you decide on that as the subject of a book?

Well, I came up with the idea for the book on beer when I saw the Budweiser truck and in July, actually this book went to the printer on July 10^th and I thought I could take off for a few days but I realized I needed to come up with a new book idea and that is so hard to do. As you well know… It has to be an idea that can sustain a book and hasn’t been done to death so I was kind of “not thinking.” I have discovered that the best way to come up with a book idea is not to think. After a few days I realized I had this image of the logo of the King Ranch. I didn’t even know where it was, except that it is in Texas some where. But I ignored this image for several days until I realized that my brain was trying to tell me something. So I did a little preliminary research and discovered that meat, until the 1930’s, meat production was the largest industry in the United States. And that knocked me out of my chair. I had no idea… and I also, I think this is what galvanized my decision to do it… At that point I had finally figured out that Ambitious Brew was actually about American optimism.

I was going to note that it seems to fall in the same time frame, in the same area of the country, with your fascination with business and how you don’t think of brewing as a mega-business and yet it is and was then and how …

And in the case of meat it is … with beer there is a lot of cultural opposition and animosity … for example “Prohibition”… But nobody, despite all the talk about the people of PETA and vegetarians, Americans consume an extraordinary amount of meat. It is one of those things we take way more for granted than … I am becoming aware as I am doing my research that there was plenty of rather interesting stuff around the time of the American Revolution so I might go back… I don’t want to write a duplicate of Ambitious Brew. It has already been sold so I am committed to this project.

When I start writing a book, the first few months, every morning is like walking through a door marked “Chaos” and I don’t really know what I am doing but I will figure it out.

I think I gravitate toward food and drink because I think they are the most culturally “laden” activities that human beings engage in. (23:15)

You can really learn about a people's values when you look at what they eat and how they make their food. So I think that without really trying, I have gravitated toward another ingestible.

I think that it is a nurturing thing and as writers we tend to feel that our writing is nurturing people… it is an undercurrent of hoping that the information in our writing will enrich people’s lives.

That is true… I feel that I was put on earth to bring solid history to Americans that will make them care but that is a better way of saying it. It certainly nurtures me as well.

That might explain why I find brewing people to be fascinating. They are incredible smart, talented and creative people. I didn’t expect that. And they are also loving, in a way that kind of bowled me over.

That brings us back to myths which are a comfort to all of us. But when you encroach on someone’s myth you had better duck. I discovered that in a very visceral way. This has been a great experience for me. I learned a lot of things I didn’t expect to learn. I must say that when I got a chance to interview these people who are actually alive, I usually “interview” dead people; I was so inspired by these people. They really challenged me, they didn’t mean to, but they did to re-tire in my own life. It has been a life altering experience because food and drink are so visceral that so you are right. I hadn’t put it that way.

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© Peter LaFrance 2006

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