Beer and Business

Beer has been a cultural, artistic and economic backbone for all of recorded history. One can argue that beer has provided an employment structure for many communities over millennia. From Egypt and elsewhere in Africa and throughout Europe, beer has united the people with commerce and the land.

Breweries support those who: brew, keg and bottle the beer; keep the brew house clean; mine and smelt ore and recycle metals to make barrels; wash barrels, bottles, kettles and glassware; refill bottles and barrels; ship the beer; and manufacture and install the tuns, coolers, fermenters, wort chillers, bottling equipment, tap lines and other hardware. Back in the day, ice cutters and cold storage warehouses were vital to proper lagering while neighboring farmers grew grain and hops for the local brew house. Water utilities purify the most voluminous ingredient - H2O -- in beer manufacture.

And of course we cannot forget our friends across the rail, our faithful bartenders, servers and brewpub owners.

Beer is an enterprise that has provided good jobs for generations and has kept local economies fluid.

In 1885, 3,000 people in Milwaukee alone could attribute their livelihoods to beer brewing. Note that Milwaukee's peak population was 741,324 in 1960. Thus, even at peak population, at least 1 out of every 250 people in Milwaukee worked in the brewing business, and most truly, it's a much greater percentage.

Beer brewing supports commercial and employment bases as well as industrial and farming concerns. If one wants a quality world that includes beer, I think, one must be open to supporting sustainable communities and urban densities, creating places where people can gather, and farmland preservation, where people can grow crops such as barley and hops.

Beer brewing can responsibly buoy sinking commercial and industrial tax bases, and steadily fill public coffers with income, sales and use, and liquor taxes. Some studies show that the brewing industry contributed to more than 40% of national tax revenues in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Despite the globalization of seemingly everything, some folks still support local sustainability. Capital Brewery (Middleton, WI) has made it a point to buy wheat in-state from farmers on Washington Island, disparate to their policy of exclusively importing the rest of their barley from Europe.

Historically, malted barley has come from England, Belgium and elsewhere across the Atlantic, but more farmers and maltiers are making a go of it in the US of A.

However, if you are going to buy American barley, you are not easily going to buy from Mom and Pop.

Look to our northern tier for the right conditions to grow barley: Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. Cargill is a crop giant with acres and acres of barley in production, mostly contracted by macrobrewers like Busch and Miller. Washington and parts of Oregon currently support hops, although Wisconsin was once our nation's lupulin leader.

Climate change will have an effect on beer production as it will with all crop-based industries. It is possible America will need to import all of our nation's barley from Canada and Russia in the coming days. Some popular American hop strains have suffered from disease and blight, with brewers scrambling for supplies.

Eep! Possibly worse than our dependence on foreign oil, our national beer production may be based on international relations.

Beer is good for American business. Let's keep making beer in America to support Americans.