One of the most popular ways to consume beer in Mexico is out of a bottle containing 940 milliliters called a caguama. The name actually comes from a term for a loggerhead turtle. The bottles received their name in the 1960s thanks to a brewery’s marketing campaign, but there may be deeper seated cultural reasons that it stuck.
Monterrey is Mexico’s industrial city. While traditional beverages might be hard to come by here, the city’s history has long been influenced by beer. That is Cervecería Cuauhtémoc was one of the city’s original factories and helped to develop much of Monterrey’s early heavy industry.
Blue corn is native to the agriculture of New Mexico. Indigenous people in the region developed the crop. While it has been used in food and drink for thousands of years, New Mexico’s craft breweries are just taking notice. Now, breweries across the state are experimenting with the corn’s color, flavor, and texture in pilsners, ales, and lagers.
Jackson, Mississippi, has experienced years of difficulties with their municipal water supply. Sedimentation, pipe collapse, and bacterial invasion have made residents turn to bottled water. But businesses are also affected by the city’s struggles. The water crisis and the decaying infrastructure make doing business in Jackson more expensive, less predictable, and occasionally impossible.
Craft beer has now cycled through two or three generations, but the first generation is still around to guide us. In Philadelphia, local homebrew gurus have been involved in the craft beer movement for decades. Their stance on the current craft beer business reflects their concern for beer’s future.
Many of the earliest settlers of colonial Philadelphia drank a lot of beer. When you walk around the historic part of the city, it seems that a tavern or brewery was on every corner. These drinking establishments were a continuation of British culture in the New World, but also facilitated the American Revolution.
In New York’s state capital, beer historians are rewriting history. At one point, Albany sat at the pinnacle of American brewing. This forgotten history informs the heritage of beer in Albany, and it may also provide a foundation upon which local craft brewers can develop into the future.
In Central Maine, craft brewing really only took off in the mid 2010s. Before this, many in the greater Bangor area relied on homebrewing to satisfy their taste for interesting beer. Central Street Farmhouse stood at the center of this community which would go on to found several breweries in the area.
Albany, New York was once the brewing capital of America. In the early 1800s, a libel law suit brought this brewing industry into the public eye. The threads of brewing, temperance, and food sanitation collided, but the brewers got the short end of the stick. Nevertheless, the case was an early example of public advocacy for food safety.
Germans developed lager style beer by fermenting in cellars for long periods of time. When immigrants arrived to America in the 1800s from Germany, they found brew-worthy caves in St. Louis. Thanks to its geography, Missouri became home to America’s lager industry, eventually producing beer giant Anheuser-Busch, which was founded out of a cave. St. Louis owes its early development to lager beer.
