Taplines: Craft Beer’s Oval Office Origin Story

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On this episode of “Taplines” host Dave Infante is joined by author and founder of the Brewers Association and the American Homebrewers Association, Charlie Papazian. The two discuss the Carter administration’s loosening of federal laws on homebrewing. Tune in for more.

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Dave Infante: Thank you so much for joining us here on “Taplines,” Charlie.

Charlie Papazian: Oh, thanks for having me.

D: Charlie, where are you joining us from today?

C: I’m in Boulder County, Colo.

D: You have a long history in Boulder. You are not a newcomer to Boulder like so many people have been over the course of the past couple of years. How long have you lived in Boulder?

C: Yes, I’ve been here 50 years.

D: Wow. 50 years, man.

C: I’ve seen a lot of changes.

D: Yes, I bet. We have you here on “Taplines” today to talk about a significant change, speaking of which as we do here at “Taplines,” we’re looking to tell the story of the modern history of beer in America. When we think about major milestones that unleashed the craft brewing movement in this country and changed the face of American beer, one that sticks out is a pivotal moment that you not only lived through, but played a part in ushering into being. I’m talking of course about Jimmy Carter’s decision to sign HR1337, which removed a lot of the federal-level restrictions on homebrewing in America. Charlie, let’s start with where you were when you heard the news, maybe. Why don’t we start at the beginning or maybe even before the beginning. You had a career in homebrewing prior to Jimmy Carter’s decision to change the federal government’s posture towards homebrewing. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were doing and your homebrewing career thus far at that stage?

C: Yes. I moved to Boulder in the early seventies and ended up getting a teacher’s job, a job teaching kids. At the same time, I was talked into by an organization called the Community Free School here in Boulder, Colo., at the time to teach a course in beer-making, called Log Boom Brewing. It was a homebrewing class. I did that for ten years. Over that period of time, there were about a thousand people that took my class, which I gave out of the house that I was renting at the time. All kinds of people would come through and that’s where I really learned how to make beer. I actually started making beer when I was a college student at the University of Virginia. We can talk a little bit about that a little later in the program perhaps about what kind of beer that was, but that’s what I carried over to my move to Colorado and that’s what I started with and having a class, small classes in the beginning., I began experimenting in the class. So it was a learning experience not only for the people that were taking the class, it was a learning experience for all of us. We started experimenting with different kinds of malt extracts and specialty grains. We didn’t have much choice in yeast, but the fun part was that we were experimenting with how to enjoy it. That was what kept us going. In the late seventies, I had decided with a friend of mine called Charlie Matson, who is one of the people that took my class, we decided to start an organization that we called American Homebrewers Association. We came out with our first issue of Zymurgy Magazine in December of 1978, but unbeknownst to us when we had this idea to start the publication, we didn’t have any idea that legalizing homebrewing was in the works. We were starting this organization and I had been teaching beer-making classes when homebrew was not legal, but that didn’t stop us. We just did what we did and we figured the ATF at the time, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had better things to do than bust homebrewers, which was the case.

D: They more or less said as much. I was reading up on Tom Acitelli’s excellent history of craft brewing in this country, “The Audacity of Hops” and he had quoted an ATF agent at the time. He was obviously referring to a secondary source in the newspaper somewhere but the ATF had said that, “It was a low-priority item for us.” That was the quote that they gave. I know that that was not, of course, something that they were interested in doing — coming in, busting down your door, but I imagine that it being illegal was maybe still on your mind to some extent. Or did that not really factor into your decision to get further into the homebrewing practice?

C: This was in a time, the mid-seventies, everybody that was taking the class was really interested in doing something new, something revolutionary, something themselves, and improving the status of beer, and making better beer. The fact that it was illegal was kind of a plus. You referred to legislation that was signed into law — it was a transportation bill, actually, and there was an amendment in this transportation bill that legalized homebrewing on the federal level. I remember after we discovered that this was going to happen, and it did happen, there were comments by some of the people that were taking my class. They basically said, “I hope it’s just as much fun as when it was illegal as it’s going to be when it’s legal.”

D: Right. There was a counterculture appeal to this practice before-

C: There was, and I had been featured in many newspaper articles and feature stories in the Colorado area. I’d been on the nightly newscast about this guy in Boulder, Colo., that was teaching people how to make beer and that it was illegal, but we were doing it anyway. It really didn’t bother me that much. It wasn’t something that was hanging over us, but one of the things that did happen with the legalization of homebrewing is that it provided a safe harbor for homebrew shops, which they didn’t promote themselves as homebrew shops in those days. There were no homebrew supply stores.

D: Sure.

C: There were home winemaking supply stores, and they sold to us, but if they were going to promote homebrewing, which was illegal, they were anxious about losing their business.

D: Sure. That was like at the head shops before marijuana legalization became more widespread, they would have tobacco pipes. Those pipes are only for tobacco — not for anything else. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The fact that there were home wine-fermenting shops, home wine-making shops, speaks to a holdover from Prohibition if I’m not mistaken. Home wine production was not restricted in the same way as spirits and beer production. If my history is right, I’m relying on Dan Okrent’s “Last Call” is the history that I go with for most of my Prohibition knowledge. There were winemaking packets that people were getting from California and yeast packets and grape concentrate packets, so they were produced even during Prohibition and then after Prohibition. The law carved out that practice for home winemaking, but not for homebrewing. So we find you, a younger Charlie Papazian, in the mid-seventies, and you’re homebrewing, you’re not too worried about the fact that it exists in this gray area. When you started Zymurgy Magazine, you didn’t know that there was a legislative effort to reform the laws around homebrewing? This was just a serendipitous coincidence that the AHA came to be and the magazine came to be right around the same time that the federal government was making that revision?

C: Well, the decision to go forward with this whole project was before we knew about the legislation that was going to change things. We did feature — we found space in the magazine, the very volume one, number one, to put an — there’s a pretty detailed story about the legalization of homebrewing and who was responsible for it, the senators in California and elsewhere that sponsored the amendment. We did find out about it at the last minute, and we included the story in the first issue of the magazine.

D: To your memory, who was the major, or who were the major political allies of this car — or this little tuck-in, in the transportation bill that got passed? I think Alan Cranston, a senator out of California, was pretty instrumental. Does that name ring a bell?

C: Yes.

D: Were there others?

C: Yes, there were others. The magazine is about four feet from me. I could look it up for you if you wanted. There was another senator from the Midwest that was involved. It was politics as usual.

D: Sure.

C: There were some East Coast and West Coast negotiations and discussions and it got through. From what I understand, it was the winemaking supply stores and some of the higher-profile people that made it happen.

D: Got you. It gets passed. It doesn’t mean that all homebrewing restrictions have been removed, because of course, in the United States, alcohol gets regulated largely at the state level not at the federal level. After Prohibition, we all learned our lesson about the federal government controlling the alcohol trade. We said — the American people said — let’s give that power back to the states. We wind up with a 50-state patchwork of alcohol regulations, many of which pertain to homebrewing. I know that the AHA, the organization that you founded in 1978, would go on under your stewardship many years later to continue to fight the battle at the state level to remove restrictions for homebrewing. I think you guys, you and your team and the group there wound up accomplishing that midway through this past decade. I think it was 2013, was it?

C: Yes, I believe so. Somewhere — Mississippi and Alabama were the last two states after all the-

D: Last holdouts. Of course, at this point, that’s when we’re looking at the history where we’re at right now. That’s way, way in the future. I mean, you’re in 1978, early 1979, Zymurgy Magazine is just the first edition you guys have published, the AHA is in its infancy. What happens from there? You mentioned that the ability for homebrewing retail to really take root was a key turning point or a key outcome of this changed law. Can you speak to that a little bit? What was the significance there and what transpired from it?

C: Sure. With the legalization, the home winemaking stores could call themselves home and wine and beer-making supply stores and eventually homebrew shops. What resulted with that transition was that more people were turned on to the hobby and there was more turnover of ingredients. Subsequently, the ingredients became fresher and there was more variety and more people got into the business. Various malt extract companies sprang up or began being imported into the United States from the U.K., from Ireland, from Germany, from Canada. Also over a period of time, the quality of hops improved dramatically because in the original days — If anyone saw what we were using for hops, they said, where do they come from? A dust on the floor or something? It was just horrible. It was brown and crumbly, it could have been old cardboard for all we knew, but that’s what we knew for hops in the old days.

D: No fresh-hopping in the technique back then. That was not a thing back then.

C: From all that, homebrew shops got more popular. Homebrew clubs started springing up. People were sponsored by — clubs were sponsored by shops, and the exchange of information became accelerated and we all improved our beer.

D: What was going on at that time with regard to the exchange of information? This is something that I was really curious about. Obviously, the magazine is a big channel through which you’re communicating with your members and with other folks who are interested in homebrewing. What were like other media that you were using at the time? I mean, were physical newsletters a thing? Were you guys doing conventions and meetups to exchange ideas? What were the dominant methods of that information sharing that you’re describing? I mean, this is pre-internet, which I understand that people communicated before the internet, of course. I’m not a child of the internet. I was born in ’88, so I didn’t exist before the internet existed, or I existed before that. I’m curious to know, this is technical stuff. This is important information that really is at the core of homebrewing because it’s technical, it’s an art and a science together. How were you communicating that information?

C: In those days, let’s just say in the mid-seventies — we can progress through the mid eighties and nineties — but by the mid-seventies, there was no dependable quality information about beer and brewing. If you wanted a book on the subject, there were a few homebrew books for a couple of bucks you could get, including one of my original “Joy of Brewing,” which was pretty basic information. A lot of the information was based on English homebrewing, which was a whole different circumstance. We didn’t want to make cheap beer, we wanted to make good beer. That was the major difference between the information that existed and the information we wanted. This is something you were asking in a prior discussion about, what were some of the fundamental cultural shifts that happened back then that really influenced where we are today? I have to say that because there was no information, we had to rely on our own experiences and we had to share those experiences. Those experiences were successes, as well they were our failures. We weren’t ashamed to share our failures as well. The exchange of information was essential for all of us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make better beer. That today is called collaboration and those days we just simply were sharing information. Zymurgy Magazine, still published by the American Homebrewers Association, was the only nationally distributed and available communication that connected this very fragile network of people who wanted to make better beer and drink better beer. That was the only thing around those days. How did we do that? We met locally, we got on the telephone, we wrote each other letters and notes and we mailed each other things and we read them. We experimented and we failed and sometimes we succeeded and we shared that information. We tasted our beer and we’d wonder what we were tasting. Out of that came this whole “how do you judge beer?” movement that emerged out of the Homebrewers Association. That cultural shift is still with us today. People around the world are very impressed, in the early days they were flabbergasted that people were actually sharing their recipes and sharing their information and how to make beer. That translated into the professional microbrewing craft brewing movement as well. You see that, a lot of collaboration. Before homebrewers and microbrewers and craft brewers existed, none of that existed. Brewers were very secretive. They wouldn’t even allow another brewer into their brewery. They were so secretive and so scared about trade secrets, and there were no real trade secrets, but there was this mentality of cutthroat competition and not sharing one iota of information.

D: Yes. Well, because we’re talking post-Prohibition here, but pre-craft brewing movement in the U.S., it was a consolidating commodity game. I obviously didn’t live through that, but I know my history to some extent and I’ve reported, spoken with people who were there for it. Yes, you make the joke that there were no trade secrets. Everyone was playing the same game, light adjunct lager, put it on a refrigerated rail car and get it to as many markets as possible, and the game was really more about marketing than it was about-

C: The beer.

D: -the composition of the liquid, the brewing of the beer itself. That alone was, you were pulling against the tide. You and your cohorts, your peers at the time in the homebrewing community were pulling against the tide just with regards to the full flavored liquid that you guys were brewing. I am curious to know — I have so many additional questions here. I’m curious to know, when you talk about the actual liquid that you were brewing, what were you brewing the most of at that time? Were you doing small batches of every different thing? Were you honing in on a particular style? Were you brewing for your own palate, for your friends? Like, what was governing your exploratory brewing practice at that time?

C: Yes. In the earliest of days, it was, you might call it Prohibition-style homebrewing. It was a dump and stir recipe with cans of hot flavored malt extract you got at the supermarket, and you stirred that in with a lot of sugar, and whatever yeast you could find and hope for the best, no boil. It was good enough that we stuck with it, but once we began exploring and visiting a few breweries and brewers shared their information, there were these things called boiling the wort and adding hops and things like that, rather than using just the canned hot-flavored extract. What were we brewing in the — let’s say during the seventies, we were brewing pale ales, India pale ale. We were brewing English style ales mostly. Lagering was not really accessible to us because we didn’t have the experience and the expertise to cold lager, and we didn’t have the access to lager yeast.

D: I was going to say, you didn’t have the — and you also didn’t have the caves.

C: Who’s going to go out and buy a refrigerator for a lot of their beer, when we didn’t have any lager? The only thing we had was something that came in a foil package, an unlabeled foil package called Ale Yeast. Who the heck knew what that was? So it was mostly the British. We were inspired by the Brits. Their homebrewing books, and we discovered things like stouts and porters and pale ales and bitters and milds and brown ales. That’s what we were making in those days. Then we began experimenting with things that were in the kitchen: herbs, spices, fruits, honey, brown sugar, all kinds of concoctions that in those days were considered blasphemous by professional brewers. You can’t even call it — you put honey in your beer? You can’t call that beer. That was the attitude. I think there was a pivotal point, a paradigm shift when Michael Jackson came out with his book, “The World Guide To Beer,” around the late seventies, 1978–79 it was available in the United States. We discovered Michael Jackson and his book, and he exposed the world of German-style beers and Belgian-style beers and the history of American-style beers, beers from other parts of Europe and Australia, et cetera. You were drooling with — thirsting with every page that you read in this book. We started trying to figure out how we can possibly make some of these beers. Through people’s experiences with traveling and tasting we gained the knowledge to begin making these kinds of beers.

D: Was there a particular recipe or a particular beer that you were making at that time that has, in your opinion, withstood the test of time that you’re still brewing from time to time? Is there one or several of them that you feel have held up over the years? Or all of them maybe?

C: Personally, my beer tastes evolved and my brewing habits have changed, and my equipment hasn’t changed very much. I’m still a very hands-on homebrewer. In the old days, I was making lots of ales, English-style ales, which I still love, and they’re harder to find in pubs these days. That’s the value of homebrewing for me these days is that I can make the beers that I can’t find elsewhere, which are the porters, the stouts, the English-style bitter and mild. The things that withstood the test of time have been, I think the pale ales and the India pale ales. Those are recipes that we developed in the early days when the only hop that we could get that was unique and fit our homebrewing personality was the introduction of Cascade hops. Before then, there were no real aromatic hops or hops that gave off any kind of aroma. All of a sudden when we discovered we could get fresh Cascade hops, we started dry hopping, not in the traditional sense that English brewers would dry hop, but dry- hopping in the American way and making American-style pale ales, that’s where you get these American-style pale ales and American-style IPAs. That all evolved because we really loved hops and I think the homebrewers in the United States and the craft brewers in the United States really opened the world to the whole aromatic and flavored experience of hops which didn’t exist back before homebrewing took off in the mid-seventies and early eighties.

D: Sure. Now we just take it — An American drinker who enters the craft beer ecosystem or marketplace at any point after 2012 or so is encountering hoppy beers in mass as a matter of course. It may be more than any one style. The India Pale Ale, West Coast-style India Pale Ale has defined American craft beer for better or for worse for an entire generation of drinkers but at the time, that was not the case.

C: It’s right. Homebrewers and American craft brewers have redefined what an IPA is several times.

D: Many times over. Yes, exactly.

C: All kinds of variations. When I go into a pub or a taproom and there’s like seven or eight or nine different IPAs and there’s not much other choice, my tastes have drifted towards sessionable beers, beers that I can have a few of and still do other things afterwards. So I migrated to milder beers, English-style bitters, and also German-style lagers which I grew at home. They’re much more session-able. You don’t end up talking about the beer the whole conversation. You talk about life, which is what the social network has always been in pubs historically. Beer means different things to different people, and even myself, I’ve evolved.

D: Sure. Charlie, at the time, obviously you didn’t know what the American HomeBrewing Association was going to turn into. You didn’t know that the “Complete Joy of Homebrewing,” which you’ve been very modest about, you mentioned in passing, but it’s your book. Some would call it the definitive text on homebrewing, which has sold well north of a million copies, but at the time you were writing the first edition of it, it’s now gone on to be printed four times. You didn’t know any of that at the time, but you moved from 1978, early 1979, the law changed. You have formed the AHA, you’ve launched the magazine. You moved from your homebrewing practice into a life of what you might call advocacy or becoming a proponent of craft brewing, or excuse me, of homebrewing and to some extent craft brewing as well. Your colleagues or your peers at the time, many of them went on to found breweries that we all, or many of us know today that had their household names for other reasons. You’re a household name in the beer industry because of all of your work with the AHA and with the Brewers Association. But you had folks in your circle at the time who went on to form breweries that the American drinking public would know today. Do you still keep up with your old homebrewing pals, the ones that are still in the game? I’m curious to know what the, you mentioned the social network, what the social network looks like now, all these years later.

C: Let’s see. I’m not sure what the question is.

D: Well, yes, let me rephrase it another way. What were some of the other brewers that you were homebrewing with at the time, what did they go on to do? I think, if I remember correctly, you may have brewed with someone who went on to found Wynkoop Brewery, went on to found, I think New Belgium was someone who went on to found New Belgium.

C: There were quite a number of people that took my beer classes that started their own breweries in the Colorado area. New Belgium was one. The people at Wynkoop, the original brewer there took my class. Things evolved and when I travel around, I’d say, when I meet brewers anywhere, I’d say 95 percent of the brewers in my past travels always mentioned that they had their roots in homebrewing — started out homebrewing and they evolved to become a professional, whether they were a brewer or an engineer or a marketing person or a manager, a lot of them started out with my book. I find that inordinate for me, it’s just an amazing amount of people that are in the profession that started out with my book. The thing that I tried to instill with people who would read my book was that the information had a foundation in science, good science, and the presentation was very practical, but also that it was fun and enjoyable. Like the hobby is enjoyable. I would say that a lot of people that started out with my book stuck with it more than you would expect because I tried to instill that “have fun with this” mindset. “Relax. Don’t worry, I have a homebrew,” was the motto that encapsulated the culture. Have fun with this. Share it with friends, get them going. The other thing I tell people is don’t overcomplicate things. Yes sure, get into the gadgets, get into the hops, get into the malt and the yeast, but don’t get to a point where you leave the hobby because it’s gotten so complicated and involved for you. Keep it simple, make great beer. I still stay in touch with brewers. I go to a few local breweries, taprooms here in the Boulder County area. Always running into people that I’ve worked with, that I’ve had beers with before or I’ve collaborated with. There’s always a story to be told and people to meet wherever I go. I was recently at a conference in Southeast Asia, in Thailand — Bangkok, Thailand. I met people that started out with my book that are now managers in Hong Kong or brewing in India or even have a taproom brewery in Thailand. When you’re introduced to something that instills a spirit of fun and enjoyment, you stay with it a long time.

D: Yes. As we think about where the craft brewing industry and where the homebrewing industry has gone since the late seventies, early eighties, that period we’re talking about, it’s gone in a million different directions. Of course it’s come a long way, as we’ve mentioned, in terms of style. Also breadth and depth and industry maturation, whatever. Basically, in every regard to the point where the average drinker, I think today, the ones that I talk to and I’m out reporting don’t necessarily make a connection between homebrewing and the craft beer that they see on supermarket shelves these days. It’s become much more of a legitimate mainstream product. In one regard, that’s great because that represents a level of success of getting that adoption that at the time, that was unheard of. You were just doing this as a fringe thing, right? On the other hand, it’s maybe a little bit of a disconnect from its historical roots, from those roots of homebrewing back in the period that you were working on it with your friends in the basement in Boulder in Charlottesville when you were there. What’s like if you had to tell someone or you find yourself speaking with a drinker who has no context for that history, for that period in the late seventies, what’s one thing you’d like people to know about what it was like during that period before craft beer before homebrewing was really even a known quantity before it had been codified and turned into this thing that everyone loves? I’m curious to know what you think gets lost in the conversation or gets overlooked for today’s younger drinkers.

C: Yes. There’s no way to impress upon people how difficult it was to even get people to try craft beer, microbrew beer, or homebrew. The color would turn them off. It would be amber and they would call it dark, would have this strange taste that they didn’t recognize what it was so it was no good but it was the hops that they were tasting. It was extraordinarily difficult for getting beer drinkers to try something different. It was even harder to get beer distributors to carry your beer. If you had craft beer, it was harder to get retail stores to sell it because nobody had any faith that this so-called trend was going to be long-lasting. They said why do we need another beer? We got Bud, Miller, and Coors. What do we need more for?

D: If they were really special, maybe they had Heineken.

C: Yes. The import section of a liquor store or where they sold beer was one refrigerator, a glass-door refrigerator with Guinness, Heineken, Becks, St. Pauli Girl, and maybe one Mexican beer and an Irish stout.

D: Harp, yes. I remember it, yes.

C: It was really difficult. We’ve had some difficult times recently. We’ve had Covid and we’ve had other things to happen, recessions and things like that but it was never as difficult as it was back in the eighties. Covid was a challenge but even though you didn’t know much about the virus in the beginning — you had beer, you knew how to make it, you knew how to adapt your business, maybe there were options available to you. In the early days, there were no options other than just educating people on what you were doing and why and here try this.

D: Yes. You were coming from first principles. Yes, a different time. Last question for you, Charlie, but when you read the history or certainly when I do and when I speak with sources, the Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1978, early 1979, that removes restrictions on homebrewing is often pointed to as in hindsight, the moment that launches the craft brewing movement in earnest in this country. I’m curious as someone like yourself who lived through that period, and who was really there at ground zero, so to speak, for this entire movement in founding the AHA, and then going on to launch the magazine and write the book and do all the advocacy, the work that you did, do you think of that moment that we’re discussing, do you think of that in such a pivotal way? Is there another moment that you think of that it was equally significant, but doesn’t get as much attention? I’m curious to know how you contextualize that decision, Carter’s decision in your craft beer history and how significant you think it is.

C: In retrospect, it was quite significant, but at the time, we had no idea.

D: It was a blip.

C: Yes. We had no idea. It was like, oh, man, they legalized, it’s not going to be as much fun anymore. We didn’t know the implication. we just carried on. Slowly, we realized that fresh ingredients were more available, the hobby expanded, more people got involved. Were there moments that are or were there other paradigm shifts? I think of the time in the probably mid-eighties, late eighties that we were onto something when Miller Brewing Company came out with a stout. They advertise Miller Lite, and then they come out with a stout. It was a short-lived experiment on their part, but that was a pivotal moment for me. When one of the big brewers made a honey beer, it was the big brewers that were bashing us in the old days. You can’t put honey in beer, that’s not beer. They started to make honey beer. They started making some pale ale-type beers, and they were O’Doul’s, O’Doul’s, which is a non alcoholic beer made by Anheuser Busch. Originally O’Doul’s was a pale ale, an experimental beer that was made in New Hampshire.

D: Is that right?

C: That’s right. They made O’Doul’s a märzen, Oktoberfest beer.

D: Sure.

C: O’Doul’s brand still lives on but it’s non-alcoholic, but it was originally a pale ale. Those little things that happened in my mind was like, all right, they’re noticing, things are going to change. They’re changing slowly but it’s happening.

D: Sure.

C: You walk — The Great American Beer Festival, something I founded in 1982. I’ve been to every one of them since. It’s a measure of an evolution over the many, many years. The kinds of people who would come and the behavior, which is always enthusiastic. In the early days, it was mostly homebrewers that would come and now mainstream comes and they, people just discover beer because they really understand what this is all about, which we had no idea that it was going to be so mainstream. We’ve lost, like you inferred earlier you lose some things, you gain other things. A lot of craft beer brands are mass-produced now. Does that make them better or worse? Let the beer drinker decide. Personally, I’ll drink a good craft beer no matter who makes it. I prefer to visit my local taprooms in the area. I love the beers that they make.

D: Or brew it yourself.

C: Or brew myself, which I brew, still brew pretty regularly, about once a month at least. I got a couple of lagers lagering right now, as well as a few ales on tap.

D: Do you think you’ll ever give it up? Too much hassle? Just let someone else brew your beer for you?

C: No, I don’t. I might, but I don’t have any intention to because the beers I make are unique enough and delicious enough that I can’t get them anywhere else except my place.

D: Fair enough.

“Taplines” is recorded in Richmond, Virginia, and produced by yours truly and Darby Cicci, who along with the talented Shane Firek, composed our delightful soundtrack. Just listen to it. I also want to give a quick shout-out to the entire VinePair team, and especially co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin, editor-in-chief Joanna Sciarrino, managing editor Tim McKirdy, and art director Danielle Grinberg, who designed our lovely “Taplines” logo. Of course, big thank you to you. Yes, you listener, for spending time with us week in and week out. We literally couldn’t do this without you. I’m Dave Infante and I’ll catch you next time.

The article Taplines: Craft Beer’s Oval Office Origin Story appeared first on VinePair.