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On October 31, 1715, the Mug House Riots broke out in England when two opposing political groups met in the same tavern. Their debate escalated into a fight that spilled into the streets and lasted for days.

On September 10, 1731, six people were appointed by the city of London as “hop searchers,” and assigned the task of seizing and burning all low-standard hops.

On December 31, 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on St. James’ Gate in Dublin, Ireland. Guinness reportedly said he was so confident in his product that he happily signed the lease, which is on display at the guinness Storehouse at St. James’ Gate in Dublin, Ireland.

On December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and John Hancokc threw a “kegger” for the Sons of Liberty inside Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern. Later that evening they led the group in a protest that became known as the Boston Tea Party. The leaders commonly provided a keg at meetings to ensure attendance.

On October 12, 1810, Munich’s first Oktoberfest is held to celebrate the royal wedding of Ludwig I of Bavaria. Today, the 16-day festival kicks off when the mayor of Munich shouts “O’sapft is!” while tapping the first keg of beer.

In 1813, Martha Jefferson moved back into Monticello to look after her widowed father, President Thomas Jefferson. On September 17, she interrupted her settling-in duties to brew 15 gallons of beer.

On October 17, 1814, a giant vat of fermenting porter burst in St. Giles, London, releasing more than 135,000 gallons of beer and causing other vats of beer to explode. A total of about 323,000 gallons of beer gushed into the streets, destroying two homes and trapping a teenage employee of a nearby pub.

The Stuttgart Beer Festival began in 1818 when King Wilhelm I sponsored the event after years of hunger. Today, the annual three-week festival is the second largest beer festival in Germany, following Munich’s Oktoberfest.

On October 5, 1842, Josef Groll brewed the world’s first golden beer, which became known as Pilsner Urquell. Up until then, beer was usually dark and hazy.

On July 11, 1883, a 14-year-old boy from Baltimore, Maryland fell into a boiling beer vat at Helldorfer’s Brewery and died almost instantly.

On October 28, 1919, the Volstead Act was signed into law, stating that Prohibition would begin the following April. This was the beginning of the end for hundreds of local breweries, as they were forced to convert to other products or shut down completely.

On November 13, 1925, Grupo Modelo bottled its first Corona Extra.

On December 5, 1933, Prohibition officially ended when Utah became the 36th state needed to ratify the 21st Amendment to the Constitution. President Roosevelt announced the news immediately, and beer lovers nationwide celebrated.

On November 28, 1935, the Tree Stooges released a short film called “The Three Little Beers,” in which the threesome work at the delivery department of the Panther Pilsner Beer company. The Stooges must stack barrels of beer onto their delivery truck and end up driving the truck to the company’s golf tournament. Needless to say, Murphy’s Law is in tact as everything that would go wrong does go wrong and the Stooges end up losing all the beer.

Frederick Louis “Fritz” Maytag was born on December 9th, 1937. The former owner of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, Maytag saved the company from closing in 1965. He introduced beer enthusiasts to many classic styles of beer and is credited with preserving the “steam style” of brewing, which involves using bottom-fermenting yeast at high temperatures in shallow, open pans.

On November 20, 1944, Winston Churchill ordered his War Secretary to “Make sure that the beer goes to the troops under fire of the enemy before any of the parties in the rear get a drop.”

On August 30, 1947, Lucille Ball appeared in a Schaefer beer ad. She is shown pouring a Schaefer, calling it “The finest beer I ever tasted.”

On August 6, 1976, empty beer cans saved a woman’s life when she fell off a cruise ship heading to Cape Town, South Africa. Margaret Fuller was reported missing about an hour after she fell, but the captain of the ship was able to reverse and locate her by following a trail of beer cans that were thrown overboard by passengers.

The beer-theme movie, Strange Brew, was released on August 26, 1983. The film chronicles the adventures of two unemplyed brothers who give away their father’s beer money and then run out of beer. In an attempt to get free beer, they get jobs as beer inspectors at Elsinore Brewery. Eventually they face the evil Brewmeister Smith, whose world domination plot includes putting a drug in Elsinore beer that makes the drinker attack others when stimulated by music.

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 was passed on July 17, requiring all 50 states to raise the minimum age of purchase and public possession of alcohol to 21.

On November 6, 2002, the city of Monmouth, Oregon legalized the sale of beer and wine within the city limits for the first time since 1858. When national Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the city voted on and defeated five different proposals to allow the sale of alcohol.

On July 28, 2003, the Merrian-Webster dictionary added the word “longneck,” which, as you might have guessed, is defined as a “a beer served in a bottle that has a long neck.”

In July 0f 2009, President Barack Obama held the infamous “Beer Summit” at the White House, where Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to discuss an incident in which Sergeant Crowley was called upon to apologize for attesting Gates for disorderly conduct at the Gates’ home. Obama had a Bud Light, Biden had a Buckler, Gates had a Sam Adams Light, and Crowley had a Blue Moon.

On Septmeber 3, 2010, the world’s oldest bottle of beer was found in a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Aland Islands. Experts believe the ship may have been sailing from Denmark to St. Petersburg, Russia between 1800 and 1830.

See this article for the first 25 fun facts about beer brewing history.

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In March of 1634, entrepreneur Samuel Cole opened the first American tavern in the city of Boston.

In 1650, lawmakers in New Netherland (what is now known as New York) decided to levy an excise tax on “tapsters” (those selling beer), in an attempt to relieve brewers of their tax burden.

Frederick Pabst, the German-American brewer who founded the Pabst Brewing Company, was born on March 28, 1836 in the Kingdom of Prussia.

The first lager beer was sold in Milwaukee in 1845 by a company known as Best and Company.

America’s first Prohibition act was passed by the Maine legislature on June 2nd, 1851. The bill called for the “suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling Shops.” Over the next year, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Massachussetts and Vermont all followed suit.

On April 1, 1855, the “Lager Beer Riot” occurred in Chicago after Mayor Levi Boone proposed an ordinance that would close taverns on Sundays and raise the cost of liquor licenses. Protestors who viewed the ordinance as targeting Germany immigrants clashed with police.

Ederhard Anheuser, a soap maker in St. Louis, inadvertently became a brewer when he acquired the Bavarian Brewery in 1860. He had little interest in running the brewery, but his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, ended up taking over, eventually making the brewery the largest in the world.

Known as “The Original Pale Ale,” Bass Ale was awarded the world’s first trademark under the UK’s Trademark Registration Act, which went into effect on January 1, 1876. The beer still carries the original logo: a red triangle over the word “Bass.”

On July 3, 1890, the U.S. Treasury made it legal for a brewery to install a pipeline for the transfer of beer from a brewery to a separate bottling shop. This law helped the process of beer bottling immensely.

What we now know as the beer bong was unintentionally invented by Jack Henry in 1896. Henry started off as a failed inventor of medical equipment for women. With the rubber from a straightened bicycle tire as a tube and flattened cans of beans for the funnel, the world’s first beer bong was created.

On January 11, 1898, the Anheuser-Busch company produced its 500 millionth bottle of Budweiser, becoming the first U.S. brewer to reach that milestone. The next year, Adolphus Busch proclaimed Budweiser to be the “King of the Bottles Beers,” leading to the slogan we now know as “The Kind of Beers.”

On February 14, 1899, the Texas Consolidated Brewing Association was formed in an effort to fight Prohibition. Their goal was to “have a common control of management agreements, and to facilitate common intentions of the breweries to monopolize the manufacture and sale of beer in Texas.”

In 1900, Carry Nation, a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Movement, wrecked the elaborate bar in the Hotel Carey in Wichita, Kansas and became known for destroying bars and saloons with a hatchet. She claimed her actions were not unlawful because saloons were illegal at the time.

The Cervederia del Pacifico in Mazatlan, Mexico, was established in 1900 when three German immigrants began brewing Pacifico beer.

Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1919, with the 18th Amendement to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages.

In May of 1932 about 100,000 people celebrated the legalization of beer in New York City with a “We Want Beer Parade.” In Detroit, an estimated 40,000 people attended a similar event on the same day.

In March of 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, which levied a federal tax on all alcoholic beverages in an attempt to raise revenue for the federal government. However, individual states retained the right to further regulate the sale of beer and wine.

After 14 years of Prohibition, the Cullen-Harrison Act was signed in April of 1933, which legalized the sale of 3.2 percent alcohol in states that were subject to Prohibition. The New York Times proclaimed, “Beer flows in 19 states.”

The very first canned beers, Kreuger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale, were sold in Richmond, Virginia in January 1935.

On June 25, 1951, Pabst became the first U.S. brewer to advertise in color on television. The ad was aired during a special one-hour inaugural broadcast on CBS.

On April 15, 1985, Samuel Adams beer was introduced in Boston on Patriot’s Day. Jim Koch, who established Boston Beer Company in 1984 used his great-great grandfather’s recipe for Louis Koch Lager to brew Samuel Adam’s Boston Lager.

In May of 1988, the U.S. Congress officially recognized National Homebrew Day – a day on which homebrewers around the country celebrate beer and brewing.

“Beer Day” in Iceland (which is celebrated every year on the first day of March) marks the country’s abolition of the prohibition of beer, which lasted from January 1, 1915 to March 1, 1989.

In 2002, the owners of Munich’s famous beer fall Hofbrauhaus held a groundbreaking ceremony for the first U.S. location in Newport, Kentucky. The brewery would measure 2,450 square feet. 268 people would sit in the beer hall, 108 people would sit in a restaurant section, and 350 more could fit in the beer garden.

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HOME BREWING BEER – Learn how to make beer at home with Dr. Homebrew’s How-To Beer Book. (Available now in both paperback and hardback copies – MAKES A GREAT GIFT!)

The seemingly magical process known as “fermentation” has been around well beyond recorded history, is steeped in endless tradition, and has been an integral part of our human culture the world over. What is considered by some as common practice in everyday life is revered by others as a glorious opportunity for self-expression. That opportunity, my friend, is “Home-brewing.”

DEFINITION: Home brew (noun): an alcoholic beverage (as beer) made at home.

As its name suggests, homebrewing is the process of making beer at home. As foreign a concept as that may sound to you at the moment, the process of “brewing” has been practiced for thousands of years in various locations all around the world, with a multitude of different ingredients, and has brought smiles to billions of individual faces.

Amazingly, some of those combinations of fermentation and imbibing have occurred naturally, without any influence by man. But once those seemingly random reactions were manipulated by thirsty humans, the rest was history, as they say. What was once a misunderstood but enjoyable chemical reaction has since been studied, practiced, and refined by varied civilizations – each of which has developed their own regionally exclusive and culturally influenced concoctions. Factors such as indigenous ingredients, climate, and even the ability to forge metals have all played a part in the act of “homebrewing.”

A quick hop and a skip down to your local brewery will reveal a maze of megalithic structures that would seem right at home in an oil refinery, yet with the skillful hand of an experienced brewmaster they can easily bring about a masterful composition of sweetness and bitterness, dancing seamlessly together like a well-tuned violin concerto. Yet no violinist gets to play at that level without first practicing on their own. So fear not if you possess little in the way of metallic brewing contraptions as metallurgical advances have only made things more convenient. The basics of home brewing beer have remained almost the same since the very beginning and you don’t need much to get started!

One of the most beautiful aspects of fermentation, especially when practiced at home, is the fact that it occurs naturally. This is just a small part of why home brewing beer has persevered through the test of time and has been adapted to many different people and places the world over. Whether you have access to fresh honey, tea leaves, grains, sugar cane, fruits, vegetables, or soda pop, with some patience and a little help from mother nature, you can homebrew nearly anything you want. In fact, that’s exactly what has happened for thousands of years! People have utilized ingredients in their area, adapted those ingredients to the technology at hand, left room for yeasts of various kinds, and created their own unique and entirely home-made alcoholic drinks. The possibilities are literally endless!

Learn to make your own beer now… with Dr. Homebrew’s How-To Beer Book!

The secret to success as a homebrewer is creativity. If it weren’t for creativity, we would never have things like airplanes, power tools, or Mozart. When it comes to home brewing beer, the sky’s the limit! Sure you could try your best to replicate the disgusting taste of a commonplace beer like that of Lake’s Ltd., or you could lead a rebellion of free thought and self-expression by making something truly delicious and one of a kind. That’s the beauty of homebrewing your own beer, wine, mead, or anything else you can imagine, because the only impedance to making something wonderful are the boundaries of your imagination.

Is Home Brewing Beer Safe?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s address a couple questions I’m sure you’re just itching to ask. Such as, “Is it safe to homebrew beer?”

Well, that’s an excellent question my friend! Let’s put on our lab coat and safety glasses and get to the bottom of that, shall we?

While homebrewing beer is frequently described as a hobby that can be either as expensive or as complicated as you wish to make it, it would be fair to say that an inherent increase in caution would be warranted and wise when brewing your own beers. It’s important with anything you do in life to exercise a certain degree of caution, and fermenting your own ales and lagers is no exception. Whether you’re walking across the street to get to your local pub, cutting vegetables in your kitchen with a knife for dinner, or knowing when to stop drinking and call a cab for a ride home at the end of the night, caution is a natural and instinctive part of our lives.

As for specific safety concerns when brewing up your own tasty batch of suds, the process is not too unlike that of making tea – albeit on a much larger scale. When you brew your own beer, you’re dealing with hot water, sugar, and the process of transferring your “sugar tea” to a fermentation vessel of some kind. If you’re capable of handling a pot of boiling water and steeping the grains or liquid extract syrup safely, then the only other safety concern you need to keep in mind is sanitation, which won’t be a problem, provided of course you follow the procedures discussed later in this book.

The importance of sanitation cannot be stressed enough as yeast isn’t the only microscopic organism looking to crash your fermentation party. If your beer gets any organisms in it besides the yeast you want to be in there, there’s a good chance that your beer will not only taste unpalatable to most, but could very likely contain some other type of bacteria that is normally best avoided and should not be ingested. The best way to stay safe when brewing your own beer is to keep anything that comes close to your homebrew clean. From the room you choose to brew in to the instruments you use to stir your “sugar tea” with, you need to keep things clean and sanitary at all times. This is very important!

Is Home Brewing Beer Legal?

You’re probably also wondering about the legalities of homebrewing. In other words, “Is homebrewing  beer legal?”

To be honest, I’m no international lawyer and I don’t even play one on television. For me to pretend to be an expert on the legalities of making your own alcoholic beverages would be laughable and, at best, dishonest. I can only suggest that you consult with your area’s legislative office or local authority to ask and clarify the matter before you begin. While most countries do allow for small quantities of homebrewed alcoholic concoctions to be made by those of legal drinking age, I can’t speak for the entire planet and hold no responsibility for you should you decide to brew your own beer in a part of the world where doing so is considered against the law.

Not only is the fermentation process both safe and legal in almost every part of the world, but brewing your own beer has unending potential for exercising all of your senses and expanding your creativity. The processes involved are relatively simple and can be masterfully combined to create a beer that you can be proud of when you raise your glass at your next toast.

Homebrewing Beer Has Never Been Easier!

Beer, as we know it today, is the result of an amalgamation of generations upon generations of brewing experience and technological innovation. Ancient cultures have understood and practiced fermentation for a multitude of reasons, including spiritual enlightenment and, of course, personal satisfaction. For such a simple and ancient process to have not only persisted through time, but to have both evolved and thrived for thousands of years, one can not doubt the magic that can be experienced through the fruits of this simple act.

The allure that home brewing beer had in the past and continues to have all over the world in various forms is proof that when you combine the traditions and practices from ages past with the technological developments of today and the future, the potential for brewing evolution is truly astounding.

As a homebrew hobbyist, you have access to a community of fellow beer brewers that will gladly share both their experiences and honest opinions with you, while happily offering up advice to help you thrive and improve as a homebrewer. Should you have aspirations of brewing beer as a profitable career, Dr. Homebrew’s How-To Beer Book will help you get your start. After all, you’d be hard pressed to find a successful head brewer didn’t get his or her start as a homebrewer first and then worked, over the years, to hone the skill sets necessary to produce beer on a commercial scale.

I salute you in your quest to learn more about the magic and mystery of homebrewing and I’m pleased that you chose me (Dr. Homebrew) to be in your beer brewing instructor.

Now it’s your turn. Home brewing beer is easy! Learn to brew your first batch of beer with Dr. Homebrew’s How-To Beer Book. Available now in both paperback and hardback formats. Makes for a great gift too!

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