Why am I mentioning this in a blog about beer? Well, it got me thinking. There's the old British saying regarding marriage where the bride has to have "something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue." Now, I'm not one to wax poetic about the virtues of marriage but as I sit here scouring Etsy and eBay for pieces of brewerania, that saying makes sense. Over the next four weeks - I will give you my take on the phrase and how it pertains to all things beer.
If you were paying attention and I hope you were, because if you tuned out within the first paragraph, I'm screwed as a writer - you may have noticed a word that you may not recognize. Hell, the spellcheck feature underlined it in red. Brewerania. Unlike its cousin, Hulkamania, brewerania commonly refers to any article containing a brewery name or brand name, usually in connection to collecting them as a hobby. Examples include beer cans, beer bottle, bottle opener, beer labels, tin signs, coasters, beer trays, beer tap, wooden cases and neon signs. The reason for promotional knick knacks is quite simple equation. People like free shit and if your name is on their favorite t-shirt or hat, you get a walking billboard. When I worked for a brewery doing promotions, people always asked if I had anything I could give them. I was giving you free beer, what else could you possibly want?! If your grandfather used a branded bottle opener - that opener became a behavioral conditioning item. Every time you open a beer, you see the Iroquois logo. Then you look into your fridge and think, "almost out of Iroquois, time to stock up before we get rocked with snow."
My first recollection of brewerania was a 6 pack of beer my mom brought back from the Daytona 500 race she went to in 1989. Every time we moved, that thing would resurface and I'd ask her, "why do we keep moving this?" Personally, I am astonished that she had the will power not to drink those - but 27 years later, that 6 pack still lays in a moldy basement somewhere. What is the actually value of that? I'm not a 100% sure, but there's probably someone with disposable income who would want a white trash relic to remember their trip when they boned a blonde woman from Hooters with neon hooped earrings and hair with enough hairspray, that if it'd caught fire, that bimbo was a goner.
My mother also had a knack for garage sales, which I abhorred. There was no bigger waste of a Saturday morning then being rounded up in a wood paneled minivan and drove around to people's homes to rummage through old shirts. I was afraid I'd run into a classmate and I'd be outed as the white trash we were. Our house was stocked full of other people's castaways. My mom thought that she would in turn run her own garage sale and make a profit but that never really panned out because we lived in the MIDDLE OF GODDAMN NOWHERE!!!
I acquired an Utica Club serving tray - whose location is currently unknown, but it piqued my interest in collecting older pieces of brewery merchandise. Right now, my collection consists of of t-shirts and glasses. I have t-shirts from Buffalo where the breweries were only selling shirts to fund the building of the actual brewery. When traveling, I like to pick up something, like a koozie or t-shirt. If I have some extra cash, maybe I'll get a sweatshirt. As I said before, I can easily spend a day pouring over eBay or Etsy looking for pieces of Buffalo-related brewania. I'd like to find a bottle opener or an old neon sign from Iroquois, Phoenix or Simon Pure.
In that old British saying, something old connotes continuity. There are a lot of people who view the craft beer movement of the past 20 years or so in a vacuum, as if it's a novel idea. However, it's not. It was made, not begotten. Our grandfathers' beer was a lot like out own. They were very local and locally owned. Buffalo once boasted that they had the most breweries per capita. Vermont now has that honor, as of 20151. Prohibition did its job, snuffing out little breweries and those large enough to survive were either absorbed by more-financially backed groups such as Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz. Having something old reminds us that there is a history beyond our spectrum, breweries starting up en masse in antebellum America. Just like in the movie, Inception, we need an anchor from out past so that we know we're in the present. A reminder to avoid the past of post Prohibition consolidation.
For more information, visit the American Brewerania Associtation's website. Getting to know the breweries of your area is a fun way to enjoy your beer and learn more about your city or region.
Footnotes & Additional Reading
1. Beers per capita, Statista