This is a business history of brewing in America. What is especially fascinating is the story of the rise of the great brewing families and the impact of Prohibition. Ogle is willing to tackle the difficult business of the rise of microbreweries and the gradual absorption of the industrial giants by multi-national corporations.

In a day when the largest American-owned brewery is the former micro, Sam Adams, Ambitious Brew is the perfect book to see how it happened.

Lynn Hoffman, author of Bang Bang

My wife bought this for my birthday, and I completely enjoyed it. Shortly after finishing it, I was in St. Louis and toured the Budweiser brewery. This book made it much more enjoyable of a tour.

This is a great book if you're looking to learn something about the history of American lager brewing, and in particular about the giants (and now-deceased giants) of the industry. It covers quite a bit of ground I have never seen covered in any other book on the subject.

The author does have some biases which I think do color the book a bit. She has a contrarian tilt which seems to lead her to the view that big "industrial beer" from the giant lager-brewers is a better product than it really is. She does not seem to be as familiar as might be hoped with brewing itself, and consequently does not appreciate the extent to which the American brewing industry compromised product quality by relying on highly tannic, six-row malts and the notoriously bad-smelling Cluster hop, for example. And her interest in American brewing does not extend to ale (apart from the ales of the microbrew era); she seems to accept all too readily the notion that American ale-brewing in the pre-lager era was a cesspool of bad beer.

The upshot is that the book is perhaps a bit too favorable to the point of view of the great national brewers, and to their insipid style of high-adjunct, low-hop lager. But the early history of the large brewers is fascinating, and she shows genuine interest in the microbrew movement and its impact upon American tastes. A very, very enjoyable book.

This book is a must have for a homebrewer or anyone interested in the history of American entrepreneurs. The history of American beer is really the story of the American dream. German imigrants came to this country with almost nothing. Some of them went on to build the biggest breweries in the world. The story is counter to much of what I had thought. Apparently there was a time when Budweiser was one of the best beers in the world - who knew? This book also is a fascinating look at Americans' conflicting views of alchohol.

Ambitious Brew takes you on a journey through America, often peering with a European's eye at the wealth of opportunity in an unfolding land. Maureen Ogle's tale gives little attention to the colonists, but begins with German immigrant Phillip Best in the mid-1840's. Throughout this complex story, she is like Cezanne, creating the picture with pieces of paint until the canvas takes form and presents the picture as a whole.

Ogle not only tells of the development of beer, but also connects this development with key pivotal points in history - points that had served to initiate new patterns within American society. The story swings back to the seventeenth century, when rum from the West Indian and Caribbean plantations seized the market; then surges forward again, to the early nineteenth century, when "...fourteen thousand distillers were producing some twenty-five million gallons [of whiskey] each year..."

Her findings portray such giants as Adolphus Busch, August Uihlein, and Frederick Pabst as men who fell into brewing by accident, and not by design. Rivalries for market share between the largest brewers were a constant, dampened only by occasional waves of temperance talk...indirect prejudices aimed at specific groups - saloon owners, corporate magnates (seen as sleazy crooks by the general public), German immigrants (targeted as a result of anti-German sentiment following WWI), liberated, loose women, and those who professed atheistic beliefs.

Ogle closely analyzes the events that lead up to Prohibition, but passes quickly through the dark days like Alice through the Looking Glass. She compresses the years following WWII, portraying the post-war beer world as a conglomerate of marketers and accountants, vying for the bottom line.

The tale regains its initial drama at the launch of the microbrew movement, ignited by a preference for pure, locally-produced products, championed by people such as Mike Royko, Gordon Bowker, and E. F. Schumacher. Stories of guts and ambition come alive - tales of Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, Ken Grossman, Charlie Papazian, John Siebel, Jim Koch, and the debut of light beer. She applauds Michael Jackson for his book The World Guide to Beer, a work that empowered a generation of brewers to see themselves as the large, complex community that they had become.

AMBITIOUS BREW is a stimulating epic, filled with stories of fascination, competition for market share, and steady, unflinching focus by people who never saw themselves as particularly special.

I've read a lot of books about beer and this one took me a long time to read. It was kind of like reading a text book because it was very 'factually detailed'. I was expecting this book to have more of a personality than it did. I learned a lot about the business end of beer but not so much about the social aspect of it. Many of the chapters seemed to take much too long to get to their point.

Mauren Ogle has shown herself to be a historian of the first order with he latest book Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. She has written a thorough history with enough detail to keep both the student of history and the beer geek happy. The book is as much about the American Dream as about beer.

The book held my attention from start to finish and left me wanting more. The long battle for supremacy between Pabst and Anheuser-Busch was fascinating. Ms. Ogle showed that the brewers of the time were forced to continually brew lighter and lighter beers because, contrary to the claims of the microbrewing enthusiasts, that's what most of America wants. She also showed that he tend toward the bland didn't stop with beer, and that only in the last 20 years has there been a backlash, in beer, coffee and food in general. My only criticism would be that the last chapter on the microbrewery revolution left me wanting more. It seemed almost as if she wanted to say more, but was running out of space to say what she wanted.

I must admit that knowing that the author's earlier works included "All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890" did not necessarily lead me to have great expectations for this work!

Yet, I am from Wisconsin, home of big brewers and big plumbing companies(think Kohler); I decided to give the book a shot.

Ogle is a good writer and perhaps an even better researcher. The book flows very well and will serve others as a resource in writing about the U. S. Beer Industry. There are not enough broad histories of American Brewing available.

The bibilography, end notes and index alone are worth the price of the book.


A few well chosen photos add to the value. I would liked to have seen more visuals.