in Garrison Hall (GAR), 4.100 from noon-1:30 p.m.
The talk presents a draft chapter from my second book on the lager beer revolution in the United States. Brewing is one of the oldest and most widely used technologies. Many of its key discoveries took decades, some even hundreds of years. The nineteenth century was the Belle Époque of brewing professionalization as the sharing of beer practices evolved from (informal) personal experience and sometimes clandestine exchanges to an open knowledge transfer, primarily through trade journals and formal training.
During this time, German Americans took over the U.S. beer industry. As brewers and brewing scientists transferred European technologies and skills across the Atlantic, they eventually (re)invented a new beer style, American-style lager, though not without setbacks. My presentation zooms in on the role of the United States Brewers Association and its flagship publication, Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer, in disseminating scientific advances but also failures.
Jana Weiss is DAAD Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on U.S. and transatlantic history, in particular immigration, racism, knowledge, and religious history. After studying at the University of Bremen, she received her PhD in 2013 at the University of Münster with a study on the role of civil religion on U.S.-American patriotic holidays after 1945 (Fly the Flag and Give Thanks to God. Zivilreligion an US-amerikanischen patriotischen Feiertagen, 1945-1992. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015). Jana is currently working on her second book titled A Lager Beer Revolution: German American Brewers in Pre-Prohibition USA, analyzing the cultural and technological transfer of the “German art of brewing” to the United States. Her research has been generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.
This talk is part of the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine series (HSTEM talks).