Since this country was settled, beer was part of it. It’s often noted that founding fathers Samuel Adams and George Washington both brewed beer, but it wasn’t special to them. Without a real brewing industry in the United States, what would be referred to as homebrewing now was found in most households back then.

Beer festivals like the World Beer Festival in Durham, NC, have become a commonplace celebration of the cradt brewing industry, bringing together a variety of brews in thsame place for fans of the industry

Why “The Amber Age” you might ask. The name of my little venture here, this on-line magazine, was derived from the term The Golden Age. The term Golden Age is typically used when referring to the best in a series of delineated ages. Comic book collectors, for example, refer to the period beginning with the first appearance of Superman and ending with the first appearance of the modern Flash as the Golden Age of comics. It was a time before the Comics Code Authority came into being, squelching a lot of the creativity, and even adult themes that permeated many of the comic books back then. I digress.

The Amber Age is, I feel, the right name for The Golden Age for American beer drinkers and the American brewing industry and it dates back to the establishment of Albion Brewing in Sonoma, CA, back in 1976. While Albion, founded by some homebrewers that were looking for something better than what was on the market back then, went out of business as scant six years later, they were at the forefront of something wonderful.

Sure, companies like Anchor Brewing were survivors, and preserved some of

Flying Dog's Gonzo Fest is one of the many festivals that craft beer lovers can attend.

America’s pre-Prohibition beer styles and traditions, but Albion was at the forefront of a movement. It was a time when much of the industry was consolidating, and it was hard to get your hands on a beer that wasn’t one of the characterless, mass-produced offerings such as Budweiser, Miller, Schaeffer, and the handful of other macro-breweries. Albion was the result of beer drinkers looking for something better, something more. They were pushing back at an industry that had only 44 breweries left in the country, and experts were predicting that number would eventually collapse down to less that half a dozen.

Beer drinkers pushed back, and Albion, at the forefront, became the father of the craft brew movement.

Directly or indirectly, that group of California homebrewers is responsible for what we now enjoy today – responsible for the Stone’s, the Samuel Adamses, and Flying Dogs of the American Beerscape. Less than 40 years after Albion folded, beer drinkers now enjoy an incredible variety of ales and lagers made at an estimated 1400 breweries and brew pubs around the country.

The question remains, however, about how we got to the dire straights we, as a beer drinking public, faced in the 1970’s. How does a country made up of immigrants from Ireland, France, Belgium, England, and Germany end up with the beer industry we had in 1970? Some believe that it was a result of the beer that we as a public were being fed during prohibition. Yes, beer was still made, but with a significantly lower alcoholic content (called near-beer) in order to pass muster with the stricter government regulations passed in 1933 which allowed breweries to brew beer that held up to 3.2 percent alcohol (previous to that, most of the larger breweries survived by producing sodas, syrups, and other non-alcoholic items).

Craft beer lover Jamee Robinson is one of the direct beneficiaries of the growing craft beer industry in the United States.

While this might have been a contributing factor, it was by no means the reason that beer drinkers ended up with a significantly limited selection from Prohibition through to the late 1970’s.

There are several good histories of the brewing industry in the United States out there, and according to those well researched tomes (please feel free to contact me if you’re interested in reading one – some are published on-line and I would be happy to recommend a couple), commercial breweries began to spring up on America’s East Coast through the 1800’s with the influx of German and Irish immigrants. Later in the century, the Eastern Europeans came in, bringing with them their lighter lager styles which included the style that became the predominant style in the United States – Pilsner.

As noted before, the breweries entered prohibition and adjusted their beer recipes to account for the fact that they could still brew, as long as the beer didn’t exceed a certain percentage of alcohol. In that case, it was not considered to be, I believe the term was, “an intoxicating beverage,” and could still be served. This, in turn, limited the styles brewers could produce.

Yes, prohibition lasted from 1920 until 1933 (when producing near beer was made legal), and that was long enough to create a whole generation of drinkers unfamiliar with the styles that were available pre-Prohibition, but the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, was just around the corner. What really did in the varieties that were once available, according to historians, was a recovering beer industry suddenly having to deal with the rationing that quickly became commonplace during World War II. Breweries suddenly found themselves in a position where they had to compete for many of their supplies, and the supplies they were getting weren’t as plentiful, nor as high in quality as they might once have used.

Yours truly (l.) discusses brewing with DuClaw brewer Jim Wagner at the Brewer's Association of Maryland's annual Springfest.

From 1920 (and even earlier in some states) until the mid-1940’s the American brewing industry sustained vicious body blows from which it would take three decades to recover. But recover it did, and here we are now, enjoying a Renaissance of brewing in the United States.

There are things that continue to concern me in regards to the industry – such as projections that acquisitions are going to become more prevalent throughout the industry; a number of the different state’s boneheaded blue laws; the government turning their attention to brewers that are making porters and stouts with coffee as part of their on-going hunt for alcohol producers who are giving us products laced with caffeine. All of that said, it appears that we beer lovers are living in a true Amber Age.

Now that you know the why, here’s a little bit about who’s behind The Amber Age…

Kevin Smith: The driving force behind The Amber Age, Kevin has been a professional journalist since 1996 when he was first published by the now defunct Boston Chronicle. His first beat was covering the Red Sox for the ill-fated monthly. Over the years he has covered everything from Arts and Entertainment to Zymurgy, and has been published on line and by both regional and national publications. His work has been seen in Wine Business Monthly, Smart Company Magazine, and Maryland Life.

During his professional journey he has spent time on staff at a Washington Post subsidiary, and is currently the Maryland beer guy for The Mid-Atlantic Brewing News, and Baltimore’s Examiner.com site. He has been a beer snob since college, and is happy to have a job that allows him to get paid for that snobbery.

Kelly Fowler: The Amber Age’s Web guru, Photoshop sherpa, and primary photographer, the site would suffer greatly if not for her work on the keys and behind the camera. With a degree in photography and years of experience as a designer, Kelly has been instrumental in a variety of Web based advertising campaigns, corporate identities, and even re-branding strategies for a variety of companies. Kelly has worked with groups such as The Elephant Sanctuary, JRC, and Dark Corner Software.

With a photography business on the side, Kelly has taken the vast majority of the pictures for Kevin’s journalistic endeavors in regards to beer and sports. Her work can be found at www.kellyfowler.com