The event is at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s headquarters on South Street in downtown Pittsfield.
Historian and BCHS President Cindy Brown will deliver a lecture titled “Beer for Their Refreshment: Brewing in Pittsfield from the 18th Century to Prohibition.”
“Beer and cider, by which I mean hard cider, were two of the most common drinks, certainly, for adults, and often for children, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries," Brown told WAMC. "We don't usually think about beer and hard cider being daily beverages, but they were. In many cases, they were safer to drink than tap water and more available to people than, certainly, wine and other alcoholic beverages and milk. And there was also a bit of a movement to position beer as an alternative to hard liquor, and to promote it as a healthy drink and as something that it was okay to partake of in large amounts, as opposed to harder alcohol, where there was a temperance movement that was very involved in trying to get people to quit drinking it and to quit drinking hard cider, frankly.”
Brown’s study explores the personalities behind the thriving brewing economy that put Pittsfield on the map in the 19th century.
“Jacob Gimlich and John White were brothers-in-law, they married sisters," she explained. "They were both German immigrants, and they arrived in Pittsfield in the 1860s and were part of a wave of German immigrants and other settlers in Pittsfield around that same time. They were part of a German community that certainly supported culturally specific bars and inns that catered to this population of German Americans. They founded the sort of rebooted brewery that became Gimlich and White and later the Berkshire Brewing Association, and it was the most commercially successful brewery that Pittsfield ever had. It ran from 1867 until finally dissolving itself in 1929, and at its height, it was a regional powerhouse in terms of brewing. It was the brewery that provided for Berkshire County and also west into New York State, south, and east into the rest of Massachusetts. There was no other brewery between Springfield and Albany except for the Berkshire Brewing Association.”
With locally produced brews once again in vogue, Berkshire County today recalls its first brewing heyday centuries ago.
“The interest in having locally produced beer, having beer that can be enjoyed at a variety of different venues is something that that is in common with the earlier era," Brown told WAMC. "And this idea that you want to try and localize your supply, localize your business, Gimlich and White made very clear that they would like to patronize local, ancillary businesses and support the local economy. They tried to get local farmers to grow barley, they tried to get local people to provide them with the hops that they needed. They were never quite successful in securing their entire supply chain to be in the Berkshires, but they certainly wanted that. And I think that's very consonant with the kinds of themes that we see today as well.”
Brown’s talk at 5:30 p.m. will be accompanied by tastings from contemporary Berkshire breweries like Berkshire Brewing Co., Hot Plate Brewing Co., and Shire Breu-Haus.
