Dayton brewing: lights, camera, beer

Mike Morgan (in blue) interviews me at Fifth Street Brew Pub. Photo courtesy Bret Kallmann Baker.

Dayton Beer isn’t out yet, but it seems to be drawing more attention already to Dayton’s brewing history.

A few weeks ago, I got a query out of the blue from Michael D. Morgan of Newport, Ky. He wanted to interview me for a web TV episode about Dayton’s brewing past.

To be honest, my book has been so all-consuming that I’ve only paid attention to Cincinnati when it related to the brewers and breweries I was writing about in Dayton and surrounding counties.

So I wasn't very familiar with Morgan, but I quickly learned he's the resident expert on brewing history in the Cincinnati region as president of Queen City History & Education. He teaches "Hops and History" at the University of Cincinnati and serves as curator of Cincinnati's Brewing Heritage Trail. He also hosts a weekly radio show called Barstool Perspective on Radio Artifact, and he’s written two books about Cincinnati’s brewing history, most recently Cincinnati Beer, released in April.

As it turns out, we have more in common than our interests in writing, history and beer. We share the same publisher, The History Press (a part of Arcadia Publishing Inc.)

But writing, teaching, leading tours and doing radio shows isn’t enough for Morgan: as I understand it, my interview is to be a part of a web TV episode about Dayton brewing, which in turn would be a part of a series he’s begun to post on YouTube.com’s “Brew Skies” channel in collaboration with Seven/Seventy-Nine, a Cincinnati video company.

So far, they’ve released one episode, “Wild Yeast and the Missing Linck.”

 It’s a fascinating documentary about their discovery of a 150-year-old strain of brewing yeast in the long-abandoned cellar of the defunct Linck Brewery, and the production earlier this year of a new golden ale —dubbed Missing Linck, of course—by Josh Elliott, Urban Artifact’s head of barrel-aged beer and an expert on wild-yeast and sour beers.

So on Saturday, June 29, I sat down on the back of the patio at Fifth Street Brew Pub with Morgan and a co-interviewer, Bret Kallmann Baker of Urban Artifact, facing across a barrel at the Seven/Seventy-Nine video crew and a battery of cameras and lights.

As interviews go, it was pretty easygoing, moreso as I sipped my way though a pint of Fifth Street’s Icebreaker IPA.

I don’t know if Morgan got anything useful from me, or if I just wasted a lot of perfectly good pixels. But if an episode about Dayton brewing appears—with or without me—I’ll post an update with a link to the episode. Fingers crossed.


P.S. Autographed copies of Cincinnati Beer are  available now on Morgan's website. Dayton Beer is due out July 22. Check my previous post for a schedule of my upcoming book tour, History and a Pint™, or download this flyer.