Dayton Beer

  © 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney When it opened in 2013, the  Star City Brewing Co.  revived a piece of Miamisburg history. Built in 1828 as a sawmill skirting the Miami and Erie Canal, the structure had last housed the  Peerless Mill Inn , a popular local supper club. What's more, Star City also revived, after more than a century, Miamisburg's own brewing industry. Star City Brewing Co. Star City stands at 319 South Second Street. A block north is the  Lucky Star Brewery , which came a year later to occupy another canal-era industrial building. Together, they established a small brewery district on the edge of downtown, and they may have created a first: the first time Miamisburg had two breweries operating at once. My book's main title is Dayton Beer , but it includes other communities in a region roughly bounded by Xenia, Springfield, Wapakoneta, Minster, Union City and Greenville. I devoted a whole chapter to Miamisburg for a lar...

© 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney I'll be at The Barrel House in downtown Dayton this week to share a bit of the Miami Valley's brewing history, especially one Dayton brewer who sticks to this location in my mind. It's one of those strange associations the brain—mine, anyway—makes between seemingly unrelated things. In this case, it has more to do with boots than barrels, or even beer. Nicholas "Nick" Thomas (1825-1913) is one of three strong men and women among Dayton's 19th century brewers whom I'll profile in my "History and a Pint" presentation at The Barrel House, 417 East Third Street, at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 15. I'll sign copies of Dayton Beer and I'll have books available for sale. Thomas grew up on a farm in the kingdom of Hanover, now in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany. He immigrated to the United States in late 1847, landing in New Orleans and making his way up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Cincinnat...

© 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney I had planned to sit down Sunday morning and write my weekly blog about Dayton's brewing history. Instead, I awoke to the horrific news of a mass shooting in the city's historic Oregon District—the second in our country in less than 24 hours, the 250th this year alone. The ability to write or do anything meaningful seemed to drain out of me. Brewing history seemed irrelevant. Over the course of the day, I reflected on what I had learned about Dayton in looking through more than two centuries of its history, and what meaning I might draw from it. I had learned Dayton—and by Dayton, I mean the Dayton region—was settled and built by tough, resilient people. People who weathered incredible hardships just to get here, and more to build lives for themselves, their families and their community. This is the worst mass shooting of which I'm aware in Dayton's history. It will leave a scar on all of us, and on the city. But under th...