History of Brewing on History Channel

By Jon Abernathy | Filed in History

We caught a re-run of the History Channel‘s Modern Marvels series on Brewing, and I have to say, it was pretty good. They covered the history of beer and brewing pretty decently in an hour’s time, and were pretty fair overall. And I do mean history—from brewing’s earliest known origins in the Sumerian civilization, through Egypt, pre-historic Europe and on up through the ages.

Most interesting to me was some of the people they interviewed for the show, including Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, Jim Koch of Sam Adams, author Gregg Smith, and others. And, seeing behind the scenes of the commercial brewing process, both for big breweries (with 180,000-gallon fermenting tanks) to small craft breweries (drawing off beer right from the small tanks through the filtration system straight to the tap).

Anyone else catch this? If not, keep an eye to the listings for it to come around again. It originally aired December 13, but the History Channel site doesn’t have a time for the next time it’s on. But it’s worth it if you can catch it.

7 comments

  2. Doh! I love the History Channel, this would have made everything come full circle, beer and HC!

    They did one on wiskey that was really cool, covered everything from Moonshine to good stuff.

  3. Yeah, they had those on the same day too: "Distilling" and "Distilling 2". They were pretty interesting also–covered most distilled liquors, including absinthe and moonshine.

  5. I’d really like to see that, but I don’t have cable. Anyone know of a web-version or DVD of that particular show?

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