My story …

I have been fascinated by beer ever since I can remember. My love of beer started early, at age five or six, in my hometown of Düsseldorf, Germany, when my father pressed a one-Mark coin into my little fist and handed me a liter-size glass pitcher. And off I went as swiftly as my nimble feet would take me to the restaurant around the block, where the waiter filled my pitcher right to the brim with Altbier drawn from the belly-bung tap of a wooden keg. On my way home — now in carefully measured steps — I never failed to collect a surreptitious reward for my delivery service. By the time I got back home with my precious payload, there was always a centimeter of beer missing from the pitcher. There was often also a telltale ring of foam around my mouth that betrayed my felonious deed … but my father only smiled. He had his after-dinner beer and did not care.

By the time I was fourteen, I augmented my meager ration of pocket money by working on weekends as an assistant and later as a cub writer in a news wire agency, where, after a hectic day on the telephone and in front of a typewriter (we are still in the 1960s!) the crew usually went out to an artists’ pub for a beer, or two, or three, or … I was usually the youngest of the group, still below the German legal drinking age of 16. But even then, I had already internalized, almost osmotically, that beer brings people together.

Benjamin Franklin never said that beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy, as some people maintain (old Ben said something to that effect about French wine, in French, while in France), but the sentiment is nonetheless true. Beer is a social lubricant; it affirms; it consoles; it induces joy; and it indeed makes us happy. That joy of beer has never left me to this day. Eventually, it even forced me to transition from just a beer drinker to a beer maker. That happened shortly after 1969 when I arrived by boat in New York harbor only to realize to my horror that, unlike in my hometown, there was no beer with flavor to be had in my new land. Being already an avid amateur cook, I quickly and optimistically resolved to figure out how to make my own beer, which turned me into one of America’s earliest modern home brewers.

After my university years, I began a career in journalism and publishing while also perfecting my brewing skills. By the time the craft brew movement had taken off, I decided to chuck my corporate job and turn pro. I finally had arrived! What had started with a forbidden sip out of a pitcher on a street in Düsseldorf had finally become my full-time occupation. Since then, I have dealt with brewing professionals on all continents except Antarctica. And the love of beer is still driving me in my work to this day. — Horst Dornbusch