Episode 2 of Doomed to Repeat

Live from Young Augustine’s, the great professor haunt in Atlanta’s Grant Park, we delve into the history of beer and the revolution in American drinking habits in the last thirty years.  People have become beer snobs in just the way people have always been wine snobs, but the upside is that we all have a vastly greater range of tastes to sample, from double IPAs to goses to summer ales.  What prompted these changes in the beer market, and how have they changed American culture?

We talk the long history of booze and politics in American life, such as the stigmatization of drinking with respect to immigrant and religious groups and rural bootleggers; taxes, tastes, and regulatory battles; and the generational shift toward new ways of drinking in the late twentieth and early twenty centuries.  From historians such as William Rorabaugh to Maureen Ogle and Georgia State’s very own Marni Davis, we know that booze has a history all its own.

(Indeed, ToM senior writer H. Robert Baker recently wrote a wonderful essay on the subject, “The End of Craft Beer.”)

To find out about the perils and promise of his brave new world of beer, we talk to Jonathan Baker of Monday Night Brewing, one of Atlanta’s greatest contributions to craft beer.  In terms of beer pairings… it is best when listened to the way it was recorded: soused.

This is the second episode of the new Doomed to Repeat podcast series, hosted by Alex Sayf Cummings and Nic Hoffmann.  The first, on the history of desegregation, features interviews with historians Ansley Erickson and Kevin Kruse and can be found here.