Introduction: International Knowledge Transfer and Circulation within the Brewing Industry

Before global brands and multinational firms began to dominate the brewing industry during the second half of the 20^th century, the production and consumption of beer was a local and regional phenomenon – this is at least the familiar narrative found in some of the literature. However, this view obscures previous international exchanges and transfers when, for instance, German technological advances accelerated the worldwide development of a highly professionalized industry. In turn, U.S. breweries have provided innovative marketing impulses since the early 20^th century. These observations came up in our own research^[1] and prompted further reflection on the historical role of the transfer and circulation of brewing knowledge, broadly defined as not just expert scientific and marketing expertise but also as practical brewing knowledge.

By taking beer as a lens to approach the question of how informal knowledge, technologies and marketing methods circulated, the aim of our special issue is to overcome the national framework, i.e. to ask for transnational and/or transregional connections and thus to highlight the international dimension that developed early on prior to the rise of multinational firms such as Anheuser-Busch-InBev. The second half of the 18^th century laid the foundations for professionalization and expansive (imperial) networks, marking the development from experience and informal knowledge to science and formal education. Thanks to modern chemistry, beer became a global commodity that could be locally adapted.

Accordingly, our special issue adds to the field by emphasizing the historical development since the 18^th century. The majority of anthologies and special issues on beer history (mostly from the context of the Beeronomics conferences held over the last decade) have so far emphasized recent developments since the 1990s, reflecting a mostly purely economic perspective. For instance, Jens Gammelgaard and Christoph Dörrenbächer’s anthology The Global Brewery Industry. Markets, Strategies, and Rivalries (2013) follows an international business approach covering no historical development.^[2] Similarly, the introduction to the special issue “Beer, Brewing, and Business History” (Business History 2016), edited by economists Ignazio Cabras and David M. Higgins, covers the history of brewing from ancient to modern times on three pages only.^[3] While five out of the eight articles cover historic developments, they do not follow a specific question besides the broad relationship between beer and business: for example, Koen Deconinck, Eline Poelmans, and Johan Swinnen address the role of beer excise in the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule (1566-1648), Ranjit S. Dighe analyses the influence of the 19^th century U.S. temperance movement on the current growth of micro-breweries, and William M. Foster, Kai Lamertz, Diego M. Coraliola, and Jochem Kroezen deal with 200 years of corporate development in Ontario, Canada.^[4]

In close relation, our special issue is situated within the recent shift of drinking studies beyond the national framework. While beer history has received renewed scholarly attention over the last three decades, most studies focus on nation-state or smaller regional units. For instance, the 1998 volume The Dynamics of the International Brewing Industry (New York: Routledge), edited by R. G. Wilson and T. R. Gourvish, features contributions focusing exclusively on national brewing industries. However, more recent studies look beyond the nation.^[5] Special mention deserves Malcolm F. Purinton who has just published Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing 2023), offering a much-welcomed study of pilsner beer in a transnational age of empire. Jeffrey Pilcher’s (who has also published in this issue) Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity will be published in 2024. Both authors participated in our online conference in October 2021 which was attended by beer historians and sociologists from the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

The present special issue is the result of this conference, which highlighted the variety of regional and international connections within the beer industry. As the conference proceeded it became clear that – apart from the technical field, where exchange about progress and orientation towards technically advanced breweries was a conscious procedure of the brewers or brewery managers - knowledge transfer is not necessarily an intentional, strategic process. Rather, the contributions at the conference exposed a complex thematic and temporal bandwidth of transfer beyond a tactical approach of breweries or the conscious knowledge acquisition of individual brewers: the wealth of topics discussed, from scientific exchanges within trade networks, to knowledge of hop cultivation crossing borders while migrating, to the socio-cultural and ideological entanglements of brewery workers, underlined the multifaceted nature of knowledge transfer which needs to be tackled from multiple perspectives and not just primarily within the field of economic history. Likewise, the presentations put a spotlight on the wide variety of actors involved in knowledge circulation: besides brewers, for instance, scientists, merchants, advertising executives, engineers, and administrative officials used, translated, and localized brewing knowledge.

Linking the history of beer to the burgeoning field of the history of knowledge and, in particular, its circulation, allows us to emphasize (early) transnational/regional transfers within the beer industry transcending predefined spaces.^[6] Already in 2004, James A. Secord proposed a new history of science, shifting the focus from the origin to the historic and spatial movement of knowledge.^[7] Accordingly, we follow a more integrative approach, not only bridging economic and cultural history, but also uniting the (global) history of science and the history of humanities under the umbrella of the (new) history of knowledge.^[8] Beer is a local and global actor, “the boundaries of alcohol flows are seen as permeable and fluid, rather than postcolonial studies.as clearly demarcated by national boundaries or by ascribed, or prevalent, cultural customs”.^[9] postcolonial studies. Knowledge is constantly evolving, changing, adapting, and with regard to brewing, this knowledge was (and is) scientifically, economically, politically, and culturally formed, embedded in socio-political contexts, imbued with political ideologies and shaped by power relations. Thus, in order to acknowledge the multidirectionality of transfer and circulation we also situate beer history within postcolonial studies.^[10] Research in beer (or rather, alcohol, in general) has remained largely Euro-and Anglo-centric in its regional scope,^[11] and as Jeffrey Pilcher has aptly put it, beer’s global reach “can be told as a story of Western cultural imperialism”.^[12] Yet, we also seek to question the Westernization paradigm, especially for the 19^th century and with regard to so-called peripheries such as Latin America and the Middle East. The analytical concept of circulation allows us to look beyond this centre/periphery binary, as colonial historians Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, explain, circulation denotes a “double movement of going back and forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely. In circulating, things, men and notions often transform themselves”.^[13] Accordingly, geographies covered in our special issue are not only (Central) Europe and the U.S. but also countries in Africa such as Nigeria and Egypt, Mexico in the Americas and Palestine in the Near East (the latter, in particular, is a highly understudied region when it comes to alcohol). Moreover, some contributions follow a decidedly multinational approach, connecting the histories of different regions.

Overall, all contributions emphasize the global spread of beer and evolving blueprints (and failures) while also highlighting local developments. Certain patterns in production and marketing were repeated across regional and national spaces but regional adaptations and variations also continued to exist due to local conditions and tastes. Technological innovations such as refrigeration and industrial water treatment allowed for an ever more standardized product and hence, global spread. Yet it is also evident that international factors in advertising never completely displaced domestic ones because beer was always linked to regional and/or national identity. As Philip Sarasin has pointed out, the history of knowledge does not ask whether a form of knowledge works or not, but rather puts a spotlight on the practices and process of how, when, and why certain types of knowledge (dis)appear, as well as who creates, circulates, and thus transforms it.^[14]

Therefore, we asked our authors to address some of the following questions: What were the impulses for international exchange and at what levels did it occur (personal/individual, company, network, research, organizations, migration, media etc.)? How is beer linked to questions of power, especially the role of colonialism and nationalism? As beer followed global empires, indigenousness did not necessarily get lost. How was local, indigenous knowledge put to use in beer production and marketing? What were the (possible) connections between local distributors of imported beer and the beginnings of local production, either of new local or of international brands? Furthermore, as the beer industry became male dominated, in how far should the globalization of beer be analysed as a process of both racial and gender exclusion?

The first journals devoted entirely to beer brewing began to emerge in the late 1850s (the first brewing journal was Der Bierbrauer in the German states, founded in 1859). How did brewing knowledge travel and what role did migration, brewing schools, newspapers, and trade journals play? For an increasingly more educated and internationally mobile class of brewers, trade journals were key in circulating scientific and trade knowledge. However, while acknowledging the journal’s potential and the brewer’s mobility, what were their limits such as language barriers, funding, and crises such as war, resource scarcity, and state regulations? In turn, how did this affect the direction beer knowledge circulated? While England was the centre of innovation in the 18^th century, Bavaria and later Bohemia became the hubs for brewing and the hotbed of transfers during the second half of the 19^th century.

In navigating the global and the local, transfers of brewing technology and marketing techniques were essential for companies’ success as highlighted by Jeffrey Pilcher’s contribution on the global spread of Guinness during the age of empire and beyond. While German-style lager came to dominate the global market in the second half of the 19^th century, Irish stout was able to hold its market share by preserving both an aura of authenticity and a curative reputation. Beginning in the early 1930s, the brewery opened local factories overseas, overcoming not only the challenges of raw material shortages and local bureaucracies but also the desire to brew a uniform Guinness Stout (especially in tropical environments). Tailoring its advertising to local populations added to the brewery’s international success. For instance, Guinness transferred promotional techniques such as nuanced portrayals of African masculinity aimed at a more aspirational black middle class.

Like Pilcher, Semih Gökatalay also deals with the entanglement of beer, empire, and knowledge hierarchies, though in the different geo-political location of Mandatory Palestine. Using the example of Palestine Brewery Ltd, which dominated local markets, Gökatalay shows that the emergence and growth of the brewing industry since the 1930s depended heavily on the transfer of brewing knowledge and expertise between Palestine and the rest of the world. He emphasizes the international network of Jewish entrepreneurs in Palestine and abroad: for example, the idea to establish the Palestine Brewery came from Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, who pointed out the growing Palestinian demand for beer and immediately found an investor in the French industrialist Gaston Dreyfus. Ultimately, the brewery’s rapid success depended on its ability to meet the growing civilian and military demand for beer created by the arrival of European Jews and British troops during the interwar period. For this, in turn, it was crucial that the company was able to produce different types of beer according to Western standards by adopting the production methods of European beer.

In her contribution, Gretchen Pierce underlines that the development of the brewing industry was not only characterized by the adoption of Western practices. As in the case made by Pilcher for the African context, local needs also had a great weight in Mexico. Since the end of the 19^th century, the Mexican brewing industry had been strongly influenced by Europe and the U.S. However, by analysing more than 200 advertisements from the 1910s-1930s, Pierce shows that in addition to Western marketing influences, the advertising of Mexican beer was simultaneously tied to political, economic, and intellectual trends at home. Identity became more fluid in Mexican society between 1910 and 1940, people from all social classes and ethnic groups gained prominence, and breweries sought to appeal to these diverse consumer groups in their various marketing campaigns.

Also using the Mexican brewing industry as an example, Susan Gauss analyses the centralization of knowledge on Mexican barley malt cultivation, which was the result of cooperation between U.S. and Mexican agricultural scientists in the wake of the Green Revolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, the consolidation of a previously decentralized and disorganized knowledge system in the hands of brewers occurred in parallel with the strong concentration of the Mexican brewing industry, which was dominated by three companies. These three centralized data on seed research and malt barley production in a newly formed joint enterprise and enforced an extensive contract farming system that gave them control over the dissemination of new knowledge about seed varieties. At the same time, this also contributed to rural inequality because the system aimed at rapid agro-industrial concentration in malt barley production and marginalized small farmers who had previously dominated barley malt production.

Besides barley, the key ingredients of beer are hops, yeast, and water – all of which are subject to availability given the different climates worldwide. Yet, as the beer market globalized, breweries moved toward producing and marketing beers that were as identical as possible, no matter the location. Since the quality and composition of the local water has a decisive influence on the quality and taste of beer, the treatment of water is critical for creating an identical product. Thomas Schuetz points out that while breweries were dependent on innovations from the mechanical and plant engineering sector for complex water treatment technology, its pivotal development did not come from within the industry itself. Schuetz demonstrates how the vertical and horizontal transfer of technology developed, using the example of industrial water treatment plants for the brewing industry. He also shows that the brewing industry only adapted the technology after it had been safely mastered in other industries, where medium-sized manufacturers actively worked on its dissemination.

Alison Orton tackles yet another key topic on the question of knowledge transfer: the effects of migration. She analyses how nationalism and competing ideologies migrated with brewery workers across the Atlantic, from the late Habsburg Empire to the U.S. between 1890 and 1914. Brewery workers carried with them the nationalist and ethnic conflicts of their homeland, between the state-wide multiethnic (though German-dominated) unions and ‘separatist’ monoethnic Czech unions. U.S. brewery unions saw the latter as undermining working-class solidarity and effectiveness which, in turn, made it difficult for workers associated with separatism to find unionized work in the U.S., causing significant return migration. Moreover, as Orton demonstrates, not all union newspapers truthfully reported on these tensions. Union publications were the primary conduit of knowledge for brewery workers about their profession and the situation of brewery workers worldwide, providing advice on whether to migrate. Hence, misinformation and/or selective silences in order to promote certain narratives about working-class solidarity had a huge impact on labour mobility. Closely related, Czech monolingualism became a knowledge barrier overseas.

While the beer industry’s rapid internationalization and technological innovation after 1870 has often been perceived as a watershed, the respective contributions of Astrid Schneck and Pavla Šimková argue for a closer examination of the transition period beginning in mid-18^th century Central Europe. Rather than seeing a clean break, both authors view the development of beer brewing from a craft to an industry as a continuous and back-and-forth process. Taking Bavaria as a case study, Schneck traces 15 individual travelling routes of brewers from two Upper Franconian towns. She argues that this form of journeymen’s travels made their education international from early on. Moreover, she analyses how educational opportunities improved and diversified over the 19^th century with the advent of brewery-related courses and schools. At the same time, many brewers kept on travelling, some out of traditionalism but many also due to the lack of money.

Building on the formalized system of journeymen’s travels and brewery schools, Šimková draws our attention to the growing international network of brewers who began exchanging ideas in the mid-18^th century, becoming ever more willing to implement the latest technological advances. Following three generations of brewers, Šimková starts with the life story of František Ondřej Poupě, one of the first professional brewers who began to engage in the theoretical debate about beer brewing on the verge of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, brewers placed value on formal training as well as transregional and soon also international travel for inspiration. According to the Spaten brewery’s own anniversary publications, Gabriel Sedlmayr Jr.’s alleged British industrial espionage in 1833 probably contributed to the success of the brewery. Shortly afterwards, with the third generation of brewers, the convergence of practical brewing and scientific study had become the new standard, with employments stretching across continents, as attested by the U.S. career of the Bohemian-born Anton Schwarz.

With this special issue we hope to add to the rich and ever-growing field of drinking studies. Some questions remain unanswered, especially regarding corporate strategies, as some sources are simply not available or remain silent on the question of circulation.^[15] This certainly leaves room for further research such as discussing how far knowledge transfer may be considered consensual or, in fact, a form of economic espionage.^[16] Where did cooperation end and competition begin? Transfer and circulation hinged on a variety of factors – scientific, economic, political, and cultural. All in all, the eight essays showcase the potential of a transnational/regional approach to beer history that combines an economic and cultural perspective.