In 2025, Indiana was home to 185 breweries, good for 18th in the United States, which works out to 3.7 breweries per capita (defined as “breweries per 100,000 adults over the age of 21”).
That’s a ranking of 28th. Indiana’s population in 2015 was 6,973,333, or 17th in the country.
Meanwhile Maine, with only 1,414,874 residents (42nd) had 157 breweries (21st), or 14.2 per capita (2nd).
That’s right.
Second ― to Vermont nearby, which has 15.4 breweries per capita. It’s stunning. Had I not been inclined to wed a foreigner (well, a powerhouse redhead from Maine) it is likely that my atrophied, corn-fed Hoosier brain would shrug off these brewery statistics.
But Diana has taken me back to her home state twice, and now a third visit is underway. Fine beer has always been readily available there for sampling and refreshment.
Not only that, but it’s far cheaper than lobster rolls.
As an aside, at no point during any of these trips did I petulantly demand my Maine beer be brought to me “ice cold” in a frosted mixer pint, although this has less to do with Maine than my own gritty realism (and stubborn prickliness about adjective dependency).
Hip Hops: Cold beer conversation (a little truth, a little frustration)
Previously I’ve toured the Allagash and Shipyard breweries; enjoyed the Great Lost Bear beer bar and Gritty McDuff’s brewpub in Portland; and lamented the loss of Foulmouthed Brewing (also in Portland) and the relatively short-lived spinoff of Ebenezer’s Brewpub in Brunswick. Sebago Brewing was good, too.
I cannot recall drinking a bad beer anywhere in Maine, in defiance of statistical probability. The beer culture thereabouts? I’d say it is advanced, while we Hoosier lean more toward barbarism.
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Moving right along …
The larger point I’d like to pursue this week, as referencing my cherished seat on the board of advisors at the embryonic but fast-growing American Craft Beer Hall of Fame, is to make the case that Alan Pugsley belongs inside it, along with Peter Austin, who introduced Pugsley to the beer biz.
Amid craft beer’s rich narrative, Pugsley’s and Austin’s contributions are surely under-appreciated. Maybe that’s because they’re British, and their particular area of expertise, British-style ales, haven’t always slotted comfortably within the evolving pantheon of American craft beer.
Am I in the combative minority in decrying the general negligence of British-style ale in America?
You bet your damn bung-starter I am.
However, my familiar coordinates among the “principled albeit outnumbered” change nothing about British-style ale’s expansive place in my heart, particularly in the context of cask-conditioning.
In this excerpt from Best of British Beer, Emily Sale takes the ethos-charting words right out of my mouth.
For generations, British beer culture has been built around the pub session. Long conversations, shared stories, and multiple pints enjoyed over hours – not minutes. It was never about drinking fast or drinking strong. It was about drinking well.
Today, that tradition is making a powerful comeback in the form of British session beers. Lower in alcohol, big on flavour, and rooted in heritage, session beers are fast becoming one of the most important movements in modern craft beer.
A session beer is typically defined as a beer with a lower alcohol by volume (ABV) — usually between 3% and 4% — that can be enjoyed over a longer period without overwhelming the drinker. But session beers aren’t about compromise. They’re about balance.
The best session beers deliver full flavour without heavy alcohol; refreshment without blandness; and drinkability without dilution. It’s about creating a beer that fits into social life, not dominates it.
Styles like ordinary bitter, mild ale, golden ale and traditional pale ales
were designed for long, social drinking occasions. You could enjoy several pints, stay present in the conversation, and still walk home. Modern session beers are simply a contemporary evolution of that culture.
By contrast, American craft brewing has tended to evolve along the lines of power, volume and sheer olfactory exuberance. To this very day, most American “flagship” beers seem to begin at 6% abv; they’re double-this or triple-that; they push flavor characteristics to an extreme degree, collapsing in utter exhaustion, only to sleep it off then repeat the heights of extremity all over again the next day.
Okay, okay; my drinking life was like that for a long time.
Nowadays I find the pyrotechnics exhausting, although I’ll readily allow for such aspiration’s proper place in the cosmos. To each their own. Still, I’ve been beating the drum for session beers for so long that I have carpal tunnel in the brain.
Furthermore, what I genuinely miss are the regional variations that seemed to characterize American craft beer in its ascendency.
West Coast breweries were experimental with hops, Rocky Mountain breweries produced richly malty beers, much of the South was a conceptual desert (but grew out if it), and almost no one, anywhere, could find Belgium on a style map.
Concurrently, Maine in particular and New England in general sprouted more than a few breweries exhibiting a clear lineage to the British Isles. Peter Austin (1921 – 2014) and Alan Pugsley were instrumental in this.
In retrospect, their influence was breathtakingly pervasive.
In the past I’ve tended to credit Pugsley more than Austin, given his residency in Maine and the fact that he’s still on the ground consulting; he’s roughly my age, while the late Austin was of my father’s generation.
But I’ve come around to the view that they’re to be regarded as a team of brewery-inspiring Johnny Appleseeds, both worthy of the ACBHoF. Austin was Pugsley’s mentor in Great Britain, and worked for a long while at Hull Brewery. He was ready to retire in the late 1970s when a group led by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame proposed to build a brewery explicitly dedicated to traditional cask-conditioned real ale.
Ringwood Brewery was the result, and Austin agreed to be the brewer. Ringwood was a landmark, reviving traditional ways of brewing, which multinational corporations were intent on eliminating for the sake of efficiency (and profits).
Austin’s brewery design at Ringwood evolved into the “Original Peter Austin Brick Kettle Brewing System,” with a “brick enclosed, direct-fired kettle, wood clad mash/lauter tun and hot liquor back, and fish tail-equipped open fermentation vessels.”
It was built precisely to maximize multi-strain Ringwood yeast, sourced by Austin from Hull via Yorkshire, and described by Pugsley in a conversation with Julie Johnson at All About Beer magazine in 2010:
“The Ringwood yeast has a fast-attenuating yeast and a fast-flocculating yeast. The combination of them together means we can attenuate our beers in about two and a half days, which is a fast fermentation; and when we fine beer for cask, the yeast drops out of suspension within 12 hours and you have a crystal-clear, bright beer.”
This yeast, and the system Austin designed, was intended to produce classic British-style ales. If producing such ales was the objective of anyone, anywhere in the world looking to open a brewery, Austin’s name came up. The template was right there.
By 1986, Pugsley had been working for Austin ever since he left university in 1982 with a degree in biochemistry. Austin taught Pugsley practical brewing, and off they went, placing these ready-to-rock microbrewery systems across the map. Austin is credited with as many as 75 brewery startups, and Pugsley more than 80, with his first coming in Portland, Maine in 1986 at D.L. Geary Brewing (see the article by Tom Acitelli at All About Beer.
By the time I was becoming heavily involved with craft beer, the diligent beer hunter’s doctrine held that in New England, there were so many Austin brewing systems launched by Pugsley as consultant that the region’s “house character” was decidedly akin to ale from Merry Olde England.
Hazy IPA? That came waaay later.
Pugsley played his role in startups like Sea Dog, Federal Jack’s/Kennebunkport and Gritty McDuff’s, eventually becoming a part-owner at Shipyard. But he never chose to start a brewery of his own, and explains why (“The Johnny Appleseed of Craft Brewing: Alan Pugsley’s journey to share the craft of brewing beer,” by Jennifer Goss Duby at Brew View Vermont).
“I have so much fun helping other people establish their dreams…that I live it through them. It enables me to meet all these different people, all these different projects in different parts of the country and the world. I just really enjoy seeing people’s faces for the first time when we brew the first batch of beer and they taste it and a big smile comes up. I think I can say that 99.9999 percent of customers say that the first beer off the line is beyond their wildest dreams. It gives me a lot of satisfaction and pride. It continues the work that Peter Austin did in his retirement. To carry on his work—he was a true mentor and friend—is just delightful for me.”
I can’t find a comprehensive list, but breweries still in existence in Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey have Peter Austin brewhouses. Some readers will recall Arcadia Brewing out of Battle Creek, Michigan, where a Peter Austin brewhouse was used from 1996 – 2016 (Arcadia closed altogether in 2019).
As a member of the ACBHoF’s advisory board, my job is to join with other honorable members in making recommendations and contributing to the annual nominations cycle. Today’s column is my first step toward getting the word out about Alan Pugsley and Peter Austin.
Want more? Listen to this 2024 episode of the great John Holl’s podcast.
Photo credits: Pugsley’s Brewing Projects International (all).
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Previously at Hip Hops:
Hip Hops: Those first-ever draft Pilsner Urquells in Prague, 1987
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 44 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
As a co-owner (1990 – 2018) of New Albanian Brewing Company Pizzeria & Public House in New Albany, Indiana – founded in 1987, 1992, 2002 and 2009 – Roger played a seminal role in metro Louisville’s contemporary beer renaissance. He was beer director at Pints&union in New Albany from 2018 through 2023.
Roger’s “Hip Hops” columns on beer-related subjects have been a fixture since 2005 in Food & Dining Magazine, where he currently serves as associate editor and contributor. He is a former columnist at both the New Albany Tribune and LEO Weekly, and founder of the NA Confidential blog (2004 – 2020). Visit RogerBaylor.com for more.
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