Photo by Aaron Spicer.
Toasting beer’s long-lasting legacy in the Metro-D.C. area with author and historian Garrett Peck.
By Aileen McElroy • Photography By Aaron Spicer
In the summer of 1984, local historian Garrett Peck fell in love with beer. As a 16-year-old exchange student in Hamburg, Germany, a teenaged Peck remembers relishing his first fresh brewed lager.
Every night that summer Peck and his host family of four ate dinner at 6 p.m. and continued the evening at one of Hamburg’s many bars and beer gardens. Since the drinking age in Germany is 16, Peck freely sampled and savored the country’s bounty of native beers including a Javer lager, a Kölsch from Cologne and a Duesseldorf Altbier. Seated in the outdoor beer garden sipping suds on a pleasant summer evening, the family and Peck unwound over a beer or two, attaining the ideal state of gemütlichkeit—what Peck defines as beer happiness—a state of being when all present have a warm glow from the sipping of beer and talking quietly amid a cozy setting.
Peck cultivated his love for beer further in Deutschland as a Virginia Military Institute student spending a year abroad in Hamburg and as a U.S. Army officer stationed in Mannheim and Baumholder. Over his five years spent in Germany, Peck traveled to various villages and grew impressed with the magnitude of breweries and accompanying beer gardens dotting the landscape.
When visiting Germany nowadays, sipping a fresh brew is a priority. On a recent trip his good friend Alex Luther, an Augsburg native, picked up Peck at the Munich airport, and in no time the friends were seated at the Weihenstephan Brewery in Freising. At the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world, the two celebrated the morning with a toast over a hearty breakfast popular in the state of Bavaria—a pretzel, sausage and, of course, beer.
Peck’s potent labor of love
As a literary journalist, local historian and beer scholar, Peck, 47, has now poured his love of both beer and history into a new book titled “Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C.”
Peck’s 2015 book “Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.” chronicles the famous poet’s decade in the nation’s capital. Photo by Aaron Spicer.
“Capital Beer” is a new addition to a series containing more than two dozen books on the history of beer in the U.S. and Canada with titles spanning from “Boston Beer” to “Idaho Beer.” The Arlington author called his latest tome on beer a labor of love.
History Press contacted Peck to write the story of beer in Washington, and the Arlington historian strove to cover the full timeline of beer within the city’s original 100 square miles.
Since its publication in March 2014, “Capital Beer” has received steady praise including vibrant reviews from The Washington Post, the Hill Rag and Brewery History, the journal of the Brewery History Society.
In “Capital Beer,” Peck taps into more than 240 years of beer’s potent local history, beginning in 1770s Alexandria at the Wales Brewery run by Andrew Wales, a Tory during the American Revolution and a brewer for 28 years.
“We go a ways back which is nice, not just the recent stuff that has happened in the past couple years,” says Peck.
The “Capital Beer” author devotes a few chapters to the waves of 1880s German immigrants who opened dozens of breweries in Washington and changed the landscape of beer in the city for the better. With their recipe for lager, they brought a much-appreciated gift to Washingtonians, offering a refreshing antidote to hot and muggy summers. Before lager, heavier English ales were on the market and failed to reach mass audiences. Washingtonians quickly acquired a taste for the lighter appeal of lager in the late 19th century. To supply demand, the Germans opened beer gardens, which were more family-friendly than saloons and bars. Friends and families flocked together during the summer to cool off in the beer gardens, sip a newfound beverage and enjoy gemütlichkeit.
“People fell in love with lager. The response was huge,” says Peck. “It was a perfect end in the summertime and nice to drink year-round, so this began a perfect thing for D.C.”
Peck writes of beer’s immense rise in demand during the Civil War, when Union soldiers stationed in the city quenched their thirst on lager, and notes that by war’s end, beer had eclipsed whiskey as the national beverage. Impressively, after the Civil War, breweries emerged as the second-largest employer after the federal government.
In “Capital Beer,” Peck profiles many of the city’s profitable brewers and devotes a chapter to Washington’s leading 19th- and 20th-century brewer, Christian Heurich, a German immigrant who made a name for himself in Washington and successfully brewed beer for nearly 90 years.
Peck’s beer chronicles continue into the 20th century when brewing saturated the city. In 1903 a beer war engulfed Heurich and powerhouse brewers who could each produce 100,000 barrels of beer per year.
“A surprising thing I found in my research was the yearlong beer pricing war,” Peck says. “It was just Economics 101. There were too many brewers, too much capacity and too few customers. There were four big brewers, and they kind of ganged up against Heurich who was the biggest of all the brewers, and he didn’t want to lower prices.”
From the heyday of Heurich, Peck guides the reader through the Temperance Movement and down the agonizing road to Prohibition before beer’s great revival in craft brewing.
D.C. brewing and the rise of craft beer production
Since Prohibition, when bootleggers preferred profiteering from distilled spirits as opposed to beer, Washington has been known as a cocktail and wine town. But in recent years taps began flowing freely again with locally brewed beer.
As a college student in the 1980s, Peck remembers that a small number of pioneering craft beers from other cities began populating local bars—Boston’s Sam Adams and New York’s Pete’s Wicked Ale among a few others.
In 1991, the brewing revival began on a small scale in D.C. with the legalization of brewpubs. Shortly after, Capitol City Brewing opened on New York Avenue. The craft beer movement gained it legs after the Great Recession of 2007–2008 when Washingtonians sought more wallet-friendly options as opposed to cocktails and wine.
After a drought of more than 50 years, large-scale production brewing resumed within the city limits. Peck pinpoints the year 2011 as a landmark in production brewing. Within the year, Port City Brewing in Alexandria, DC Brau Brewing Company, Chocolate City Beer (now closed) and 3 Stars Brewing Company in D.C. opened.
“There was all this pent-up demand, and we forgot that Washington was once a beer town,” says Peck. “Everyone kind of shifted to wine and cocktails and forgot about beer. Now it’s just amazing to see in such a short order the explosion of choices that we have now.”
Citizens are raising a well-crafted pint of beer at new brewpubs sprouting up throughout the Metro-D.C. region. At the bar, Washingtonians can now order anything from a Port City Monumental IPA and a DC Brau Penn Quarter Porter to a 3 Stars Peppercorn Saison, Atlas Brew Works Rowdy rye ale or a Hellbender Kölsch. To complement the local beer scene there are a bevy of year-round beer festivals—the D.C. Beer Festival in the spring, D.C. Beer Week in August, the Snallygaster Gargantuan Beer Jamboree and many local Oktoberfests.
According to Peck, one of the craft beer brewers’ keys to success is marketing from the ground up. Peck acknowledged that craft brewers of today are taking a page out of the book from Napa, California, wineries and realizing that if you get people to tour your place and try the brews on tap, they may be lifelong drinkers of your beverage. The momentum of the locavore food movement also is helping to boost craft beer sales.
“I think local brewing kind of fits into that movement,” says Peck. “That’s part of the experience right there, that it’s local. People take pride in local businesses. They get to meet people and know that their purchases directly impact the people.”
Drinking local
Peck always scouts out the local beer kiosk while cheering on the Washington Nationals. He also likes to sip a local craft beer at the Westover Beer Garden & Haus in his Alexandria neighborhood while listening to live tunes or gathering with friends on the patio when the weather is warm. Peck looks forward to the opening of Sehkraft, a new brewpub in Clarendon just down the street from his abode.
“I’ll be spoiled,” Peck says, laughing.
To Peck, beer has always been a versatile beverage of many merits. As opposed to other alcoholic drinks, he finds the lower alcohol content allows one to sample a few different beers in a single sitting without becoming incapacitated. He deems beer an affordable luxury and admires the pleasant acidic and palate-cleansing attributes that beer can bring to a diverse array of entrees from sirloin steak to chicken curry.
His personal taste in beer changes with the season. In the fall, Peck gravitates toward Oktoberfest beers. To brace against the chill of winter, Peck goes with hearty ales, strong stouts and malty bocks. To cool off in the summer he can be found with a lager or light IPA in hand. One of his current favorites is Port City Brewing’s Ways & Means, which is a session India Pale Ale, meaning it is lower in alcohol so one can consume several drinks at one session or sitting. Peck recently brought a growler of the Ways & Means to a party.
“It was a big hit, even among the people who are normally turned off by IPAs’ astringency and high alcohol levels,” says Peck. “Another beer I love is Portner Brewhouse’s Cream Ale. Cream ale is an American invention and is light, zippy and a bit lemony—not unlike a German Kölsch. It’s a very approachable, friendly beer.”
As a historian Peck respects beer’s 6,000-year timeline that stretches back to ancient Mesopotamia. While on vacation, he likes to visit some of the oldest beer establishments in the country and has set foot in Boston’s Green Dragon, a snug 17th century pub frequented formerly by Paul Revere, as well as McSorley’s Ale House, Manhattan’s oldest tavern. His ventures have brought him to the historic Latrobe Brewery in western Pennsylvania and to the Over the Rhine brewery district in Cincinnati, which he calls an amazing time capsule.
Garrett Peck has not only written extensively about the history of beer, he has also contributed to numerous historical anthologies. Photos by Aaron Spicer.
Tapping into history
Peck continually pairs his love of beer with history. Besides “Capital Beer” he is an author of a smattering of historical titles—“The Prohibition Hangover,” “Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t,” “The Potomac River: A History and Guide” and “The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry.” He has contributed to “The Civil War Battlefield Guide,” second edition, and his “Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet” was released this March.
Peck serves on the board of the Arlington Historical Society and the Woodrow Wilson House and is a member of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C. He traces his love of history to a childhood cross-country trip. Alongside his parents and two sisters, the family drove from California to Minnesota to reunite with cousins. Along the way, Peck and his family visited the Black Hills, Yellowstone Park and the tiny town close to the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in Nebraska where his father grew up. He remembers his parents introducing him to these historical sites and peppering them with questions as his fascination with the history of the land grew.
Back in his native Sacramento, Peck began checking historical books out of the library. In high school, he grew interested in the American Civil War, and in college he pursued a double major in history and German at the Virginia Military Institute.
“History is actually one of the reasons that brought me out east,” Peck says. “I went to VMI, and I was thinking of doing a career in the military, which I ended up not doing, but the other part is I wanted to explore and see the different battlefields.”
Sudsy history tours
Peck ended up with a career in telecommunications and an intriguing side job that caters to beer and history. As a licensed tour guide, Peck melded his love of history and beer to create several historical beer tours, which include the D.C. Brewing Tour, the Historic Breweries of Alexandria tour and the Historic Washington Bars tour.
He conducts tours by bike, bus, foot or car depending on the tour. The Historic Breweries of Alexandria, a 2.5-mile walking tour, was recently in demand. The tour covers the site of the first brewery in the Metro-D.C. area and weaves through Alexandria’s alleys and historic taverns.
The Temperance tour is perennially popular and is the first tour that Peck created in 2006. The tour serves as the inspiration for “Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t.” Peck initially led this tour of Prohibition-related sites for a group of high school civics teachers, and over the years, it grew in popularity and has been featured on C-SPAN Book TV and the History Channel. The start of the tour is at the Cogswell Temperance Fountain, which was erected in 1882 by a California dentist named Henry Cogswell who strategically placed the fountain amid the hubbub of drinking establishments to encourage people to drink water instead of whiskey.
“Most of the stops on the tour are kind of off-the-wall sites that most people have walked past but never stopped at and seen,” says Peck. “For example, the Cogswell Temperance Fountain—most Washingtonians have no clue that we actually have a Temperance fountain. It’s right across from the Archives, and they may have walked past it but never noticed it.”
Other stops include the brick Calvary Baptist Church, site of The Anti-Saloon League’s first national convention in 1895. The most popular stop on the tour is the home of Woodrow Wilson, the president in office when the 18th Amendment passed enacting Prohibition. Wilson was known to like wine and love scotch. Peck leads his tour downstairs to President Wilson’s damp, musty and very rare wine cellar.
“They get to see a Prohibition-era wine cellar,” says Peck. “None of the wine is good anymore, but they are still in historic bottles, so it’s cool. People go nuts when they see them, and that’s when all the iPhones and cameras come out.”
The tour usually wraps up with a happy hour in Dupont Circle where you can celebrate your freedom to imbibe at the Darlington House downstairs cantina or the Bier Baron, former site of the Brickseller, which opened in 1957 and earned the Guinness World Record for largest beer menu.
The Heurich House Museum’s ties to D.C. brewing
Peck credits the Huerich House Museum as the go-to for Washington’s brewing legacy. Jan Evans, Christian Heurich’s granddaughter, opened the museum in the honor of Washington’s leading brewer who spent nearly a century brewing, working up until nine days before his death in 1945 at the age of 103. Peck dedicated “Capital Beer” to Evans and calls her a guiding force in creating the Heurich House Museum.
“I really admire Jan. She really opened up the doors for me with the family history,” says Peck.
Over the past decade Christian Heurich’s descendants and former brewery employees donated furniture and personal items to the museum. The collection within Heurich’s ornate Victorian home exemplifies the historic wealth in brewing. The museum is open for tours and hosts events such as a monthly History & Hops program featuring local craft beer tastings. The museum also organizes live music and movies and hosts yoga sessions to acknowledge Heurich’s belief in holistic healing. In honor of his German roots, Oktoberfest and a German Christmas market are celebrated annually at the museum.
“It really has been an incredible monument to D.C.’s brewing,” says Peck. “The house protects our brewing history but also points the way forward to where we are going with beer. I think Christian would be very proud of what the house is doing now and that it is introducing new kinds of beer to Washingtonians as well.”
(May 2015)