Daily Quirks of a Beer Archivist
I wanted to do a brief follow-up to “The Learning Curve of a Student Archivist” about the side-effects of learning about Oregon beer culture. These are things I’ve noticed as a new beer nerd in my daily life that truly make the things I do outside of the archives unique and colorful.
You get excited about all the cool beer at local restaurants, and then frustrated when you can’t try it. Believe it or not, I am actually not 21 yet. This gives me the distinction of knowing a lot about local beer while simultaneously not being able to drink it legally. Recently, I went to American Dream Pizza for dinner with my boyfriend after work, and he asked me for details about all the beer on tap. Easily, I could tell him which ones were from Corvallis, other areas of Oregon or a large corporation, the bitterness of each one, the style and other cool facts, such as the sustainability efforts of the brewery etc. Another time, I saw Nectar Creek mead on tap at a restaurant, and got exasperated that I couldn’t have some. Nectar Creek is a meadery based in Corvallis that I learned about in my oral history with Kyle Almlie, and as a person that’s not fond of bitter flavors, I look forward to a time when I can try it.
You have your 21st birthday plans to do an Oregon beer tour already figured out. Since I have to wait to try beer in taprooms and restaurants, I also have plenty of time to figure what I want to do when I can actually go. Currently, my list of places to visit are Heater Allen Brewing for their lagers (as I heard about in Lisa Allen and Rick Allen’s oral histories), the Widmer Bros. Gasthaus, Nectar Creek, McMenamins, 2 Town Ciderhouse, Ninkasi, Wandering Aengus Ciderhouse, Deschutes and Apple Outlaw Cidery to name a few. It’s gonna be a cool birthday weekend of finally meeting really cool brewers and tasting their delicious products.
You have a lot of imaginary friendships and can recognize people by their voices alone. A few months ago, we had a book event (as written about in “That time when Peter Kopp gave a talk OSU -- and Al Haunold helped him out”) featuring the book Hoptopia by Peter Kopp, who helped Tiah establish the archives. After his presentation, there was a Q&A session. During the session, an older man stood up and started speaking about hop varieties and various hop breeders. As he stood, I thought he was just an audience member with a question, but as he spoke, I realized that he was Dr. Al Haunold, the renowned hop geneticist who developed Cascade in the 1970s. I knew who he was because I had been finishing the transcription of his oral history a week before. It’s funny, watching all these people’s interviews, they’ve become a mix of friends and celebrities to me, so it’s exciting to see them in person from time to time. It’s also weird because, depending on the person, I know their life story, family history and entire career path, yet I’ve never met them. It would also be pretty weird to start meeting and talking to these people because I know all these details.
You recommend beer chemist jobs to all your graduating friends with a science background. One of my favorite oral histories is the one with Dana Garves, who worked as the lab technician for Ninkasi Brewing and was crucial to their space program. Interestingly enough, she ended up working for the brewery through a craigslist ad for the position, and initially wanted to be a chemistry teacher. She now works as the founder and director of BrewLab, which performs beer analysis tests for small microbreweries in Oregon. Her story is so cool that I tell my chemistry and biochemistry friends looking for jobs to check chemist positions in local breweries or businesses like Garves’.
You feel like there should be a National Treasure movie about you because you work in an archive. Growing up, I had a curiosity with history and conspiracy theories. I wasn’t super nerdy about it, but I loved the fact that you could be privy to a hidden view of the world, and that you could also protect those secrets. While most of my tasks at work are related to beer and oral histories, I also do help with public service in the SCARC reading room. Let me tell you, you feel really cool getting items from the collections for patrons or for your own projects, almost like someone on a secret mission. I swear, The Librarians movies were about archives like ours.
There are, of course, many more quirks to being a beer archivist, but these are some of the most present in my daily life. I think it comes with working in such an esoteric niche of history and culture, to the point where you are both a fan and a scholar in your field. I look forward to the other oddities of an archivist coming in the next 5-8 months.
