THE GIST
In recent years, there’s been an important and obvious sticking point for the Chicago Brewseum, a Windy City non-profit launched in 2016: the name. It limited the public’s understanding of the group’s scope that’s now grown outside its hometown, and “Brewseum” didn’t reflect new research and educational work focused on culture, not only tangible artifacts of the past one might find in a display case.
As the organization has grown, a new name and rebranding effort will reflect its increasing presence in the beer industry. On Oct. 21, the Chicago Brewseum officially became the Beer Culture Center. The announcement of the rebrand came on the final night of this year’s Beer Culture Summit, a multi-day annual conference that has come to define the organization.
The new name better reflects the group’s mission and international reach, says Liz Garibay, the Beer Culture Center’s founder and executive director.
“The consensus was always that we will be the national entity to discuss beer history and culture,” Garibay says. “It’s not that we had really outgrown Chicago at all, but it was more that everyone was like, ‘You’re more than Chicago.’ We have team members all over the nation and world.”
The Beer Culture Center has organized events and led scholarship in beer for years, but is perhaps best known for its overall orientation: It looks at beer differently. This is especially vital at a time when there are calls from the public and the industry itself to include historically marginalized voices in the discussions, production, and sales of beer around the country. Front-and-center of most of the Center’s work is the belief that beer is more than a beverage: It is a force shaping economies, cultures, histories, and individual lives. That’s matched by a commitment to elevating perspectives normally left out of beer’s broader cultural narrative.
“We’ve got a Mexican-American, gay woman who is an expert in the museum field and is the driving force behind this [organization],” Eric Johnson, vice chair of the board of directors of the Beer Culture Center, says of Garibay. It gives her such a unique sensibility about the countless stories we could tell and highlight. There’s such a different starting point and lens through which Liz and several of us look at the world.”
The rebrand has been years in the making, but a strategic plan that the group embarked on last year made clear that it needed to happen sooner rather than later. Feedback from the public and the organization’s Board of Directors and other stakeholders made two things clear:
The group needed to drop “Chicago” to better reach people across the world.
The group also needed to drop ‘Brewseum,’ as the word tended to confuse people by implying a physical museum location that the group does not have—yet.
“Organizations evolve and names need to evolve with them,” says Nora Daley, chair of the Illinois Arts Council and a member of the Beer Culture Center’s national advisory board. “As you’re starting to expand what you’re thinking about as an organization and a mission, the brand needs to be in sync with that trajectory.”
WHY IT MATTERS
Since 2016, the Beer Culture Center has established itself as an indispensable, nationally recognized force for education and research on vital and under discussed topics related to beer. This work is critical: The understanding, preservation, and dissemination of beer history in particular prevents the loss of context. As historian Brian Alberts wrote on the topic in 2018: “The memories created at breweries constitute a wealth of historically significant knowledge, but they’re also fragile and can easily fade.”
Today, U.S. beer is at a crossroads that makes such work even more essential. A wave of craft beer industry retirements threatens the loss of institutional knowledge. Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, will leave that post in early November, and the role will no longer exist after her exit. Anchor Brewing Co., the oldest craft brewery in the U.S., shuttered in July.
The Beer Culture Center endeavors not only to preserve beer’s history, but to use that past to make sense of its present.
It hosts the Beer Culture Summit—having just wrapped its fifth year—a hybrid virtual and in-person consortium that this year encompassed 22 sessions on topics ranging from accessible taproom architecture to beer’s presence in the Christian Bible to a celebration of beloved film depictions of beer and bars. From 2019 to 2023, roughly 1,760 people have attended the Summit’s in-person events, with more than 1,000 attending virtually. (Virtual attendance is more difficult to track, as some people attend multiple sessions.)
It supports original research, such as last year’s LGBTQ Bar + Brewery Project. This initiative saw graduate students from the University of Chicago’s Public History Practicum collaborate with the Center to create a digital archive of contemporary LGBTQ+-owned breweries and bars/social spaces in Chicago, with a particular focus on those owned by women and people of color. The Center hopes to digitize and expand the project with archives from an LGBT Chicago journalist, individual bar histories, and audio recordings.
It has also hosted exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago (“Brewing Up Chicago: How Beer Transformed A City,” 2018-2020) and the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle (“Beer + Glass,” 2019).
Through its Brewseum on Tour programming, the group hosts traveling events that have taken place in Portland, Maine; Mexico City; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and New Orleans. These are limited to 15 people per trip, and all have completely sold out so far.
Garibay deviated from what was a traditional career path in museums precisely because she found that field inflexible, exclusive, and static. In leading the Beer Culture Center, she wants to create a cultural institution that elevates the lived experience and histories of all people.
“When I used to go to academic conferences, it was the same stuff, the same people, doing the same things,” Garibay says. “A part of me is always trying to push the envelope. I’ve never wanted to do anything the way mainstream anything has been done. Most of the time, you’re not connecting to real people or telling real people’s stories.”
This is what beer needs if it’s going to thrive as a contemporary industry. Across the beer business, leaders—from the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the Brewers Association, and the newly formed National Black Brewers Association—have been calling for the inclusion of new voices and perspectives on the industry. Garibay’s fresh approach impressed Johnson, who wanted to be involved with the Center once he learned more about its work.
“When I saw the concept, I was expecting a bearded white guy to be the one behind it,” says Johnson, executive director of the Chicago-based literacy organization Open Books. “I was surprised to find that there was a woman instead, and that suggested to me that there’s going to be more going on with this organization than what some of my predispositions were or my prejudices about it.”
The Center’s sometimes outsider positioning doesn’t preclude Garibay from using the extensive contacts she’s built in the world of museums, academia, and culture to expand its partnerships. In addition to the Field Museum, the organization has worked with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History on past programming. WIth a new name better reflecting its ambitions, the Beer Culture Center hopes to continue these collaborative projects and to attract potential corporate sponsorship in order to eventually fund a brick-and-mortar space (almost certainly in Chicago) to create a museum dedicated to beer history and culture.
“There’s nothing like [the Beer Culture Center] that I’m familiar with. What I have admired is the intentionality of its growth and partnerships,” Daley says. “All those conversations lend themselves to not being centered and isolated, but being in partnership with other existing institutions where you can add value.”
It’s not surprising that the Center is adept at partnerships. After all, it’s an organization dedicated to forging connections—between the public, beer, culture, history, research, and diverse sources of knowledge. The Beer Culture Summit has since its inception been a collaborative effort with other institutions, from breweries (Revolution Brewing, Conrad Seipp Brewing Company, Guinness Open Gate Brewery, Goose Island Beer Company) to museums (the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) to arts and culture fixtures (Firebird Community Arts, Metro Chicago). Many of the Center’s board of directors and national advisory board members come from such institutions, reflecting the group’s importance beyond beer.
“I truly believe in the power of the story of beer,” Garibay says. “I believe that it’s an incredible connector. You turn your head to the past and see it. You look to the future and you see it. You see it today.”
Words by Kate Bernot