Beer and brewing have been an important part of Boston history from before the American Revolution through to today’s Craft Beer Revolution. With historian Malcolm Purinton, we’ll follow the colonial beginning of a local brewing industry through the stylistic changes of the nineteenth century from ale to lager beer production and into the end of the twentieth century when Samuel Adams Brewing and Harpoon led the way into the era of Craft Beer. Feel free to sip your favorite brew while listening in from home!

This event is $10 for the public and free for those who qualify for Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture program (EBT, WIC, and Connector Care recipients). To learn more about Card to Culture, click here.

About our speaker:

Malcolm F. Purinton is a Food and World historian whose work focuses primarily on the sociocultural relationships of empire, trade, and technology in the history of beer and brewing. His first book Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste, and Empire (Bloomsbury Academic Press, Food History Series, 2023) examines the development and spread of this light golden lager beer and how it became the only truly global style of beer.

He is also the author of a chapter on the history of European beer in nineteenth century South Africa in “Alcohol Flows Across Cultures: Drinking Cultures in Transnational and Comparative Perspective” (Routledge) and has a regular column on the Boston beer scene with the northeast beer periodical, Yankee Brew News.