The University of Toledo’s Dr. Neil Reid is an expert in the craft brewing industry.
“As an economic geographer, I’m interested in how breweries impact the places where they operate,” said Reid, a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning who’s affectionately known as the “Beer Professor.” “When a brewery opens in a neighborhood, what does that mean for real estate values or for crime rates? If it repurposes a former church or factory, how does that help to revitalize the neighborhood? The craft brewing industry gives us an interesting lens to explore local economic activity.”
Dr. Neil Reid enjoys a pint at the Fieldhouse at Inside the Five, a craft brewery taproom just off Main Campus. Reid, a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, is an expert in the craft brewing industry.
Some of his latest research traces the history of the craft brewing industry in Ohio, exploring the stories told by the names of the breweries that have operated along U.S. Route 23 since the early 1800s. Where establishments had once been named after their founding families reflecting a surge of immigration from Germany, breweries are today more likely to be named with a creative nod to the places they call home.
Reid and his co-authors, Dr. Margaret Gripshover at Western Kentucky University and Dr. Thomas Bell at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, published their findings as a chapter in “Geography of Time, Placement, Movement and Networks, Volume 3.”
In tracing the establishment of breweries along the historic throughways as early as 1805, the researchers found that historic breweries leaned into the prosaic.
More than half of those analyzed were named after their owners and just shy of a third were named after geography — most frequently the city where they operated. Among the family-named breweries, German surnames accounted for 83% in a reflection of the immense influence of German immigrants on the emerging American brewing industry. The oldest cited example is the Kolb Brothers Brewery established in Tiffin in 1835.
The researchers credit Prohibition and its lingering effects on the brewing industry for the half-century gap before they pick their analysis up with the rise of the craft beer movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Contemporary breweries are named much more creatively and after a much wider variety of inspirations. Here researchers categorized the largest share under neolocalism, referring to the broader buy-local movement that gave momentum to the craft beer industry. Examples include playful references to cities, streets, landscapes features and location-specific history like Toledo’s Black Frog Brewery, whose name is a nod both to its Black founder and the amphibians that inhibited the region’s former Great Black Swamp.
“You’d almost never see a family name on a brewery today,” Reid said. “Craft breweries are known for their creativity and experimentation when it comes to their recipes, and that creativity extends to the names of the breweries themselves.”
