With only a few weeks left till our Thesis papers are officially due I'm feeling confident in how my thesis has progressed. I have captured much of the straight history of 1800s and early 1900s brewing and have begun to move onto the more social aspects of brewing. What I have left to do is write about who drank beer and why. I've already touched on it some bits and pieces, but nothing dedicated to it. I will writing about this in both the past and present, and the later involves me surveying local breweries about their target audiences, and observing their actual audiences. I already have this completed with two local breweries and hope to up that number to three or four by early next week.
I think the most interesting thing I've run into is the Temperance movement. Once I finally started writing about it I realized just how relevant it was to almost every other part of my paper. It drove technological innovations, various industries, and the way it evolved even bolstered the brewing industry. Like many things, it started small only targeting the most extreme abuser of hard liquor, but slowly progressed to include all drinkers of hard liquor. Although eventually moving onto the many varieties of beer, it temporarily pushed everyone into the beer world, giving it an effective monopoly in the alcohol world of Rochester.
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