When Joel Bittle began writing a book about St. Louis craft beer, he thought he knew when the story started.
“I thought the book would hinge on the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev,” Bittle says. “It felt like collective trauma, and St. Louisans didn’t know how to deal with that. Some of them said, ‘I’m never drinking a Budweiser again.’ Others directed it toward this craft beer explosion that happened after it, and I really feel like St. Louis benefited from the culture that came out of that.”
At first, that appeared to be the story: a city long synonymous with one enormous brewery begins finding a new beer identity following the AB InBev deal in November 2008. Then Bittle started interviewing the people who had lived it…