All posts by The Beer Professor

Neil Reid is Professor of Geography and Planning and Director of the Jack Ford Urban Affairs Center at the University of Toledo. He studies and writes about the beer industry.

The Guinness Storehouse

One could hardly come to Dublin without visiting the Guinness Storehouse. So that is what my wife and I did during our recent trip to that fair city. Guinness and I go back a long way. Of all the beers that I currently drink with any regularity Guinness is the one with which I have the longest association. My Guinness drinking days go back over 30 years to when I was undergraduate student at the University of Continue reading The Guinness Storehouse

The Old General Store Revisited

Anyone who grew up in rural America, especially in the South, may remember fondly the old general store which not only carried many of the essentials of life but was also a gathering place for people in the community, especially in the winter when the clientele (often men) would sit around the pot-bellied wood stove exchanging stories and probably whittling on a piece of wood at the same time. This is the stuff of a Norman Rockwell illustration. Continue reading The Old General Store Revisited

Scotland’s Lager Lovelies

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This pier at Tarbet on the shores of Loch Lomond was no more than a 15 minute walk from my parents’ home

I was born and raised in Scotland. I lived there (with the exception of an 18 month hiatus in London, England) from my birth in 1963 until emigrating to the United States in 1985. I grew up in the small Highland village of Tarbet. Continue reading Scotland’s Lager Lovelies

Beer-Oriented Development

A few weeks ago a colleague from Bowling Green State University sent me an e-mail. He was interested in getting together to explore the possibility of engaging in some collaborative research around the beer industry. Russ told me that his interest was in beer-oriented development (BOD). It was not a term with which I was familiar. But that’s why we have Google, right? The term appears to have been coined by  Continue reading Beer-Oriented Development