UPDATED: TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR FOR $12.
Next Tuesday, June 11th, the Good Beer Seal and Beer Sessions Radio™ will be hosting the NYC premiere of Beer Hunter (the movie) at Anthology Film Archives. For those who are unaware, Beer Hunter is a documentary on the life of Michael Jackson (not to be confused with the singer), who is largely credited with being the first true craft beer aficionado. His book, The World Guide to Beer, was the first ever to categorize every beer style, and his travels were well documented prior to his untimely death in 2007. His books on beer and whiskey have sold millions of copies, and his 1993 Discovery Channel television series, “The Beer Hunter,” inspired countless brewers and beer enthusiasts and literally helped shape the course of the craft brewing revolution sweeping the world.
Those clips have now been assembled in this documentary, which we’ll be celebrating alongside Jimmy Carbone, host of Beer Sessions Radio™, Seth Wright of Beer Nation, Director/Producer John Richards, John Holl (editor, All About Beer), Tom Acitelli (author, The Audacity of Hops), Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery, and others, TBA.
Tom Acitelli writes about Jackson in his book:
“As McAuliffe built beer history in Sonoma, California, Michael Jackson was giving it a lexicon seven thousand miles away. Born and raised in a working-class household near Leeds in West Yorkshire in northern England, he had his first beer, a lower-alcohol mild, at fifteen at the Castle Hill Hotel in Huddersfield. He dropped out of high school a year later, in 1958, to support his family, working newspaper and magazine jobs into the late 1960s, when he also worked as a program editor for British TV host David Frost and as a documentary producer. In 1969, he was covering a carnival near the Dutch-Belgian border as part of a long gig in the Netherlands that took him away from his London home. There he tasted an ale brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery in Belgium and found it was nothing like the English beers he had been drinking since his teens. Struck by its complexity and intrigued by its history, the next day he took the bus less than a mile and a half, and, as beer writer Jay Brooks put it, “crossed the border—his Rubicon—and began exploring Belgium’s beers and culture.”
“What Germany and the Czech Republic are to lagers, Belgium is to ales. For a variety of reasons, including a sixteenth-century German dictate that beer be made only with water, hops, and barley (they didn’t know about yeast’s role then), the Maryland-sized kingdom has long boasted a rich, complex tableau of ales, from those dark as the chocolate they taste like to ones as effervescent and fruity as any sparkling wine. Brewers there, unlike in Germany, felt free to experiment boldly, often using the hops indigenous to Belgium, especially its northern region of Flanders. Belgium indisputably made the world’s most interesting ales. So it was no surprise that Jackson was smitten by Belgian beer. That the experience propelled him to become the most famous and influential beer writer ever—perhaps the most influential food writer on any one subject of the twentieth century—was almost as improbable as Jack McAuliffe birthing a brewery by hand in the hinterlands of a small town on the western fringe of the American empire. But that’s what happened.”
We hope you can join us for the premiere of this amazing film. Doors open at 7 p.m. with complimentary beer and snacks. All About Beer Magazine will help moderate a Q&A panel after the screening, as well. Tickets are available in advance; a limited number of tickets will be $12 at the door.