TweetI have good news to share. I am now reviewing the book manuscript. I plan to edit and rewrite. Not sure how long that will take me. The new working title is: Pabst Best Tonic: Selling Alcohol as Medicine.

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TweetI am adding a couple of chapters to the book. For that I read several books on the history of beer. Another topic I tackled in the reading was the connection between health and beer. This meant a bit of history since many historians claim that we have records of beer dating back to the […]

TweetIn November of 2019 Ohio University Press offered me a contract for my new book All about Flowers: James Vick’s Nineteeth Century Seed Company. So you can see that at the moment I am busy with work related to the release of this book. Ohio assures me the book will be out this Fall. Here […]

TweetIt has been a long time since I wrote anything on this blog. I just want you to know that I am writing another book, so the Pabst Tonic book has taken a bit of a back seat at the moment. Down the line I certainly intend to publish the Pabst book. I think you […]

TweetIn the nineteenth century it was common practice for a newspaper to include an article favorable to a company or business that advertised in its pages. Pabst Brewery was no exception to receiving such an article. A letter addressed to the brewery by a Chicago publishing firm November 15, 1887, read as follows:  “In consideration of […]

TweetThe Best Tonic from Pabst followed in the tradition of patent medicines, or products that companies put out that would cure health problems. Stephen Fox in his book The Mirror Makers writes: “In the decades after the Civil War, patent medicines became the first product to be advertised on a large scale, the first to aim directly […]

TweetI began to write the nine chapters of the book one year ago.  As is my style, I put a lot into the chapter, some of it because I wanted to include it, other material I inserted to fill out some missing area. Right now I am editing those chapters.  This is not difficult work, […]

TweetWhat amazed me as I read the advertising material from Pabst about its Tonic is that the beverage was referred to as ‘food’. In an 1890 page in the Secret booklet called “Still More Secrets” we read: “Malt Extracts are prescribed by physicians to promote sleep, to strengthen nerves, to build up the system as […]