Gerome highlights a book in celebration of Sacramento Beer Week

For this week’s highlight, Gerome has decided to feature an item in celebration of Sacramento Beer Week, which starts today. His featured item is the book, Beer, Its History and Its Economic Value as a National Beverage, by F.W. Salem, which was published in Hartford, Connecticut in 1880. Our copy of this book is part of the A.W. Noling Hurty-Peck Collection.

According to this work, California had 195 breweries in 1878-1879 and sold 379,373 barrels of beer from May 1, 1877-1878. Brewers in Sacramento included: Borchers & Schwartz, E. & C. Gruhler, Kerth & Nicolaus, F.C. Knauer, P. Scheld, and M. Ochs. Those Sacramento brewers sold a combined 15,936 barrels of beer in 1878. Davisville (now Davis) was home to one brewer in 1878, William Faber, who sold 74 barrels that year.

The Library has a second copy of this work in the Viticulture and Enology Collection. That copy was recently digitized through the Library’s Google Book Digitization Project.