Brewing the Burg
Brewing the Burg
Miamisburg and its Brewers
in Ohio's Canal Era
Timothy R. Gaffney
Welcome to the website for my upcoming book. Brewing the Burg will introduce you to Miamisburg's early brewers, whose lives spanned its growth from a frontier settlement to a modern manufacturing town. From the digging of the Miami and Erie Canal to the American Civil War, they witnessed and were influenced by myriad events and trends that shaped this southwestern Ohio community through the nineteenth century.
Miamisburg's brewers were never famous, and their names are long forgotten. In some cases their stories were nearly lost to history. This book is my attempt to bring them back from obscurity and, through their eyes, see a bit of the early history of the place that has been my home for nearly half a century.
The book is being prepared for publication in the coming months. I'll post more information as it's available. In the meantime, please visit my Facebook page for updates.
Cheers!
—Timothy R. Gaffney
About Brewing the Burg
I am a writer and retired journalist. For most of my career I covered aviation, space and defense for the Dayton Daily News. I also wrote a number of books, mainly for young readers. In recent years, a longtime interest in historical preservation combined with my fondness for beer to spark an interest in the craft beer movement. I noticed that craft brewers around the region were helping to preserve old buildings by repurposing them into brewpubs. That made me curious about the region's original brewers and what became of them. A year of research led to Dayton Beer (History Press-Arcadia, 2019), which explored the history of brewing in the Dayton region. It included a brief chapter about Miamisburg's early brewers, but I knew it only scratched the surface of the Star City's brewing history. It became an obsession to discover all of Miamisburg's early brewers and learn, to the extent that I could, their stories. Brewing the Burg is the result.
