Synopsis: One hundred fifty years of American beer, from the German immigrants of the 1840s to the microbrewers of the 1980s. The critics say: "It's a treat to drink from Maureen Ogle's superb schooner 'Ambitious Brew' . . . [W]hat she packs into this brisk, entertaining and insightful account is worthy of a toast and a round on the house." Peter Rowe/San Diego Union-Tribune "The rise of lager beer, and the great names associated with it - names like Busch, Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Miller - is the subject of Maureen Ogle's effervescent, occasionally frothy "Ambitious Brew," a fairly standard history with a provocative thesis attached. Ms. Ogle . . . takes the air out of a few myths . . . ." William Grimes/New York Times "Ogle beautifully weaves together [brewers'] tales, moving from one mini-bio to the next as the industry and the country grow. . . . [and her] storytelling ability keeps Ambitious Brew flowing." Bob Oswald/Chicago Sun-Times Want more synopsis? When a wave of German immigrants arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they promptly set about re-creating the pleasures of the biergartens they had left behind. Just fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented was the nation's most popular beverage -- and brewing was the nation's fifth-largest industry, ruled over by fabulously wealthy titans Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. Anti-German sentiments aroused by World War I fed the flames of a well-established temperance movement (one activist even declared that "the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller"). Prohibition was the result. Beer came back in 1933, but Americans' taste for Budweiser and Schlitz did not. Per capita beer consumption remained stagnant for the next few decades, and only reached its pre-Prohibition high again in the 1970s. That was too late to save the hundreds of small beermakers who went bankrupt in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-seventies, only forty-four brewers remained. But even as those few giants monopolized the industry, a younger generation's passion for innovation and entrepreneurship sparked a new era in beer's American history. In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of homebrewers built small breweries and began making lagers and ales of a sort not seen in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Today there are well over a thousand breweries and brewpubs in the United States and there has never been a better time to explore the pleasures of fine beer.