Last week I got a visit from two fellow Geographers – Mark Patterson and Nancy Hoalst Pullen. Mark and Nancy are faculty members at Kennesaw State University which is located about twenty miles north of Atlanta, GA. I first met Mark and Nancy in New York City in 2012 at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers. I was introduced to them by a mutual friend Jay Gatrell. Mark and Nancy had an idea for a book about the geography of the beer industry and asked if I would be interested in contributing a chapter. I was of course and The Geography of Beer was published in 2014 by Springer Publishers. My chapter (co-authored with Ralph McLaughlin and Mike Moore) documented the spatial evolution of the craft beer industry in the United States from the 1980s onwards. Like me Mark and Nancy have alter egos – on Facebook they appear as The Beer Doctors.  So, not for the first time this year, The Beer Doctors and The Beer Professor came together to continue their exploration of the wonderful world of craft beer.

Mark and Nancy were in Toledo for another beer-related book project – the National Geographic World Atlas of Beer. The project is funded by the National Geographic Society. The objective is to put together a 300+ page atlas that will highlight the brewing industry and beer cultures of somewhere between twenty-five and thirty countries. This is project that involves intensive field work with the result that Mark and Nancy will visit breweries in all of the countries they highlight in the atlas. In total they plan to visit between 350 and 400 breweries in 25-30 different countries for the project. They have already visited Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Next year they will visit breweries in South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. I have no idea how many beers Mark and Nancy will sample during their travels (probably well over eight hundred) but I thought “Around the World in 800 Beers” was a catchy title for this piece.

In addition to their overseas travels Mark and Nancy are also visiting quite a few breweries in the United States. The latest leg of their North American brewery tour was a seven day sweep through Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. It was a trip that saw them drive 1,300 miles and visit twenty breweries. When they told me that they were coming to this part of the country it was implicitly understood that they would include a visit to Toledo. So I made arrangements for them to visit the Black Cloister Brewing Company and meet with its CEO and founder Tom Schaeffer. We met there on a Wednesday evening.

Mark and Nancy have started a “Pay It Forward” tradition in their brewery visits. This simply involves asking the brewery they are visiting to provide a growler of one of their beers to be given to the owner/brewer at the next brewery they visit. They actually presented Tom with two growlers – one each from Founders Brewing Co. in Grand Rapids, MI and Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City, IN. Tom gave them a growler of Black Cloister’s Chained Dog, a Belgian-style Golden Strong. This growler they took with them to Fatheads Brewery in North Olmsted, OH when they visited there the next day.

The interview with Tom lasted about forty-five minutes and covered a wide range of topics including Tom’s introduction to craft beer, his definition of craft beer, and his thoughts on the future of the industry. As it was not my interview I will not reveal any of Tom’s answers here but it was fascinating to hear his perspectives on both the national and local craft beer scenes. What became clear from the interview is the vast knowledge, insatiable passion, and tremendous enjoyment that Tom has for beer, the brewing process, and the business of making and selling beer. Tom is not alone. There are thousands of individuals just like him all across the United States who, day-in and day-out, work their rear ends off to bring you and me some of the best beer brewed anywhere on the face of the Earth.

After their visit to Toledo Mark and Nancy were heading to the Cleveland, OH area to visit one more brewery (Fatheads) before catching a flight home to Atlanta. On their visit to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan Mark and Nancy had received quite a few complimentary six-packs, four-packs, and bombers from breweries – too many to take back on a flight to Atlanta with them. So the Beer Professor was asked to take them off their hands – which he gladly did.