Unplated: an interview with Tiah Edmunson-Morton

The archive is filled with voices: sometimes, they tell stories we've overlooked for most of history

This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.

Tiah Edmunson-Morton is an Archivist and Faculty Research Assistant at Oregon State University's Special Collections and Archives Research Center, where she started the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, the first in the country, in 2013.

Beyond her work as an archivist, teacher, and oral historian, she researches and writes about beer in the Pacific Northwest, with a particular focus on the wives of 19th brewers. She has an MLIS from San José State University, MA in English Literature from Miami University, and is a Certified Archivist.

I first met Tiah in my life in rare books and archives about a decade ago, and was immediately enthralled with her efforts to preserve and share materials related to brewing. Several years ago, she asked me to join the Brewing History Consortium, a community of cultural heritage professionals preserving and making available collections related to brewing and brewing history.

Brewing, in particular, is such an important focus because historically it hasn't been as documented as other culinary traditions. Brewing was women's work, or the work of people of color, often done in the home or on a small commercial scale, resulting in an everyday drink that perhaps felt too pedestrian too document by those keeping records (though I heartily disagree with them).

Tiah's work bucks that trend, reminding us of the importance of documenting our foodways, especially those that have been overlooked, and the importance of making what we learn available to the world.

JS: First of all, can you tell me a bit about your work? How did you come to work at the Hops and Brewing Archive?

TEM: I’ve done a lot of things at the OSU Library since starting in 2006, mainly focused on duties related to teaching, outreach, and exhibits. I started the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives in 2013, which is the first in the U.S. dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing materials that tell the story of Northwest brewing. I’ve focused on collecting materials related the regional hops and barley farming, craft and home brewing, cider, mead, and the OSU research that dates to the 1890s. I also really enjoy doing oral histories, giving public talks, working with students on beer history projects, and writing about my research. I'm working on book about the wives of 19th century Oregon brewers for the OSU Press (https://bit.ly/ORbeerwives), expected publication fall 2024.

When I thought about how to go about building an archive, I first looked to the collections already housed within the larger Special Collections & Archives, namely the research records of programs and faculty at my university. These weren't "transferred" into the OHBA, but it was important for me to highlight them. And at that point I looked to adding collections. The mission of the OHBA today is pretty similar to the mission when I started it, but the real challenge of documenting an active industry is just that: these are often still active records. I dealt with this in a variety of ways (I can say more if you'd like), including digitizing and returning materials, conducting oral histories, and waiting until breweries contacted me (sometimes when they were cleaning, sometimes when they were closing).

JS: Why is it important for us to document and preserve information about brewing, a practice that, for centuries, tended to be understudied?

TEM: There’s a tremendous amount that we can learn about culture, science, economics, work, etc. through the lens of beer and brewing ingredients. Things have certainly evolved since 2013, but I’d also say that 8 years ago there wasn’t much “traditional” (read: academic) beer scholarship. That's not to say that people weren't writing about brewing history, but most published in the late 20th and early 21st century were written for trade publications. This is not to slight that work, at all, but as a rule they aren’t given the time to read the census or do the tedious research to tell an inherently messy and contradictory story.

I have a unique opportunity as an archivist at a university who also has a mandate to do scholarship (hence the book). So as part of my book project, I was also to read the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses. It took me 2 years. I was looking for people who identified as brewers in their occupation, but also looking for marital status, place of birth, and number of kids or lodgers. I also used business registry books, newspapers, and early 20th century books on Pacific Northwest histories. It’s all very tedious and not very brief. But I have learned a tremendous amount about 19th century Oregon. E.g., I have a sense of where the white settlers were born, the jobs they did and how that changed over time, the concentration of different types industry, the ratio of single to married residents, the rate of childhood mortality or divorce. I am lucky because the census and historic newspapers are available online, but the problem with these “public” data points is that they are not private thoughts. Add to that, many people didn't write down the things we are interested in. German beer books didn't include recipes and most 19th century Oregon breweries didn’t save records. Women who ran breweries didn’t record their feeling about property rights, children of brewers didn’t talk about going to school with children of Prohibitionists. The history of beer is a difficult story to tell.

We’ve heard a standard narrative about beer and from that we make a lot of assumptions. This brings me back to making an archive. While I wanted to collect materials that academics would use for those more in-depth research projects, the earliest users were journalists or people fascinated by the idea that a university was collecting beer history. In this vein, I think the thing that surprised me the most when I started the OHBA is that many of the people who contacted me wanted to come and just look at the archive! They didn’t necessarily want to come and open file folders full of papers, but wanted to see the colorful, ephemeral, “material culture” side of brewing. I knew I needed to collect labels, coasters, posters, shirts, etc. Now that I've done research myself, I understand how valuable these materials are for telling a complimentary story to the one in the data points.

JS: You founded the Brewing History Consortium in part so that brewing history-adjacent archivists could be in community and share resources and ideas. Can you tell me a bit about the Consortium, your motivations behind it, and the impact you hope it will have?

TEM: Beer history melds nicely with public history, and while there are lots of opportunities to engage with the general public and avocational researchers, I do feel like there are only a handful of people who are thinking about things from an archival or documentarian perspective. When I started the OHBA I didn't know what I didn't know, so while I'm not sure I had any grand ambitions when I set the BHC up, I hoped others would value having a way to message experts and ask for advice. What has been really helpful for me has been having a varied group of people, experts in the own fields, representing a variety of types of organizations when I have a question. 

JS: One big gap in our story of brewing is, of course, the role of women in brewing and the fact that brewing was not a purely European phenomenon. Can you tell me about what you've learned re: women in brewing, and also how you hope to see women's role in the modern brewing industry evolve in the future?

TEM: Whew, this could be (and will be) a long answer! I'm definitely more in my comfort zone to talk about American and European women, but in many different cultures and eras, women were the brewers and brewing was considered an aspect of “house and food management” duties. The idea that men were brewers is a relatively new construct. How does the trajectory that brewing as an industry took vary from place to place? I'm not sure, and I might be wrong, but generally speaking, my hunch is that anywhere you move something from the home to the factory, women are displaced.

In ancient times and throughout the world, women were beer goddesses, but also the primary beer producers. In medieval England, alewives and brewsters (female brewers) made and sold beer to their neighbors and local taverns. History remembers them as witches targeted by people worried about spells and cauldrons, but in reality, they were working women displaced by professionalism, profit, and brewers' guilds. With the growth of industrialization, education, profit, and professionalization, women were simply left out of an evolving industry. By the early modern period, men had taken over their role.

Yet even as men moved into an increasingly commercial and capital intense field, women in England and Europe continued to work as tavern keepers, likely also brewing for their customers, and when they immigrated to America in the Colonial Era, they brought those skills with them. Colonial women continued to make beer at home, it was one of their weekly tasks, but they also ran taverns and probably served their own beer. However, as brewing was increasingly industrialized and commodified in America, women again lost their place as producers and wage earners.

Unfortunately, instead of a history that looks at divisions in labor and gendered work, power associated with work that produces profit, or the impact of a lack mentoring and education, what we are left with is a history full of tired tropes about women and beer. There are stories of 19th century women who were Temperance crusaders, protesting outside of saloons while wearing bonnets, women’s suffrage leading to Prohibition, and after Repeal happy housewives who bought packaged beer for their husbands. Advertisements in the 1980s paired women in bikinis with a beer on the beach or a beer on the hood of a car. In the 1990s, when women cracked the door of the brewhouse open again, industry and popular periodicals had a brief fascination with the "feminine face of brewing,” but treated women in the industry as an anomaly. More recently, we have fixated on the idea of “the artisanal product creators,” linking prestige and status to production, which in effect diminishes the work of anyone other than the brewer. This present-day focus on the “genius brewer” has seeped into the history of brewing as well; researchers want to find women who brewed in the pre-Prohibition era, as if the act of stirring wort in a kettle was more valuable for a family business than bookkeeping or child-minding.

I talk a lot about what is not in the archival record, and in the case of doing research on women in brewing, there is definitely a lack of data. And so, to do work to document and share the story of women in brewing, you also have to research and write about men in brewing. I often think about something Tonya Cornett said in an oral history interview: "I just want people to ask me about my beer, not about my being a woman who made the beer." I also think about the harassment and violence women face in the industry, both how that impacts individual women's experiences and how we can responsibly document that while the women are still working in the industry. I don't think having equity in an industry means we don’t see or experience, but at a baseline women need to be safe and to be recognized as creators rather than novelties.

JS: I also want to touch on brewing's non-European roots, because I think many westerners assume that brewing is a very Germanic/British/Slavic phenomenon and maybe aren't aware of the fact that brewing took place and takes place across the planet (West Africa comes first to mind). 

How do you see global brewing cultures represented in our archival records of brewing, or in our archives-based outreach? And how might we move towards a more global representation of brewing in our archives and archival outreach?

TEM: I'm not entirely sure. I've definitely seen more talks or articles about non-white brewers and brewing in the past couple of years, and that includes indigenous brewers or people of color in the U.S., but it is certainly the case that most of the narrative about beer outside of the U.S. and Europe situates it in the past (I'm thinking of Egyptian beer). I made this beer research guide for a beer history class that happens each term at the university where I work, and an aspect I've really struggled with is how to offer resources or research tips for those working on projects outside of the dominant Anglocentric lens. I'm guilty of exactly the things I criticized at the beginning of this paragraph as it relates to "places and eras" (e.g., I talk about the ancient world rather than present day brewing Egypt). It has been easier for me to situate resources for global brewing cultures in gender, but it may be that in doing so I am perpetuating the "otherness" of both gender and culture... I suppose I see my work as a work in progress!

I try to be and try to encourage people I work with to go beyond the rote story of beer, but also to situate brewing and ingredients in systems of culture, story, community, and relationships. So, it isn't just about including a line about beer in South Africa or in Morocco, but really exploring the story of food and drink and history in those places. It also means embracing the contradictions and "individual-ness" of brewers in those regions -- and I hope our archives-based outreach and collecting allows for a more nuanced exploration (read: not having just one brewer or one brewery act as a representative for an entire country / culture).

What about archives? We exist in the stories people tell about us and the organizations within which we live our lives, and the lack of documentation about non-white roles in industries such as brewing effectively silences them and ensures that history remains lopsided. I particularly like this line from the Society of American Archivists about archives in general: "Archival records serve to strengthen collective memory and protect people’s rights, property, and identity". Archives and records repositories are filled with voices. We visit them to learn about our families, past actions of governments, and the activities of private organizations. But they are also spaces that reflect power and document the dominant narrative. Decisions are made by creators, by archivists, and by researchers about what to include and who to exclude – the result can be distortion, omission, and erasure. And so, for all the voices recorded in an archive, there are also many that have been silenced. It is also our job to fill in gaps and consider where the "silences" are in the records. The reality is that the records of lesser represented or marginalized communities don't automatically make it into the historical records. Archivists have become much more pro-active in collecting from the communities, but also in engaging in helping communities save their records without giving them to an established archival institution.

JS: I want to wrap up with a few questions that return to your work in the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive: First of all, what does outreach work look like for you? Who are you trying to connect with, and how do you communicate to other the importance of understanding brewing history?

TEM: I had been an archivist for 8 or 9 years before I started the OHBA and had done the hands-on processing and description work (so putting the materials in order and writing a guide to the collection), taught library and archives research sessions, and done a lot of outreach and exhibits. I also had a graduate degree in English (as well as my library graduate degree) and have done a lot of research. I didn't know how to make an archive, but I knew how to talk! And I think of my outreach work as the real foundation of the OHBA. People had no idea who I was, so I visited breweries, tabled at festivals, accepted invitations to be on the radio or podcasts, posted on social media and my blog, and literally just said yes to any invitation. I've presented at retirement facilities, bars, churches converted into bars, at campus food processing facilities, alumni events, etc. And of course, now I've presented from my computer at my house.

The more I got to know the community, the better I was at explaining archives to donors and helping researchers on their projects. And the more I worked with donors and researchers, the more I could piece together the history for myself. To this end, another key component of outreach for me is my own research and writing. I wrote the Oregon Encyclopedia essay on the history of Oregon brewing, wrote an article for the Oregon Historical Quarterly on Louisa Weinhard (wife of a brewer), blog in short and intense bursts, and am writing a book about women and brewing in 19th century Oregon.

I'll also say that the earliest users (those journalists and the general public looking for cool visual items) helped reinforce this idea of outreach as intertwined with collection development and reference work. In that same vein, a really popular item for people to donate early on were periodicals, something I didn’t really think of as a thing I would find so valuable! But now, in thinking about what the easiest access “primary source” is for craft beer history, I definitely point to the robust periodical collections we have in the OHBA. I also collect beer books, and find the guidebooks to be some of the most helpful for me and my users. Back in "The Before Times," we'd host open houses or I'd table at events, and these beer books or duplicates of publications were great for putting out on tables for people to browse through. Beyond being interesting to look at (oh dear, the beer ads from the 1980s), it connected people with archival records and history in a way that a report or file on a marketing budget wouldn't. I like to think that all the outreach events I do connect people broadly to their own history or the history of food and agriculture in their communities.

JS: Often, I think culinary professionals overlook archives as a place for information and inspiration. What do archives and special collections offer to culinary professionals that's unique? How can we serve them in ways others cannot?

TEM: People in the first year or two contacted me about pre-Prohibition recipes, which we didn’t have and which I basically haven’t ever found… I did try to use brewery ads in historical newspapers to try to identify a "Northwest style" of pre-Prohibition beer and used 19th century home management books in projects to recreate historic recipes. I also had an ill-formed idea to have a group of brewers make a beer inspired by some of the 19th century women I'm researching -- the pandemic derailed that one, but I still think it would be a fun way to incorporate information about where someone was born, lived, did for fun or obligation into a drink.

I'm really fascinated by place, and I think most special collections and archives have local or regional history books that could provide inspiration. Certainly, in the Northwest we'd ask who lived in a place and who was removed from that place, what did different groups grow for food, what routes did the travel, what was the weather like? Broadly thinking about how people lived is the bread and butter of archives.

I work at a Land Grant school, so we also have lots of wonderful research records for agriculture and food science. Our Home Economics college and our Extension Services division produced a treasure trove of pamphlets on how to cook and preserve almost anything that would grow here. We've used those, as well as recipe books in the general library stacks, to host historic recipe events where people cook things and bring them to share. Not only was it a fun activity, it was a great opportunity to talk about ingredients, processes, or technologies that seem "ancient" to us now.

JS: Finally, what's the biggest piece (or couple pieces) of advice that you'd give to someone who has archival records, like brewing records, in their possession. What can they do to preserve those materials?

TEM: The short answer is: keep the paper dry and away from light, back-up the electronic records, and contact your local archivist.

Though there is unique content in records related to brewing and ingredients, as records they aren't actually all that unique. The Society of American Archivists has a couple of great resources on their site here and here. This page has a list of archival and non-archival records, some common types of brewing records, and some general tips on preserving records.

People also have to consider whether these records are "archival" yet. Archives are the documentary records of something (topic, person, place, event, company) that have been determined to have long term, enduring, historical value. An archive can be a collection of materials OR the place where it is housed. They can also be physical or digital -- and of course each present unique challenges for organization or preservation. I usually say that a record becomes an archive when it is no longer actively used by the creator. Sometimes this is just because of logistics: If I am still using my research files or my brew sheets, I need them at hand and not in a box in a library! Archivists, librarians, and museum / historical society staff are all trained professionals that follow a kind of "code of conduct." It is our job to review the materials to assess their value, collect and organize them, preserve them, and provide access for users.