Your Onbeer correspondent and Yukon Dave (centre) held rapt by a Charles Finkel story

I mentioned in a post a couple weeks back a beer dinner I attended with Charles Finkel of Pike Brewing. In that post (which you can read here) I focused mostly on the dinner and pairings, however I promised something more on Mr. Finkel and his remarkable role in building craft brewing in North America. After some thought, I decided to write up a profile of Finkel for my Vue and Planet S columns, both of which ran last week.

All beer lovers owe a huge debt of gratitude to Finkel for his passionate efforts to build a craft beer culture in North America. Finkel started an import company, Merchant du Vin, in 1978 with a goal to introduce classic British and German craft beer to an unsuspecting American public. He was the first to attempt to import real beer into a market at the time dominated by a handful of domestic macro-lagers.

Unknown to me, until that beer dinner, Finkel is also responsible for the resurrection of Porter, a style that swept the English empire in the 1700s but died out in the early 20th century. He also created the modern version of Oatmeal Stout – both through a partnership with Samuel Smith Brewery in Tadcaster, England.

If that wasn’t enough, Finkel also founded one of the U.S.’s first microbreweries in Seattle’s Pike Brewing, which he (again) owns and operates. The article has some more details about these fascinating stories. All I ask is that after you read it, hoist a pint for our Mr. Finkel. He deserves it.

Read the Vue Weekly version here.

Read the Planet S version here.

(Yes they are substantially the same, with only names changed to protect the innocent…)