The Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives at the Valley Library is celebrating its third year and expanded collecting areas. In August 2013, the library’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center established the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives (OHBA), the first archives in the country dedicated to collecting materials related to the history of hops and craft brewing.
To meet the needs of researchers, the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives is broadening its reach to include the history of home brewing, cider, mead, barley farming and research, and the pre-Prohibition eras.
To celebrate the expansion of the collecting areas and the three-year anniversary, OHBA is releasing a photo per day for three months beginning on August 1. The photos will be on “The Brewstorian” blog (http://thebrewstorian.tumblr.com/) and OHBA's Twitter and Facebook pages.
"We are so proud of the support we've gotten over the past three years and are excited to broaden our collecting areas to cover more topics, more time periods, and more territories," stated Tiah Edmunson-Morton, an archivist at the Valley Library and the curator for the library’s Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives (OHBA).
The archives includes the papers of world-renowned beer historian Fred Eckhardt; oral histories with growers, brewers and scientists; the records of the Oregon Hop Growers Association; extensive industry periodicals and book collections; homebrew club newsletters; photographs; memorabilia and advertising materials from Oregon breweries; and OSU research on plant disease, breeding and processing that dates to the 1890s.
“OBHA is an archive unlike any other — one that allows scholars to research seriously the craft beer revolution and the rich agricultural history of hops upon which good beer rests,” says Peter A. Kopp, author of “Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.”
More info about the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives collections is at http://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/brewingarchives.
