The Miller Beer Barons: The Frederick J. Miller Family and Its Brewery

I went to High School with the author in Milwaukee- just blocks from the Miller Brewery; played on the same football team. Later I spent 13 years as an employee of the Miller Brewing Company. (After Tim John's family had sold to Philip Morris). Tim has to be congratulated for both the scholarly handling of the subject and his candor about what has to be a deeply emotional subject. I know that Tim John really cares for the people at Miller Brewing today. Even with no direct ties to the brewery he wanted to know how the workers at Miller were treated during my tenure. He is entitled to take pride in the incredible heritage his family left. This book is quite refreshingly different from most self praising beer stories. Tim John writes frankly and well about a family business, a city and its neighborhoods, and the sometimes crazy world of beer. It's like that first good lager on a warm summer day! I hope to catch up with Tim in Milwaukee sometime; perhaps at the 2007 150th Anniversary celebration of Marquette University High School. Maybe he'll buy me a beer! If you want a real and honest history get this book.

The Miller Beer Barons: The Frederick J. Miller Family And Its Brewery is the true and fascinating story of the Miller family, which started and ran the Miller Brewing Company for over one hundred years. Stretching from late 1800's Germany, when Mr. Miller brewed his first beer, to 1970, when Harry G. John Jr.'s sale of Miller stock was the end of the family's involvement with the company, The Miller Beer Barons is a trans-generational tour of wealth, power, and their sometimes rocky transitions. An inset section of black-and-white photographic plates nicely rounds out this exhaustively researched, meticulously detailed, highly recommended family biography.