About Franz D. Hofer
Beer with a Shot of Cultural History
Saarbrücken’s no Munich. It’s a gritty coal town, and not the first place that comes to mind when you think of German beer. But it’s there, way back in the early nineties, that I experienced a beer conversion. The main character in this conversion narrative was a Maisel’s Hefeweizen, a beguiling clove-scented beverage that showed me there was more to life than Labatt’s. Over the next several decades, I honed my knowledge and appreciation of beer, stoking my passion all the more after becoming a homebrewer in grad school.
At Cornell I wrote an award-winning dissertation about museums and the commemoration of World War II in Berlin and Tokyo. I made a case for how Germany and Japan evolved divergent responses to the Second World War in the face of shifting domestic concerns and post-Cold War geopolitical transformations. I also explored how memorial sites shape collective memory and mold national identity through their visual, textual, and tactile representations of the past. I plan to return to the themes and issues at some point down the road.
Why not right away? Because these days I write mainly about beer — in particular, beer culture, beer history, and beer travel. Figured I’d put all those years of living and traveling in Europe to good use! I’m an expert on the history of beer and brewing in Europe, especially Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Austria. And I know a thing or two about craft beer in North America. I’ve been writing my beer blog, A Tempest in a Tankard, for more than a decade now. I’m also an award-winning beer writer who has published in venues like Zymurgy, VinePair, Brew Your Own, Brewery History, and Final Gravity. My interest in beer culture — beer as culture —pervades every article I write, whether about beer gardens or beer hiking.
Strange as it may sound to some of us, there’s more to life than beer. As a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the Wien Museum in Vienna, I did outreach to expat communities, international organizations, and established immigrant communities. Writing was a key component of my position. I wrote donor proposals, devised social media projects, translated marketing material, and worked as a curatorial assistant preparing exhibition texts.
My outreach efforts at the Wien Museum eventually brought me back into the classroom at IES-Vienna (Institute for European Studies). There I teach American university exchange students a range of courses that incorporate Vienna’s museums, restaurants, coffeehouses, breweries, and wine gardens — ideal “source material” that enriches my students’ experiences of Vienna.
When I’m not writing, teaching, or translating, I enjoy hiking and cycling — preferably when there’s beer or wine along the way.