Daniel Shumway Talk

November 06, 2016 12:30PM - 2:00PM at Woodland Farm Brewery

Join us for an afternoon filled with beer education from one of our area's most premier beer experts.

Dan grew up in Newport, NY and went in college in Potsdam to study geology and physics. In college, Dan started collecting beer cans, which he used as piggy banks to store excess pennies. In his junior year (1973), he saw an article in a national magazine about a club that was formed for people who wanted to collect beer cans. He was amazed that other people collected beer cans. He joined the Beer Can Collectors of America (BCCA), and over the next forty-one years, he collected over thirty thousand different beer cans from fifty different countries. Over those years, he also picked up other items dealing with various local breweries like bottles, signs, trays and tap knobs. From this, he became interested in local brewery history.
After college, he started working at Remington Arms Co., Inc. as an industrial engineer, a career that lasted until he retired in 2009. In the early 1990s, he became interested in writing a history book about local Utica breweries. The only time he had to do research was on weekends, and even this time was not always available. He started spending many hours at the Utica library going through their microfilm files of old newspapers one day at a time. This was a rather tedious task but needed to be done because at the time he did not know when anything brewery happened. He also went to the local historical societies to find some information. In those days the internet wasn’t much help.
Retirement gave him the time to finally complete the task of finishing the book. By 2009 the internet contained lots of info on local breweries especially the site Fultonhistory.com. This site contained many of the local newspapers in searchable pdf files which made searching for brewery information much easier. Finally after years of research, his first book, Utica Beer, came out in February 2014.
During his research, he found lots of information of other breweries near Utica, so he wrote another book, Central New York Beer, which featured all the breweries located within a fifty mile radius of Utica. This book was published on September 2014. Both books were published by American Palate a division of the History Press in South Carolina.
Dan and his family live in West Winfield, NY. He is president of the Officer Suds Chapter of the BCCA in Utica which collects breweriana. He is also a member of the ECBA (Eastern Coast Breweriana Association), the ABA (American Breweriana Association) and the Herkimer County Historical Society. He plans to continue his research and to write more books in the future.

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