Beer Money

February 29, 2016
Stroh, of the Stroh brewing dynasty, captures the downfall of this empire with candor and power. From 1984 to 1992, Stroh Brewery Company was named in the Forbes 400 list, and the Stroh family possessed the largest private beer fortune in America. Yet, by 1999, Miller and Pabst had bought Stroh’s entire brewing business, plunging the beer label into obscurity, and delivering the final blows to a family already torn apart by divorce, deceit, and an imprudently extravagant lifestyle. With the piercing eye of a visual artist—she devoted a piece of installation art to her family and their memories—Stroh stitches together her and her family’s stories in a series of verbal snapshots. She captures her father’s obsession with collecting and photography, her brother Charlie’s drug use and dealing, her father’s divorce and remarriage to a much younger woman, her mother’s remarriage, her father’s drinking, his decline and death in 2009, and the demise of the brewing empire. Stroh effortlessly and elegantly weaves in her own stories of sitting next to Annie Lennox in a Hare Krishna retreat center, her days at boarding school, her drug use, and her deep love and ambivalent feelings for her father. Stroh’s compelling memoir vividly portrays the aching permanence of loss and the palpability of hope that accompanies starting over.