If you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area in the next year, I would recommend attending the 99 Bottles of Beer Exhibition at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. The collection is dedicated to “Global Brewing Traditions: 2500 BC to Present” exploring the both the similarities and broad differences in a world of beer. There are approximately 130 items on display ranging from a 4500 year old sculpture of a woman straining mash to metal beer steins. It looks wonderful, check out the great slideshow over at the Brookston Beer Bulletin. Unfortunately you’ve already missed the kick-off symposium which had a full roster of speakers, tastings and participatory events. I hope they make a catalog, or make it a traveling exhibition, I know a fair amount of people who would love to see this up North.

* * * Update on 12/15/2009 * * *
I recently visited the Bay Area and made a trip over to Berkeley to see the 99 Bottles of Beer exhibition. It was not as exciting as I had hoped. The exhibit is stuffed into a small corner of the gallery and there is probably about 3-5 minutes worth of stuff to look at. There are some really great drinking and brewing objects in the show but not enough to make the trip worthwhile in my opinion. The exhibit is tangibly hands off and it’s difficult to conceptualize the placement of these objects in their historical settings. Sorry, this could have been really great but gets nowhere near a small fraction of its potential.