Bottoms Up celebrates Wisconsin’s taverns and the breweries that fueled them. Beginning with inns and saloons, the book explores the rise of taverns and breweries, the effects of temperance and Prohibition, and attitudes about gender, ethnicity, and morality. It traces the development of the megabreweries, dominance of the giants, and the emergence of microbreweries. Contemporary photographs of unusual and distinctive bars and breweries of all eras, historical photos, postcards, advertisements, and breweriana illustrate the story of how Wisconsin came to dominate brewing—and the place that bars and beer hold in our social and cultural history.
Seventy featured taverns and breweries represent diverse architectural styles, from the open-air Tom’s Burned Down Cafe on Madeline Island to the Art Moderne Casino in La Crosse, and from Club 10, a 1930s roadhouse in Stevens Point, to the well-known Wolski’s Tavern in Milwaukee. There are bars in barns and basements and brewpubs in former ice cream factories and railroad depots. Bottoms Up also includes a heady mix of such beer-related topics as ice harvesting, barrel making, bar games, Old-Fashioneds, bar fixtures, and the queen of the bootleggers. Now in paperback for the first time!

Jim Draeger is an architectural historian and State Historic Preservation Officer at the Wisconsin Historical Society with more than thirty years of historic preservation experience. From roadside architecture to Northwoods resorts, Draeger celebrates the importance of ordinary buildings to our daily lives through his research, writing, and lectures.

Mark Speltz is an author and public historian who researches and writes about civil rights era photography, vernacular architecture, and Wisconsin culture and history. His third book, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2016. Mark now resides in San Francisco, California where he is a senior historian at Wells Fargo & Company. 

Mark Fay of Eau Claire has completed many book projects for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. He also has worked as an aerial photographer and a staff photographer for a postcard and calendar printing company and has been in business as Faystrom Photo since 1996.