View a map of confirmed locations of all Albany ale and lager producers founded between 1650 and 1875.

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An amazing fact: For decades during the mid-19th century, Albany was second only to London among cities with the largest capacity for beer production.

Also true and also amazing: A signature style produced by many of the dozens of Albany breweries was so widely distributed that researchers have found mention of "Albany ale" throughout the U.S., from New Orleans to San Francisco, and abroad, from Nova Scotia to Buenos Aires to Germany.

From what local beer blogger Craig Gravina has been able to determine, Albany ale was a double-strength beer of about 8.5 or 9 percent alcohol, fairly sweet and heavily hopped. Gravina and Alan McLeod, a Canadian blogger and fellow student of the history of Albany brewing, maintain separate blogs (drinkdrank1.blogspot.com and beerblog.genx40.com), as well as a joint Facebook page titled The Albany Ale Project They use all three outlets to document their findings, including details about more than 40 breweries that operated in Albany from 1650 to 1875.

Gravina will be one of the speakers Saturday at Hudson Valley Hops, a fundraiser at the Albany Institute of History & Art that will focus on the city's brewing history and offer samples of beer from a half-dozen regional breweries and brew pubs.

Beer has had strong roots in America since before it was a country. As part of the pre-Revolutionary War anti-taxation movement, Colonial leaders included British beer among the items colonists were discouraged from consuming. (Another was rum, a favorite Colonial drink, which was made from molasses from the British-dominated Caribbean.) Because civilians and soldiers alike were not about to do without fermented, carbonated alcoholic beverages, beer enthusiast and future president George Washington pushed for an expansion of American brewing capacity. (Given that the Continental Army promised every man a quart of spruce beer or cider daily, the stuff had to come from somewhere.)

In Colonial Albany, beer-brewing dates to the city's earliest years. According to documents found in the collections of the Albany Institute, Killiaen van Rensselaer, the Dutch merchant and patroon who founded the settlement that would become Albany, wrote in a 1632 letter to a colleague, "(A)s soon as there is a steady supply of grain on hand, I intend to erect a brewery to provide all of New Netherland with beer."

In its Dutch years and through American independence, Albany's breweries were making mostly wheat beer from imported and some domestic hops, Gravina says. The distinctive Albany ale, made with American Cluster hops, gained popularity starting in the late 1820s, largely as a result of the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal.

"Albany basically got a monopoly on brewing beer, because (the canal) provided a way to get the goods here to make it and a way to get it distributed," Gravina says. Barges could bring in hops and send finished beer west to Buffalo, through the Great Lakes and into the Midwest, and south down the Hudson River to New York City and beyond.

By the 1850s, when there were about 20 breweries (in a city of only 50,000 people), Albany's largest maker, John Taylor and Sons, was brewing 200,000 barrels, or 6.2 million gallons, annually. It was, says Gravina, America's largest brewery.

John Taylor's commercial success led him to politics, including a term as mayor. So did Michael Nolan, who, as Albany's first Irish Catholic mayor, served from 1878 to 1883. Remarkably, during the latter two years in office, he also served in Congress.

Earlier, in the 1840s, Jim Quinn, a relative of Nolan's by marriage, had founded a brewery that later became Quinn & Nolan, a brewing concern that lasted for half a century. By the mid-1880s, Quinn & Nolan was producing about 15 percent of the 360,000 barrels of beer being made annually in Albany. Around that time, Quinn's son (and Nolan's brother-in-law), Terence John Quinn, also served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Later, part of the family bought a silver mine in Arizona.

"But I don't want to give away too much of the story," says Kathy Quinn, Jim Quinn's great-great-granddaughter, speaking on the phone from her home near Cheyenne, Wyo. "If you want to hear the rest, you'll have to come to my talk," says Quinn, who will be another of the speakers at Hudson Valley Hops. As many as 10 Quinn family members are expected at the event.

Quinn learned of her family's brewing history from a cousin who was doing genealogical research. For a decade, she has been in regular touch with Albany Institute curator W. Douglas McCombs, who gave her a copy of a poster of the Quinn & Nolan brewery that is in the museum's collection, and she has donated pieces, including a Quinn & Nolan Albany ale bottle.

"The history is so rich and interesting," says Quinn. "It's been fascinating to learn about."

Starting around 1880s, the ale-producing Quinn & Nolan was associated with a newer brewery, Beverwyck Brewing, which made lagers, a style that was growing in popularity. As railroad access throughout the country expanded in the final decades of the 19th century and lagers became a preferred style, Albany and its ale lost primacy. Only three breweries survived Prohibition — J.F. Hendrick, Beverwyck and John Dobler — and by the 1970s they were all gone, too, unable to compete with Midwestern giants like Anheuser-Busch and the emerging Coors.

Today, there is one beer manufacturer in the city of Albany: the Albany Pump Station/C.H. Evans Brewing. Open since 1999, the Pump Station is a revitalization of a family brewing tradition that operated in Hudson from 1786 until Prohibition. Gravina is hoping to convince the Pump Station to use a recipe he's been tweaking for Albany ale.

More Information If you go Hudson Valley Hops When: 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday Where: Albany Institute of History & Art, 125 Washington Ave., Albany Food and drink: Beer samples by Brown's Brewing Co., Chatham Brewing, C.H. Evans Brewing/Albany Pump Station, Adirondack Brewery, Brewery Ommegang and Keegan Ales. Food by Hotel Albany and more. Tickets: $25 at the door or in advance at the museum or online at http://www.albanyinstitute.org. Tickets cover beer, food and museum admission. Info: 463-4478 Note: Currently on view at the museum is the exhibit "Making of the Hudson River School: More Than the Eye Beholds," a 120-piece show exploring the 19th-century American landscape through paintings by artists Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand and others. See More Collapse

"I haven't brewed it yet," he says. "I have a pretty good idea of what it was, so the next step is to get it made."

sbarnes@timesunion.com • 518-454-5489 • @Tablehopping •http://facebook.com/SteveBarnesFoodCritic