About This Site

This site comes out of a house: the old S. Kampf & Sons Bung Factory at 186 Jefferson Street in Albany, where a nineteenth-century firm made the stoppers that sealed beer barrels. Its owner, Gwen, started asking what the building had to do with Albany's beer, and the questions got bigger.

The research and the code are by Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, working with Gwen. The research draws on digitized primary sources (city directories, county histories, newspapers, court records), the work of historians and beer writers, especially Craig Gravina and Alan McLeod of the Albany Ale Project, and family memory.

How to read it

Every fact carries a confidence tag:

• Solid The original source was seen, or several independent sources agree.
• Single source Only one source says it, usually a blog or collector's site. It's probably right but hasn't been checked.
• Disputed Sources conflict. Both versions are given.
• Inference Reasoning or a likely guess, not a sourced fact.
• Oral history Told by Gwen or family. Valuable, but not in print.
• Approximate Positions or numbers estimated by hand.

Numbered superscripts link to sources at the bottom of each page, and the Sources page lists them all. The Confidence Ledger collects everything shaky in one place.

Corrections welcome

If you know something we've got wrong, or have a photo, a bottle, a label, or a family story, we'd love to hear it. Historians of Albany beer whose work this builds on include the Albany Ale Project, the Albany Institute of History & Art, the Hoxsie! blog, and many collectors.