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50Chapter FourSpreading the Word, 1985-2001When writing How to Build a Small Brewery and researching his first brewery, Bill Owens pored over existing brewing materials. In the early 1980s there were some small, handmade homebrewing newsletters with limited circulation and spotty release dates available at homebrew stores. One was Home Fermenter%u2019s Digest, an occasional newsletter written by the employee and girlfriend of the owner of a homebrew shop in San Leandro, California, where Owens purchased his homebrew materials. After the publication of the book and the successful opening of Buffalo Bill%u2019s Brewery, Owens still felt called to return to journalism, this time focusing on brewing. He purchased Home Fermenter%u2019s Digest for a small sum.144 He then needed subscribers. Fred Eckhardt, the homebrew enthusiast and early beer writer, was havingdifficulty publishing Amateur Brewer on a regular basis, so he sold Owens his mailing list of 300-400 homebrew shops, enthusiastic homebrewers, and microbrewery industry types.145Owens%u2019 first issue of his new beer magazine, the May/June 1985 issue of HomeFermenter%u2019s Digest: The Home Brewing & Fermentation Magazine, featured new format, new content, and a new focus on news and information from the brewing industry. As he predicted in the first issue, %u201cwe are also part of the changes going on in the industry%u2026 watch us grow.%u201d146 The initial bi-monthly black and white magazine was aimed at home brewers and wine makers, with all of the initial ads devoted to homebrew goods. Articles were split between homebrewing help and microbrewing news. By the third issue Owens changed the name to Amateur Brewer: The Brewing and Fermentation Magazine then changed it again to Amateur Brewer: The MicroBrewer/Brew Pub%u2122 Magazine. It is in this issue that Owens declared to the brewing world that he held the trademark to the term brewpub.147 The focus was continually shifting toward the