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Each April, the Brewers Association releases an important package of data, headlined by a list of largest US breweries. This year’s numbers were a mixed bag, and revealed a lot about the state of the industry.
We can all agree on what a beer currently costs. In Portland, a pint will set you back $7. Before Covid it was $6, and not long before that five. So is $7 expensive? It depends
Last week, London’s Meantime Brewery was in the news. Its fortunes are bound up with Fuller’s and Dark Star—by coincidence three breweries I toured 13 years ago. Show did they get here?
A wonderful little trend has been building in Portland for years, but I’ve been hesitant to draw attention, lest the harsh sunlight prove fatal to the delicate shoots. But now it seems safe: cask ale has become a real thing.
Adam Milne started Old Town Brewing in 2011, but it stood on the shoulders of a Portland institution, Old Town Pizza. This month the downtown landmark turns 50, giving us a chance to reflect on a half-century of life.
I have spent the last ten days in Central Europe catching up on the local beer scenes and talking to brewers from the region. Here’s an overview of what I found.
In celebration of Upright’s 15th anniversary, I asked founder/brewer Alex Ganum and three other friends of Upright to describe memorable beers from the brewery’s run.
Somehow, Portland’s Upright Brewery has been around 15 years. Despite reaching its mid-teens, Upright has remained one of the most inventive, interesting, and unexpected breweries in the the country. As we hit this big milestone, let’s revisit what owner/brewer Alex Ganum has accomplished.
Detroit native George Johnson founded Assembly Brewing in 2019, bringing the authentic pizza from his hometown to Portland. Over the weekend, he opened a second location. It is a great opportunity to revisit the tale of George’s incredible perseverance.
For hundreds of years, brewers have ranked hops based on their quality. This has led to a sense of nobility among a select class of landrace hops brewers prize the most. But are they noble because they’re old and tested, or because they taste and smell so good?
While I was in Europe, Carlsberg announced it would finally stop using the antiquate Burton Union system used to make Marston’s Pedigree in Burton, England. The news was sad, but it came far later than I ever expected. A eulogy for a technology that was once state of the art.
In the spring, Dan and others from the brewery head off to a forest just west of town. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips.
Books have been the main way we collected and stored knowledge for hundreds of years. In the past decade, while no one noticed, that changed, and books are quickly becoming obsolete.
People typically talk about “American” or “Pacific Northwest” hops as if they’re a monolith. Yet Oregon’s Willamette Valley, on the wet side of the Cascades, is vastly different than the arid Yakima Valley. The hops grown there are different, too.
Nothing in our living memory could prepare us for what was to come, and human brains aren’t wired to understand events as huge and transformational as what we confronted.
Dating breweries, like counting them, is an act of interpretation. Once a brewery’s age passes into the centuries, interruptions are certain. Sometimes breweries take advantage of those gaps to push their founding date backward. So let’s take the most famous date of all, Weihenstephan and 1040 CE.
A team of Irish researchers just published a paper about their project to recreate a 16th-century Irish ale using period ingredients, equipment, and processes. Along the way, they surfaced quite a few things I didn’t know about beer made nearly 500 years ago.
Craft beer is suffering a real identity crisis as consumers move on to other beverages. But is it also an existential crisis or something more cyclical? Here’s a reason to think it may be the latter.
I lost my internet this week. I did not enjoy the experience.