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The fresh hop beers are out! But wait, is that “green” character diminishing? I try to get to the bottom of things.
Oh those British drinkers; what will they glom onto next? It turns out the answer, which completely escaped my notice, is fruit lagers.
In a previous post, I discussed using an AI tool to edit, design, and lay out a book. The experience gave me a better understanding of where the tool-like advantages of AI reside, and how they affirm rather than refute its dangers. A long post one what I learned.
“Bars would once have been expected to contain pool and shuffleboard tables, the stink of smoke and spilled beer. Prior to craft beer, those regular neighborhood joints were just bars. Now the exact same places are “dive bars.” In the 21st century we also have “wine bars.” See how a modifier changes everything?”
On the latest episode of One Iconic Beer, we tackle the most influential beer ever made, and the brewery that’s still brewing it in Southwest Bohemia.
There’s an old saw that goes like this: while you can hide faults in many beer styles, pilsners are hard because they expose every flaw. In one very narrow sense this may be accurate, but it leaves much to be desired as a general thesis.
Yesterday Trap Door Brewing hosted US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at a political rally for Republican House candidate John Braun. The reaction on social media was spicy.
Did you know there were two Kona Breweries? Both make Big Wave and Longboard Lager. Both have the same evocative island art and the same motto (“liquid aloha”). Yet the original one on the Big Island is now independent and has nothing to do with the stuff made on the mainland.
I co-published a book! It’s not about beer, but the back story is something you may find interesting. Indeed, you may even find the book interesting!
While I’m away from the computer, I’m posting material from the archives. Today we have a visit I made to Rodenbach fifteen years ago.
Quick, what’s the most iconic ‘90s-era Wisconsin beer, launched by a craft brewery that is the inheritor of the state’s famous local brewing tradition. If you said Spotted Cow, you got the right brewery, but today we’re talking about an even more influential beer.
The iconoclastic and widely beloved Alan Sprints of Hair of the Dog brewing died last night at 66. It is a huge loss not just for the industry, but for so many whose lives he touched. We’ll miss him so much.
The Oregon Health Authority, under the auspices of their Rethink the Drink campaign, is out with a new social media spot that equates alcohol and asbestos. For a project that claims to only be interested in promoting drinking moderation, this seems pretty immoderate.
Today you get three small bites that may make a meal.: sad news about the sunset of the best deal in beer, good news about Americans’ view of beer, and a cool gadget that seems like all upside for breweries.
Brewers call them a lot of different things—hoppy lagers, WC pales, WC pilsners, but they have a lot in common. Lean bodies, crisp finishes, and modern tropical aromas and flavors. The names might be different, but it’s an emerging “style,” and I think it’s going to be a winner.
An annual celebration of the independent breweries that paradoxically both preserve old traditions and invent new ones, along with a special semiquincentennial consideration of beer’s role in American life. Plus a possibly controversial list of the most “American” beers.
Humphrey Smith, the patriarch of the Samuel Smith Brewery, has died. He was a man who lived in the ‘70s—the 1870s. And in his later years, his “traditional” approach, lauded in the newspaper obits yesterday, curdled into something darker and weirder.
Breweries have started to embrace low-alcohol beers (at or below 3% ABV) as the newest market to exploit. The logic seems to borrow partly from the “success” of N/A beers, and partly on declining consumption. But I’m not buying it.
Once upon a time, beer commercials were so salient in American life that they sparked merchandise—and everybody repeated them to each other. Today they’re mostly bland in that corporate way, sometimes entertaining, but wholly disconnected from the drinker or the product. What happened?
Bass Pale Ale is one of the most important three or five or ten beers ever brewed (please debate), and in telling its story, we also trace the contours of British brewing. Helping us tell this story are illustrious writer Pete Brown and Dr. Harry White, who worked at Bass from 1977-’07. It’s White, Brown, and Bass on One Iconic Beer.
How do hot Springs affect a hop crop? After an alarming story by local TV station KGW about Oregon’s crop this year, I reached out to several hop growers to get the lowdown. Fortunately, they painted a happier picture.
In recent numbers released by the Brewers Association in New Brewer magazine, we can see the performance of a number of larger “craft breweries.” Here’s a chart that shows their performance over a five-year span—along with a provocation in the title.
About three months ago, Von Ebert launched a fascinating experiment. They dropped the price on their gold-medal light lager, Clubhaus, to an astonishing three bucks. The effect it has had on their business offers an intriguing lesson for breweries struggling in hard times.
The story of Cascade hops stretches all the way back to 1955, and is one of the keys to the beer we drink today. In anticipation of the all-Cascade Oregon Homegrown collaboration, I have the fascinating history of America’s most important hop.
The latest Oregon Homegrown collaboration kicks off this week. Fifteen breweries are making beers with Oregon yeast and an Oregon-bred and Oregon-grown hop variety in a project that highlights how special Oregon beer culture is. And this year’s hop, Cascade, features a new twist.
Steve Luke has sold his Seattle brewery to Yakima-based Bale Breaker and is moving with his wife to New Zealand. While it may be a good move for Steve, he will leave an empty space in the Pacific Northwest when he goes.
Yesterday Google announced a new era in the way they mediate web searches, using AI to scrape the internet to provide summaries rather than links, so people never have to visit the pesky websites from which Google stole the information. It is going to be very bad for sites like this one.
Today we mark 25 years since the attacks on 9/11. Those events had such a massive, society-wide effect that they reverberate in unexpected ways across those decades—even, perhaps, in the beer industry.