Amid the requisite IPAs, the menu offered a pilsner or a vintage 1990s 4.9% brewpub porter. But on that Wednesday, late into October, I was confused. I should have wanted the porter, because it should have been cold and wet outside. Instead, the sunny day reached the mid-70s.

We like things, like beer, for its own sake. It’s pretty and tasty and fun. But we care about beer—anything, really—because of its story. In fact, our brains are hardwired to understand the world through story. Let’s delve a little deeper to see why.

If you are a right proper beer sicko, you already know the GABF announced their 2026 slate of winners yesterday. If you were doing something else and missed the news, I have all the news, with special state-by-state matchups, major category winners, and some home cooking with Oregon’s performance.

Andreas Krennmair is doing some amazing historical research about Central European beer, and his latest book Bavarian White Beer is a must-read. It corrects many historical errors and adds much detail to the story of this venerable ale.

Guinness is making exits, notably from Baltimore. This, along with parent company Diageo’s move to lay off 6.4% of its workforce (“cost-cutting”), has made a lot of news. But they’ve also made a departure that hits in a more personal way. After ten years, Guinness and Beervana have broken up.

As a follow-up to the podcast on Pliny the Elder and its role in shaping American IPA, let’s remember another landmark beer that debuted 30 years ago. More regional and less buzzy, BridgePort IPA was nevertheless a very important building block in the development of hoppy American ales.

It is difficult to see how using AI to select flavorings to squirt into your beer will make you like beer any more or hate AI any less, but Heineken is determined to run the experiment anyway.

A new episode of the One Iconic Beer podcast is out, with a look at Russian River’s Pliny the Elder. In this post, I describe the story behind the story—the reason I wanted to tell Pliny’s story.

After a slow build-up, this weekend we hit the busiest time in the fresh hop beer calendar. For the intrepid fresh-hop hunters out there, here’s a handy guide about where to find ‘em.

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.

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.