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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.
You know the history of hazy IPAs, right? It goes back to Vermont’s Alchemist Brewery and its iconic double IPA, Heady Topper. But did you know the role a hurricane played in the story? Or the fact that Heady is a slightly awkward avatar for the current style? Or what Alchemist founder John Kimmich thinks about hazy IPAs? Listen and learn!
American wheat ales are among the oldest beers brewed in the craft era, and enjoy the virtue of being a largely native style. Despite garnering very little attention these days, they still sell pretty well. There’s even some signs they’re starting to evolve.
While I do my civic duty and sit in the Multnomah County Courthouse waiting to be called to serve on a jury, I have another interesting case of civic life in America in 2026. It involves clandestine political events, a Latino brewery and Cinco de Mayo.
Craft beer has bumped up against a volume ceiling in recent years, topping out at about 15% of the market. Hidden within that bad news is an opportunity. Are there customers breweries just aren’t attracting? pFriem’s new Tropical Hazy IPA is an attempt to find out.
At the Craft Brewers Conference, people were talking about good vibes. Yet the industry’s performance, measured by dollars, anyway, is pretty grim. Is this a contradiction, or should the Brewers Association just be measuring different stats?
Portland’s Great Notion Brewing is turning ten, and we are celebrating by giving out two free tickets to their anniversary party in June. In addition to the usual music and fun, they’ll be offering more than three dozen special beers, most of which you won’t find anywhere else.
In the event, it’s a can of Hamm’s and something water-clear that smells of grain alcohol. (Which turned out to be a kamikaze.) Mark ordered one each for the three of us to sample on our little ethnographic exploration. Tab: $12. For all three.
Notes about the latest episode of One Iconic Beer, plus a program note or two from the road in Philadelphia.
The Brewers Association has their annual year-end numbers out for 2025 and as expected, it’s a bit grim. Yet within the overall dark picture, there are a few fascinating trends and details, and I have ‘em all for you.
Pop quiz: which state has more expensive beer, Wisconsin, Colorado, or Texas? The folks at Toast have some numbers out this week, and they’re quite 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.