The hop reports are coming in, and they give us a snapshot of where the beer industry is headed. In today's post, I summarize the more scintillating tidbits from Germany and the United States.
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Every brewery wants to identify that one beer that will catch fire among consumers. Different breweries approach product development in different ways, and there's no algorithm for success. A recent glance at best-sellers, however, reveals an important trend.
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After spending years in a private legal dispute with the city of Portland, Old Town Brewing finally took their case public. A relatively brief period of activism followed, and a couple of weeks ago, the city agreed to all the brewery's demands. There's a lesson here for future disputes.
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Last week, a large Portland wholesaler, Columbia Distributing, bought General (GDI), a smaller one. I spoke to some breweries in the wake of the news to learn what affect this would have on their business and availability at pubs and stores.
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Every time you pick up a six-pack from the store, it has already been sold twice before. That's because we have a system that includes a mostly-hidden middleman who neither makes nor nor sells the beer to customers. Knowing that middleman is essential to understanding the American beer biz.
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I spoke to Matt Brynildson a few years back to discuss pilsners. Firestone Walker's Pivo Pils was busy sparking a wave of craft pilsners--much as 805 is currently sparking a renaissance in goldens now.
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On the remote Big Island, on the remote archipelago of Hawai’i, is a remote town called Waimea. It’s a grassland in which the island’s cattle graze in a semi-western tableau. And yet in this small town is a wonderful little brewpub with excellent food and even better beer: the Big Island Brewhaus.
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The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino laments the death of blogs, which inhabited a lively, lifelike middle ground between social media and online magazines and newspapers. But the story is different for niche fields—like beer. Within our little ecosystem, reports of blogs’ death are greatly exaggerated.
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Portland, Oregon no longer has the most breweries in the world--though it does have 75 or so--but it may have more great ones than any other city. Trying to figure out which ones to see is a challenge, but if you're visiting Portland in 2018, these are the breweries you should see.
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Time is both atomically precise and experientially relative. We can count off the microseconds and mark events that happened centuries ago--or willl happen centuries from now. But how the time feels is an entirely different matter.
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I have recently complained about the horrors of wax-dipped beer bottles. They have the benefit of signaling that the beer inside is special, but are in other ways terrible. Are there different ways of signaling "specialness?" Why yes, yes there are.
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Three recent news stories about light beer, diet soda, and craft beer all conspire to tell an interesting story. Consumer product categories that have been fixed for years may be going obsolete, and that could be bad news even for the products displacing them.
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We have recently concluded the holiday season, a time in which special bottles of ale are removed from the cellar and shared with friends. Before all that sharing can begin, however, one must engage in the Trials of Wax. Why?
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Tom Cook has ended the franchise he had with Fat Head's Brewery so that his brewpub in the Pearl can be reborn as Von Ebert. But it's not just a simple reboot; Cook has very aggressive plans to make it an "all-around, world-class brewery." Can such a thing be engineered?
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The New York Times' occasional beer critic has managed eleven beer reviews in the past eight years--three of them on sour ales. Last week he posted his first since mid-2016, a piece on brown ales--his second since 2007. Why does the Times treat beer with such disinterest?
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Reading the tea leaves, should we take the current trends in brewing, particularly drinker promiscuity, as a danger or a boon to brewers? A few brewers weigh in on that question and, as is so often the case, have interesting perspectives.
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"In Franconian vernacular when you limp and you dangle your arms, this dangling is called schlenken. So a schlenkerla is a diminutive or the nickname for a person who dangles, who walks like that—very much like a drunk person would walk."
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Late last year, Pabst Brewing, which owns the Ballantine brand, decided to do another recreation--this time of what we might call the original whale, Ballantine Burton Ale. It follows the brewery's recreation of Ballantine IPA and, like that beer, is a careful evocation of one of America's legendary beers.
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It is an annual tradition: the Satori Award, which honors the best new Oregon beer. That beer will be revealed in due course, but not before I survey the year in beer, not just in Oregon but beyond.
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