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.
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In the latest Sightglass article, I explore the remarkable ways barley varieties affect the flavor of beer and how craft malthouses, producing malt in small batches, are transforming American brewing.
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With the release of two new stouts, Breakside debuts a new approach to barrel-aging. Borrowing a page from the wild ale playbook, they blend not just different vintages, but different beers to create more integrated, subtle beers than the standard approach of single-batch blends.
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Craft breweries are rapidly turning kveik into yet another juice-delivery system, which is fine as far as it goes, but risks slamming the door on far richer, more interesting possibilities. Let’s all be aware of what we’re dismantling before we dismantle it completely.
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One brewery accounted for three of the best fresh hop beers I had this year, including the very best example. What’s StormBreaker’s secret?
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Dry-hopping is king, especially for fresh-hop beers. Or is it? Bend Brewing’s Zach Beckwith has thoughts.
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Things are hard right now—one might even say grim and bleak. But what a tonic it is to poke one’s nose into a pouch of unfamiliar hops and inhale deeply.
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Some brewers call their dry-hopped lagers “Italian pilsners,” but there’s more to it than that. Let’s check in with Agostino Arioli, the man who invented the style at Birrificio Italiano.
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Craft beer has sparked an amazing wave of hop breeding, both among private companies and government-supported agencies. It started in the US but has now spread around the world. Here is a list of all the new hops you might encounter, from home and abroad.
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Lithuania has one of the most interesting and unusual brewing traditions in the world, and should be on your short list for foreign travel. Here’s a primer.
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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.
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We casually refer to Brettanomyces as “wild” yeast, despite the fact that most of it is prepared by a technician in a sterile laboratory. But for some brewers, wild means wild.
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Modern breweries prefer to boil their wort as briefly as quality allows, owing to efficiencies in time and energy. But it wasn’t always so. In the 19th century, brewers routinely subjected their worts to three, four, or even twelve-hour boils. If you’ve ever wondered what that does to beer, I have the perfect beer for you to try.
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It is difficult to brew with spices, and no one does it as well as the Belgians. In this first part of a two-part series, St. Feuillien brewer Alexis Briol offers the philosophy that guides Belgian thinking.
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Cask ale is not just the most important symbol of British brewing, it’s also one of the hardest to make beers, the most hand-crafted of beers, and, when it’s made and served properly, the best beers on the planet. Why does no one see this?
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Historian and archaeologist Alexander Langlands has a new book called Cræft, the purpose of which is to reclaim the meaning of "craft" as it existed before it became a marketing slogan or an expensive item available at boutiques. How might this apply to beer?
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Where can you find a brewer with a “lambic farm” who makes his own invert sugar? In the second post in my pre-Homebrew Con series about homebrewers, I profile Portland’s own Bill Schneller, who champions traditional styles.
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Do you ever wish you could go back to a time before a beer style disappeared and have a pint? You can do the next best thing with this amazing video from 1973, the moment Irish porter—and the “high and low” system of pouring it—vanished from the earth.
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The idea that an intensely fruity IPA must be cloudy as a weissbier is one of the more dubious in all of beer. No surprise, then, that breweries are pushing the envelop and developing “clear hazy IPAs.” A collaboration between Fair State and Surly is instructive.
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