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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MorePortland, 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.
Read MoreTime 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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreThree 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.
Read MoreWe 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?
Read MoreTom 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?
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreReading 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.
Read More"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."
Read MoreLate 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.
Read MoreIt 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.
Read MoreThe end of the year means, of course, Jeff's old-timey picture show! Pull up a folding chair while I get out the carousel and begin loading in the slides and we'll get started. I promise beer and brief comments.
Read MoreYou may not realize this, but it there is an unwritten rule that between Dec 26 and Jan 1, publications (blogs inlcuded) must publish a year-end review. Look, I don't make the rules. If you want me to stop this practice, you have to take it up with the Deep State.
Read MoreAs I was thinking about the year just ending, memory of one of my favorite posts came to mind--one not on the "best posts" list. A little scouring revealed three more. If you'll excuse some navel gazing (or solipsism, depending on how critical you're feeling), I'd like to direct you to these four further posts in case you missed them.
Read MoreTis the season ... for retrospectives. On this eve of Christmas Eve--or more properly because it's a long holiday weekend--I offer you the best posts that appeared here over the past calendar year.
Read More--Post updated with revised figures-- When the GOP pushed through tax cuts this week, they included a tax cut for breweries. It's a bipartisan proposal that's been kicking around with broad support that will actually benefit the little guy--in this case craft breweries. But is it good policy?
Read MoreA report on day two and breweries 5-8 in our lightning tour of Seattle breweries. Reuben's was the day's focal point, but we also popped into Old Stove and an Elysian outpost. My report, plus a comment on where Seattle stands now.
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