I am midway through the first leg of my book tour and I have some reports. Unexpectedly, cask ales have been the early stars of the show.
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On Friday, I visited pFriem in Hood River. It was brew day for a project on which we’ve been collaborating: a full-flavored Vienna lager like Anton Dreher made in the 19th century.
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It’s hard to imagine a time before bourbon-y imperial stouts were our trusty winter fortification, and yet it’s a relatively recent development. Here’s the story.
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A report on the book tour launch (a full house, many smiles, great performances by Ben and Van), and a note about upcoming stops.
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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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The Beer Bible 2nd Edition will be available a week from today. Here’s the skinny on everything that’s new. It’s a lot!
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You may have noticed that the site has been less active than usual around here lately. There’s a reason for that, and now that things are beginning to look more normal going forward, I wanted to comment on it.
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Writers and brewers have identified most of the useful frameworks we use to understand beer. An important one, often hinted at but never fully explored, is national tradition. It’s never been more important to understand, though—especially now amid the birth of the American tradition.
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The Brewers Association announced the winners of the GABF last night, and here’s a brief, Pac NW-centric recap.
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The 20-stop national Beer Bible book tour begins on Sept 23, and we’ve planned events every beer fan will enjoy. Have a look at the schedule and save the date.
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An exceptional new brewery opened in Bellingham a year ago, and they specialize in rustic styles, including Franconian lager. But my fave was a Polish lager.
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We now accept the fairly rigid classification of beer styles offered by groups like the GABF and Cicerone program. Where did they come from, and who decided how they should be organized? The short answer is Michael Jackson, but the longer answer is more intriguing.
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Beer styles are an agreement, shorthand to describe something we think we all understand. But scratch the surface even a little bit, and you fall into an epistemological void. Three examples this week illustrate their paradoxes and predicaments.
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A quintuple IPA arrived in my mailbox and promised to answer a question I’ve long wondered about: is there a point of diminishing return on IPAs, where hop intensity can no longer increase with the strength of a beer? The answer lay within.
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As the pandemic launches into its fifth and potentially most-virulent wave, politicians are stepping back. Private retail businesses are left to make decisions about how to police their customers, and the fallout might last years. It’s a bad situation.
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Pliny was a bright light in the fog. Despite its hurricane of flavors, it was more focused, refined, and elegant than other IPAs of the day. With the benefit of time, we can see that it reset expectations about what was possible, pointing to the future we now inhabit.
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Workman Publishing is being sold. The Publisher of The Beer Bible also owns Storey, an imprint with a number of excellent beer titles. It’s probably not good news.
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For people like me devoted to the culture, craft, and history of good beer, mass market products are like clouds passing through a blue sky. Once the new products were dry beer and wine coolers and now they’re alcoholic sodas and seltzers. They will be passing overhead forever because people like them.
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Of all the interesting stuff that has appeared at this site over the past 15 years, nothing was more important than the forty-odd posts from brewers and one cidermaker that constitute the Coronavirus Diaries series that ran on the site from March 2020 to this May. They’re now available as a book.
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