A report on yesterday’s surprise storm over Portland, and the lovely time we had amid the swirling tempest.
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Today I wrap up AI week with a consideration of the nightmare scenarios—as well as the lesser examples that might be just as bad. What happens, for example, when a distributor replaces its sales team with AI?
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Users can plug the name of living artists into AI generators to get art that looks like Banksy or Jeff Koons or Em Sauter. But should they?
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We kick off AI week with an update. A year ago I first explored AI, but the advances since then are startling. In this post, I discuss the ways it can research a beer style for a new release, name your beer, write a press release for it, and create a label. But the real advantage is the way it will make the creative work we already do a lot faster.
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Did you know there were two Kona Breweries? Both make Big Wave and Longboard Lager. Both have the same evocative island art and the same motto (“liquid aloha”). Yet the original one on the Big Island is now independent and has nothing to do with the stuff made on the mainland.
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Today we hear from Alesong's Brian Coombs, who spoke to me about the brewery's experiments with wild fruit inoculations. It's a rare practice I wrote about in Craft Beer and Brewing.
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Historically, hops have been divided by category—”bitter” versus “aroma” was the classic dichotomy. Because of the massive changes in beer and hop breeding, German researchers are suggesting expanding that group to four categories. But are categories really necessary?
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A blogger may rest, but the news never does. Several big and small stories developed while I sat on a beach, and here’s my omnibus post of catch-up hot takes. Get ‘em while they’re fresh!
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Chocolate, like beer, goes through a spontaneous fermentation. In my recent visit to Hawaii, I had a chance to see and smell the process in action—and later taste the results. If you know where to look, you can taste fermentation’s effects in chocolate. 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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I’m not a beer geek. I am a beer nerd—there’s a difference.
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As our beer journey unfolds, our sense of flavor changes. That can cause our memories to drift as well. Fortunately, we can turn to “calibration” beers to remind us what the past was actually like.
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A couple years back, John Holl and I were drinking beers at The Commons when the topic of "romantic facts" came up. Romantic facts? You know, those (false) stories that have gotten repeated so often they've come to be accepted as truth. Ben Franklin saying "Beer is proof God loves us," or the one about how a monk smuggled yeast into Bohemia from Bavaria to brew the first pilsner--those kinds of things. In journalism there's a concept about a story that's too good to fact check, and the romantic fact is beer's version of that.
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We need to talk about a new product from the Anheuser-Busch InBev corporation of São Paulo/Leuven/New York: Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda. If the string of adjectives and nouns in that title makes sense to you, and it almost certainly does, something weird has happened.
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In case you missed it, glittery beer has arrived. You may have seen these strange, wondrous beers on social media and wondered how they're made and what they taste like. I spent a couple hours with two brewers who made recent examples and I have your full report on this truly beguiling new beer style.
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When Yvan De Baets and Bernard Leboucq installed their brewery in Brussels in 2010, it doubled the number in the capital city. Since then, a number of new breweries have followed, but none have focused so single-mindedly on creating hometown beers.
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A personal note about my plans for January.
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The beer industry news has been fairly bleak as we head into the new year. But how does it feel at the brewery level? I spoke to more than a dozen breweries, and got more individual, personal—and enlightening—responses.
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