Following the hailstorm of criticism that fell on the recent Craft Brewers Conference, I reached out to organizers at the Brewers Association for answers to some of the critiques.
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Hazy IPAs are known for their gentle, sweet tropicality, while West Coast IPAs feature savory, garlic-to-pine notes. In Portland, some breweries have decided to blend the two together. Amazingly, it works.
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I may be an outlier here, but as a rule of thumb, I personally would never green-light a collab with any packaged meats product.
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After an encounter with a single-hop Talus beer, I have a better sense what this newish American hop tastes like, and I am in love. It’s tropical, but less mango and more mangosteen. In this post, I unpack its unusual but somehow familiar flavors.
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The origins for the way John Kimmich makes hoppy ales were many, and as far away as San Diego and Portland. Yet when he canned Heady Topper, “everybody thought that I just blinked my eyes one night and made this beer.” His thoughts on hops and where his offspring have taken IPAs.
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Two breweries joined a small wave opening in Portland in the past year, and even in a very crowded market they bring something eaters and drinkers won’t find elsewhere.
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There’s nothing wrong with beer styles per se, but they have become so codified and calcified they’re as much a straightjacket as a tool for understanding. We won’t and shouldn’t abandon beer styles entirely, but it’s time to develop a new language.
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Less than a year ago, three Washington state breweries filed a lawsuit against Oregon to allow them to self-distribute into the state. Suits like this can take five or more years to work their way through the system, but not this one—Oregon folded like a cheap suit.
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Bud Light did a great thing: the company reached out to a winsome young woman with a massive social media following. Everything since then has been a disgrace.
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Oregon’s De Garde Brewing, possibly the only brewery outside Belgium exclusively making spontaneously-fermented beer, turns ten next month. That decade charts big changes in the fortunes of wild ales in the US.
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Heineken has a new product aimed at an American audience, but everything about the rollout suggests Heineken doesn’t really get Americans.
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In the oscillating cycle of innovation and retrenchment, breweries focus on different things. People aren’t clamoring for the newest, most exotic beer anymore, and breweries will contend with this new normal by training their creativity on their business structures instead.
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Schwarzbiers aren’t the most popular lagers on American taplists, but they’re fairly common. If it hadn’t been for one brewery, there might be none at all. This is the 500-year story of the most famous black lager brewery, Köstritzer.
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It’s one thing to call a two hundred year-old brewery that makes the exemplar of a certain beer style a “world classic.” But what does it mean to call a ten year-old brewery that?
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The Schehrer Award honors a brewer’s lifetime achievements.
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Technology is disrupting not just how but what we pay, and has the whole enterprise of tipping teetering near collapse. Perhaps it’s time to say good riddance.
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Organizers announced the winners of the annual Oregon Beer Awards last night. A few bites on the winners.
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A team of Irish researchers just published a paper about their project to recreate a 16th-century Irish ale using period ingredients, equipment, and processes. Along the way, they surfaced quite a few things I didn’t know about beer made nearly 500 years ago.
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Humans, at base, are no more independent than an individual tuna in its shoal. But good luck trying to figure out which direction the school will turn. I think there’s a lesson in there for sellers of malt beverages.
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Craft beer is suffering a real identity crisis as consumers move on to other beverages. But is it also an existential crisis or something more cyclical? Here’s a reason to think it may be the latter.
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