Author: Jeff Alworth
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Classic Beer -
Classic BeerU Fleků Flekovský Ležák 13˚: Bohemia’s Definitive Dark Beer
May 2, 2018 - Jeff Alworth When citing the year of their inception, many breweries—well, how to say this delicately?—polish the apple somewhat. The date you find on a bottle may refer to monks who brewed there once, or an unrelated brewery from centuries earlier, or some other abstruse connection to antiquity. That’s why it’s nice to be able to highlight... View Article -
Classic BeerFuller’s London Pride: A Harmony in Five Parts
January 10, 2018 - Jeff Alworth Good luck finding a proper English bitter in the United States. You can more easily locate gose—an obscure, recently extinct beer made in only a couple of breweries in its native Germany—than the national ale of Britain. The same Britain, to underscore this irony, that served as the model for American microbreweries 40 years ago.... View Article -
Classic BeerCantillon Classic Gueuze: Everything Is in Everything
January 1, 2018 - Jeff Alworth A few years back, I landed in Belgium’s Charleroi airport during a November cold snap. The woman at the car rental desk shot a look at the frost-covered ground, gave a shiver, and complained about the chill. But later that afternoon, as I stepped off a busy Brussels street into Brasserie Cantillon, one of the... View Article -
Classic BeerSchneider Weisse: Wheat Beer’s Last Stand
November 6, 2017 - Jeff Alworth The village of Kelheim, smack dab in the center of Bavaria, does not appear to be hallowed ground. It has the same tidy, charming appearance of so many little towns that dot the Bavarian countryside. True, there’s a larger-than-average brewery just to the east of the town square and, true, it does announce itself as... View Article -
Classic BeerGenesee Cream Ale: Smooth Character
July 1, 2017 - Jeff Alworth Select a type of beer and think about which one started or revived a tradition—Pilsner Urquell, Rodenbach, Fuller’s ESB. These are your classics. We tend to discount American beers made in large plants and sold in cans and not unreasonably; most tend to be targeted at the mass audience or are pallid imitations of more... View Article -
Classic BeerTaras Boulba: Delightfully Belgian
May 1, 2017 - Jeff Alworth If you found yourself in one of the beerier precincts of Portland, Oregon, six or seven years ago, there was a good chance you noticed someone wearing a T-shirt with a single, strange word, punctuated for emphasis: Smeirlap! This was an insider’s reference to a particular Belgian beer—but not, as you might expect, Cantillon Brewery,... View Article -
Classic BeerWestmalle Tripel: Evolution Over Decades
March 1, 2017 - Jeff Alworth Belgians, in the realm of beer at least, are slow to give up their traditions. As late as the 1960s, they were still resisting the charms of industrial lager, and when you pore through the gem case that contains Belgian ale styles, you still find many ancient treasures. And until fairly late in the 20th... View Article -
BrewingEmergence of Tiers
March 1, 2017 - Jeff Alworth For a few decades, beer has had a dividing line so bright it jumps out at the grocery store. On one side are traditional mass-market lagers, on the other “craft beers.” Containers are roughly the same price in each category, but quite a bit different on either side of that line. If you’re an old... View Article