If you appreciate fine beer and you plan to tour Europe, then the Czech Republic will be high on your list of places to visit. You had better hurry, though, for the entire European brewing tradition is under threat at the hands of global brewers.
Candidate Coors Handles a Hot Potato Peter Coors, who’s taken a leave of absence from the family beer business to run for the United States Senate in Colorado, has sought to rekindle a long-smoldering issue: the 21-year-old minimum drinking age. At a June 23 forum in Greenwood Village, Coors said, “We got along fine for... View Article
There’s a joke going the rounds of the British brewing industry that runs like this: “What do you call Scottish & Newcastle Breweries now that it doesn’t have breweries in either Scotland or Newcastle? Answer: Ampersand Breweries, because that’s all that’s left.”
Last year, the war in Iraq forced the cancellation of the annual National Beer Wholesalers/Brewers Joint Legislative Conference in Washington, DC. As this year’s gathering approaches, National Beer Wholesalers Association president David Rehr has plenty of forest fires to put out.
Hoppiness is in the mind—and on the palate—of the beholder. IBUs tell only half the story. They measure the amount of alpha acids—the primary bittering chemical in hops—but leave out the volatile oils and resins that give beers their floral, citrusy, earthy or spicy aromas.
Although much of beer’s dawn is shrouded in obscurity, we do know that beer is as old as civilization itself. We also know that humans have used two fundamentally different ways of brewing: an ancient way of making beer from bread that was practiced at least until the birth of Christ, and a modern way... View Article
Because the Celtic/Germanic tribes were illiterate, our knowledge of the ingredients and processes used to make central European Stone Age beers is sketchy. What we do know is that, until the modern globalization of trade, man has always brewed with the ingredients he found right at his door- (or cave-) step.
Lambic, one of the world’s most fascinating beer styles, is under threat. At the end of January, lambic brewers were due to meet with the Belgian government in an attempt to protect their production methods from a small army of bureaucrats from the European Commission who, determined to eradicate unhygienic food processing, could destroy a... View Article
So many trends—from Starbucks coffee to grunge music to gourmet pizza with capers and duck sausage—started on the West Coast that it’s enough to give some East Coast residents an inferiority complex.
