At some point, when no one was really looking, an entire season just fell off the calendar. Think about it. Each year drinkers look forward to summer ales and autumn’s Oktoberfests and pumpkin beers. Then, as the air gets crisp and cold, the brews get spicy and boozy, with the arrival of winter warmers and... View Article
Ben Beinhardt has lived in Germany all his life, surrounded by hundreds of years of brewing tradition and some of the most iconic brands the world has known. He still fondly recalls his first Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock, made at a brewery that’s been around since 1877, and his excitement at drinking a beer steeped in... View Article
Imagine starting a brewery on a shoestring, cobbling together a small system, making just one barrel of beer at a time. Then, after working tirelessly to reach a point where demand exceeds capacity, miraculously being able to move into a new location already outfitted with the exact equipment needed to expand. Improbable? Not quite. In... View Article
As you feel the comforting cool sensation of that beer in your hand, consider that our universe encompasses an almost incomprehensible range of temperatures, from atom-slowing cold to raging infernos not even Dante could have imagined. We are fortunate to live in the zone where liquid water is possible, making life—and beer—possible. Heat is a form... View Article
How does a brewery stand out in the market these days? First, the beer needs to be unimpeachable. Second, there needs to be an ethos followed, a commitment to practices combined with that je ne sais quoi. So we asked a simple question of brewers, magazine contributors and fellow drinkers: Name a brewery doing interesting... View Article
COPENHAGEN—We should invent a name for this kind of thing—ghost brewing or reincarnated beer, something like that. It’s when a brewery revives an old recipe and tries to brew it to the standards of a lost era—often with ancient ingredients. Recently, the Carlsberg Brewery ran through this exercise after successfully cropping yeast from a 133-year-old... View Article
This article appears in the November issue of All About Beer Magazine. Subscribe today and have All About Beer Magazine delivered to your mailbox, tablet, smartphone or computer. Twenty years ago there was a chance that a beer drinker in Manhattan might open a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that had traveled 2,850 miles from Chico, California,... View Article
Barrel-aging may be all the rage at the moment, but giving beer time to mature is nothing new. And it wasn’t done by halves. While a modern lager might spend a few weeks aging and a barrel-aged beer sits a couple of years in wood, in the past, beers could mature for decades. Stock Ale... View Article
Dave Gardell has owned the Ruck, a beer bar in Troy, New York, for the last 11 and a half years. He’s worked there for the past 18. At his job, he says, he makes special effort to “have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the product I’m serving,” even “pounding the pavement” himself to... View Article
