Craft beer was supposed to be the antithesis of the “fizzy yellow beer” doled out by big brewers, but a new round of lagers is putting that thesis to the test. My father-in-law, a longtime Seattle-area homebrewer, still has a “Life Is Too Short For Yellow Beer” bumper sticker on his truck. At one point,... View Article
If you spent even part of 2017 in line for hazy IPA or waiting for the nation’s larger brewers to make their next acquisitions, you had time to ponder what this year is going to add up to for the beer industry. We can’t know exactly what 2018 will look like for the beer business,... View Article
When Microsoft bought LinkedIn last year, the tech giant didn’t disguise itself as Pa Gates’ Craft Technology Works. When Amazon bought Whole Foods this year, it didn’t create a South Lake Union Organics holding company to do so. So why do brewers keep filtering their craft beer acquisitions through smaller, friendlier faces? That question came... View Article
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that the biggest problem small brewers face has nothing to do with upside-down bottle seals or beer festival advertisers. The 5,300-plus brewers nationwide that the Brewers Association defines as “craft” don’t need the word “independent” broken into three pieces to serve as a reverse scarlet letter differentiating their beer from... View Article
Once upon a time an ad was an ad and a story was a story. Or at least that’s the fairy tale journalists like me tell ourselves. Really, though, salespeople have made a living off telling stories for at least as long as reporters have. But over the past five, maybe 10 years, I’ve heard... View Article
The $20.99 750-mL bottle of barrel-aged stout to put away for sometime special and the $11.99 four-pack of Belgian-style ale that’ll go over well back home were already in my basket. I also wanted a sixer of something hop-heavy for myself. I wavered briefly between a great IPA from a regional brewery that I favor... View Article
At first blush, two key areas of growth in beer these days may not operate as separately as they seem. Drinkers still can’t seem to get enough hops. They also continue to gravitate toward locally made beer. Both interests underscore freshness, encouraging more beer drinkers to think about it, value it and seek it out.... View Article
“I’m stuffed,” we say when the broccoli makes one more trip around the table. But 10 minutes later we “always have room for dessert.” For me, beer works like that. I’ve got a whole separate compartment in my stomach for beer. Not so, of course; the separate compartment is in my mind, not my stomach.... View Article
Texans bought 9.5 percent of all the beer sold in the United States in 2015. That’s almost 20 million barrels, making it the second-largest U.S. market, after California. But California has something like 10 million more residents overall, and a legal drinking-age population that’s also bigger by about 10 million. So the average 21-plus Texan... View Article
