I can’t remember when I wasn’t collecting something. As soon as I learned to write, I wrote to English motorcar manufacturers requesting copies of their brochures. As a kid from Broken Arrow, OK, my shaky cursive probably revealed my inability to pay cash for an Alvis, Bentley or an Aston Martin Yet send they did... View Article
I’ve always been a tinkerer. Before I could walk, my mother tells stories about me taking apart the toaster, or dismantling light covers and sticking bobby pins into wall sockets. I was a busy boy.
Brauerei Michael Plank is a 391 year-old brewery named after the caretaker who has lived all those years.. Today’s Michael Plank is the 16th generation of first-born sons named Michael. His five year-old first son, Michael, will be the 17th generation. This little brewery thrives, producing 10,000 hectoliters (8,500 U.S. barrels) of beer a year,... View Article
I walked through the crowd on pint night and someone shouted across the room, “Buy you a beer?” I scanned the group and recognized a member of our festival volunteer team. I yelled back, “No, this one’s on me.” He replied, “You’re always buying. Let me return the favor.” In a moment, beer’s social foundation... View Article
While visiting a TV station in Albuquerque on business—like many of my beer-writing brethren, I have a “real job” in addition to my “beer job”—one of the news anchors and I got to chatting about my growing enchantment with Land of Enchantment’s famous cuisine.
One of my favorite pearls of wisdom from Yogi Berra is, “You have to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” In our industry, this is almost a truism. Like most people in the craft beer business, I had no idea 25 years ago that I was... View Article
From the beginning, of course, I wanted to sell beer, but I also wanted to be part of Brooklyn. To me, the two goals were connected. I first visited New York with my mom and grandma in 1957 for the Billy Graham Crusades at Madison Square Garden. They got saved seven nights in a row;... View Article
“When nothing else from the past subsists, after people are dead, after the destruction of things, smell and taste alone remain, like souls bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the vast edifice of memory.”
I live in the north of England, in Yorkshire. My mum doesn’t drink at all—she’s teetotal—but my dad’s a great beer fan. This sounds a bit strange, but I was actually conceived in Tadcaster, which is a big brewing town in Yorkshire. Whenever I go back to Tadcaster now, I love that smell of beer... View Article
