All About Beer: You have been in on start-up brewing enterprises in many countries. How receptive were they to brewpubs and craft beer? Will Kemper: The reception has generally been positive, for example, in Turkey—specifically Istanbul, because Turkey’s a big country, so you’re really talking Istanbul.
With more than 2,000 craft breweries in production and another 1,000 in the planning stages, the craft beer scene is poised for growth and ground-breaking innovation like we’ve never seen before. Craft beer’s pioneers deserve the lion’s share of the credit for where we are today, but where we’re going will be, to an increasing... View Article
It’s hard to believe it’s been 18 years since I attended my first Craft Brewers Conference. At the time I was working for a beer distributorship in Houston, and the management there was just getting interested in crafts and imports. We had just taken on the Celis brands, and as the CBC was in Austin... View Article
My journey in beer began in the 1970s. During that decade and into the early ‘80s, the beer landscape was bleak throughout most of this country but especially in my native South Carolina. American beers were generally flavorless thirst quenchers and European beers were usually stale or skunked. Despite the sad state of the beer... View Article
All About Beer: When was DuClaw founded? Jim Wagner: DuClaw was founded in 1996 by Dave Benfield, who is still the owner.
When I had just graduated from college, most of my mornings would begin with me stumbling over tossed clothes and sneakers to the refrigerator. My mouth typically felt as barren as the Sahara, and only one thing could cure this—water. I never thought I would ever drink anything else in the morning. Least of all,... View Article
I am writing this in the lobby bar of the Warwick Hotel in Denver, where I am waiting for my colleague, wine editor Emily Pennington, to join me shortly so that we may catch a cab down to watch the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney. Emily is 25 years old, and as I’ve... View Article
I love the Windy City. It has buildings that stretch to the heavens, the cursed Cubs and its own style of hot dogs. What’s not to like about that? It’s a gritty lakefront community with a checkered history of crooked politicians, mob bosses named Bugsy and Capone and their illicit everything everywhere. Like most cities,... View Article
“Why did you switch from wine to beer?” “I graduated!” always gets a laugh. Though I’ve been commercially close to Gambrinus far longer that I was to Bacchus, I have never lost my taste for wine. Neither tipple is nobler than the other, though beer snobs pale in comparison to wine snobs. Over the years... View Article
