Recently, my young friend Alyssa and I had a date for that now ubiquitous wonderful American tradition—Sunday brunch. Where to go? We considered and discarded a half-dozen places before deciding on Freetail Brewing Co., a pizza-centered brewpub and production brewery here in San Antonio. This was the choice even though my dining companion was on... View Article
Editor’s note: This article appeared in our January issue, and several additional acquisitions and consolidations have occurred since it was written. Buckle your seat belts. The speed at which sales are happening across the beer industry is frightening, and earlier this summer I had a front seat to one of the more talked-about acquisitions. I... View Article
Here’s a fun fact: There’s an awful lot of sleeping around within the beer industry: craft brewers sleeping with distributors, distributors sleeping with big brewers, big brewers even sleeping with craft brewers (so dirty) and what-have-you. Even beer journalists get in on the Dionysian revelry—I myself have carried on various trysts with craft brewers, big... View Article
On a warm February night 20 years ago, I found myself at an establishment in west Houston drinking beers with my boss and several top executives from Heineken. I was a wide-eyed 25-year-old greenhorn—a middling sales guy at a large beer distributorship—and I remember just being honored that I was invited to tag along with such... View Article
I had my first tastes of beer as a child early on Saturday mornings. My grandfather—whom we all called Poopsie for some reason—was a prodigious beer drinker. And when I say prodigious, I mean he started drinking beer on Saturday mornings at around 7 o’clock. He’d wake up at 6, eat a big pile of... View Article
There’s a famous clip from the TV show Portlandia where Fred Armisen’s character is quizzing a waitress at a hip restaurant about whether the free-range “heritage-breed, woodland -raised” chicken he’s about to eat is local. After the waitress explains that the chicken, whose name is Colin by the way, is local and is fed a... View Article
The approved assignment for this column was to be about attending the 1994 Craft Brewers Convention in Austin, TX, where Charlie Papazian, then-president of the Brewers Association of America, took to the stage inexplicably in a clown outfit to wild cheers. It was to be titled “Clown Shoes.” It was to be an introspective on... View Article
Everybody I know these days hates light beer, except those who don’t. It’s not just that they don’t prefer light beer or that they like more flavorful beers: They actually actively and morally despise light beer. It’s as if light beer was once a significant other who wronged them somehow—cheated with an import, say—and forgiveness... View Article
Do you know what a SKU is? In the consumer goods industry, it is an abbreviation for stock keeping unit, and we pronounce it “skew.” A stock-keeping unit is just a very unfancy way of referring to a specific brand and package combination. In the beer industry, a brand would be Lagunitas IPA. A package... View Article
