The Ballast Point brewery launched in 1996 out of the back of a then-four-year-old homebrew supply shop in the Morena neighborhood of San Diego, near the University of San Diego. The first beer the brewery released was Ballast Point Copper Ale (which Ballast Point renamed Calico Amber and then California Amber). Jack White was the... View Article
We may think IPAs have been a big deal for a long time in American brewing, but they didn’t even become the best-selling style in the craft segment until five years ago. That was about the time when breweries started tinkering with the way they make these beers, using more and more hops later and... View Article
On June 25, 1986, a Wednesday, D.G. Yuengling & Son started production on its first-ever light beer. It called it, simply, Yuengling Premium Light, a lower-calorie variation on what was one of its most popular offerings, Yuengling Premium. It was an auspicious event for what by then was the oldest brewery in the United States. The... View Article
In May, Carlsberg flew writers from around the world to Copenhagen to witness the unveiling of a beer made with 133-year-old yeast. One of the reasons I took Carlsberg up on the offer, aside from the fact that they were paying for everything, was because it gave me a chance to explore this “new... View Article
On a July evening in 2006, Ray Daniels, Lyn Kruger and Randy Mosher stopped in at a basement bar in Durango, Colorado, well-known for its beer selection. The trio were in town to teach an advanced homebrewing course through Durango’s Fort Lewis College and the Siebel Institute, the esteemed Chicago-based brewing school where Kruger was... View Article
Last Saturday, the world learned of a troubling schism in Colorado: 14 of the state’s breweries, including the five largest not located in Golden, quit the Colorado Brewers Guild to form their own rival organization. This is only the latest development in a quickly-fracturing craft brewing community that until a couple years ago could plausibly... View Article
On Monday, June 17, 1991, new Mid-Coast Brewing Co. formally unveiled its Chief Oshkosh Red Lager at a Hilton hotel in downtown Oshkosh, Wis. The event would now otherwise be unremembered 25 years later were it not for one thing: Chief Oshkosh Red Lager came in cans. Mid-Coast Brewing was the brainchild of Jeff Fulbright.... View Article
[Full Disclosure. The following post came as a result of a visit I made to Dublin to the Guinness brewery. The folks at Diageo, Guinness’ parent company, paid for the trip and put me up while I was in Dublin. Guinness is also a sponsor of my personal blog, Beervana.] If you walk into any decent... View Article
On page 154 of the second edition of the Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Beer, published in 1988, author Michael Jackson described a brewery called Golden Pacific: “Beer-in-a-box was an early innovation from this micro-brewery in Emeryville, a borough in the urban agglomeration between San Francisco and Oakland. The initial product, Golden Pacific Bittersweet... View Article
