As recently as a couple years ago, it was pretty easy for Americans to distinguish good beer from bad, independent beer from corporate-owned beer, and local beer from nationally- or internationally-owned beer. And in most cases, good, independent and local beer all lined up neatly on one side of the ledger. In the past two... View Article
By June 1991, Kim Jordan’s days off as a social worker began with calls to customers to see which beers they needed. She would then spend the afternoons delivering them around the greater Fort Collins, Colorado, area in her Toyota Tercel station wagon, picking up her son from first grade along the way (he... 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.] Dublin, Ireland’s reputation for beer-drinking... View Article
I have seen the future—or tasted it—and it is the tart IPA. (The future may need help with names, because “tart IPA” is terrible—but more on that in a moment.) Over the past decade, IPAs have been in near-constant motion, but they’ve been heading in the same direction. Taking their cue from the key ingredient—American... View Article
There were three keynote addresses scheduled for the National Craft-Brewers Conference and Trade Show in Boston in May 1996, one for each day of the annual conclave for smaller brewers now known best as the Craft Brewers Conference. Charlie Papazian, long-time head of the Association of Brewers behind the conference, would give one of the... View Article
The islands of wild and sour ales are, like Borneo or Madagascar, exotic and remote. For most drinkers, they exist on the periphery, little worlds that can be safely enough ignored. For those who delight in a buffet of entirely different and interesting flavors from most beers, though, they are worth a small expedition. But... View Article
On Tuesday, March 21, 2006, at 9:50 p.m. Pacific time, Jack Dorsey, a New York University dropout-turned-tech-entrepreneur, sent this message via a new social media app he helped develop: “just setting up my twttr.” It was the earliest message of what became Twitter. (Dorsey’s firm did not acquire the now-famous domain name for several months,... View Article
During the third week of November 1980, Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi, founders of a new brewery called Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. out of a converted metal warehouse in the Northern California city of Chico, brewed the first batch of what they intended to be their second commercial release. Their first had been a stout,... View Article
The writer James Fallows and his wife Deborah spent three years working on a project for The Atlantic called “American Futures.” They traveled around the country to small and midsized towns in a single-engine airplane, hoping to get a different view of American life than we normally see reflected in the media. It culminated in... View Article
