As the years roll by, the United States is slowly developing a repertoire of favorite beer styles. Hoppy ales are by far the dominant strain in American brewing, but a few other types have managed to stake out pockets of the market. Unexpectedly, one of these smaller winners is the exotic, alluring saison—about as far... View Article
Full Sail Brewing Co. proudly touts its ownership on beer labels. Independent, it reads. “47 employee owners.” That’s the number of people who worked at the Hood River, OR, brewery in 1999, the year the brewery went to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The number today of employee owners—called shareholders—is 78, and on Tuesday... View Article
In the fall of 1984, Richard Wrigley, a British transplant from Manchester who once likened Michelob to “a soft drink,” opened a 5,000-square-foot brewpub called the Manhattan Brewing Co. It was located in its namesake borough, in an old electric-company station at Watts and Thompson streets in the not-quite-fashionable-yet Soho neighborhood. Wrigley sold two ales... View Article
In 2011—which, depending on your relationship to time, was either recently or long ago—I embarked on my maiden voyage to England. I was doing research for the Beer Bible. When I touched down at Heathrow, there were about 20 breweries in London, and I managed to tour a respectable 10 percent of them. And 20... View Article
When I was in college, I had several friends who enjoyed the sugary-liquor concoction known as the Long Island Iced Tea—LIIT for short. I have fuzzy memories of a bartender filling a shaker pint glass up with ice, then grabbing four bottles—two in each hand—and upending them, spilling the contents into the glass for a... View Article
In 1986, John Hickenlooper drove from Colorado to California to visit his brother after getting laid off as a geologist for an oil company. The two dropped in on Berkeley’s Triple Rock Brewery and Alehouse, a restaurant with its own brewhouse that another fraternal set, John and Reid Martin, had just opened. Hickenlooper loved the... View Article
Would consumers of the energy drink Red Bull think the company has entered the beer market, if they came in contact with Virginia’s Old Ox Brewery? Attorneys for the extreme drink certainly think so, and have filed a complaint in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The filing can be found here. In it, attorneys for... View Article
Back in the olden days, when life was hard and resources were scarce, brewers often did an odd thing: they boiled their worts for insane lengths of time. The Belgians seem to have been kings of the long boil: an average wort would spend four to six hours in the kettle, and some ranged upward—way... View Article
The first pour every February of the Russian River Brewing Co.’s Pliny the Younger had been reliably popular since the inaugural one in 2005. Something about the 2010 debut seemed different, however. Perhaps it was because the triple IPA from the Santa Rosa, CA-based brewery and brewpub had scored a perfect 100 rating on both... View Article
