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
During the Super Bowl on Sunday night Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) ran a commercial that did not involve puppies, horses or wolves. Instead the ad, titled “Brewed the Hard Way” relied on text superimposed on top of brewing scenes, friends out at the bar knocking back Buds, and other random beer shots. It focused on its history, and... View Article
By the mid-1980s, the beer scene in Arizona, which hosts Super Bowl XLIX this weekend, was bleak. The state’s only brewery to make it out of Prohibition for any length of time—eight tried—was the Phoenix-based Arizona Brewing Co. That brewery began to shed consumers, however, as Phoenix’s post World War II population boomed, the newcomers... View Article
Almost as quickly as the news of Elysian Brewing Co.’s sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) whipped around beer circles online, one particular beer label appeared. A white background with bold black lettering: LOSER. Above the word, a phrase: “Corporate Beer Sucks.” A year-round offering from the Seattle brewery, Loser is a Sorachi Ace-forward American... View Article
