Earlier this week, blogger Ron Pattinson posted a table containing brewery counts of the different countries of Europe. Almost immediately, commenters rang in to report errors. It’s not that the source was bad, either—he got it from the Brewers of Europe, a trade organization sort of akin to our Brewers Association and the best source... View Article
Time is relative, and a year can both be experienced as a blink of an eye or a whole decade, creeping along. Casting my glance backward, I’m surprised to find a year of beer looks more like that decade; it’s possible that more change hit the brewing world in 2015 than any year since... View Article
The good folks at Dogfish Head Craft Brewery—by any measure one of the more interesting and accomplished breweries around—have done us a disservice. They recently brewed up an IPA called “Hoo Lawd” (say it out loud), which they claim is the “hoppiest beer ever.” While the average IPA lands somewhere between 40-60 IBUs, this latest... View Article
Miami is a great city. It has all those benefits that come from being situated on a beach at the tropical, southernmost tip of the continent—sun, palm trees and beaches. But it’s also the most international American city I’ve visited, a place where 90 percent of the conversations you hear are spoken in some... View Article
On Monday, Constellation Brands announced it was acquiring San Diego’s Ballast Point Brewing Co. Big whoop, right? It seems like one of the big beer companies buys a craft brewery about every other week. But here’s the actual news within the story: Constellation—which owns the U.S. rights to Corona and Modelo and is the country’s... View Article
Milwaukee has possibly the second-most beautiful City Hall in America (Philly’s is even more impressive). If you take a short stroll from that central landmark, crossing the Milwaukee River, you come to a section of town, running blocks and blocks and comprising 28 buildings and 21 acres, that was once home to the Pabst Brewery.... View Article
A year ago, I posted some excerpts from an article in The New Yorker dating back to 1940 about McSorley’s Old Ale House, a tavern in Manhattan’s East Village. That article discussed how aggressively behind the times the old tavern was … and it’s now 75 years later. In the 161 years of its life, a lot... View Article
One of the best breweries I know is so obscure and out-of-the-way that most people living an hour and a quarter away, in Portland, don’t even know it exists. It’s named Solera, appropriately, after an equally obscure technique of nurturing wild ales. In an era of hops, the brewery does have one IPA, but mostly... View Article
Modern minds have been rewired by technology such that some features of the pre-technology world are simply incomprehensible. I’m thinking now of the basic thermometer, which is knitted so tightly into our being that we can’t engage the outside world without making an involuntary assessment of the temperature. It’s hard to imagine a time... View Article
