Yesterday, Tony Magee announced that he had sold off half the brewery he founded—Lagunitas—to Heineken. There have been too many of these kinds of announcements recently for beer fans to be genuinely surprised by this. It’s true that Lagunitas’ brand has been as anti-corporate as any American brewery—but as we saw earlier this year, cultivating... View Article
As I travel around the country on my Beer Bible book tour, I hope to sit down with brewers from time to time and chat about their lives, their cities, and whatever moves them. Last week I was in San Francisco. Those who have seen Dave McLean or visited Magnolia, the brewery he founded, may... View Article
Starting in the Spring of 2011, I merrily began a project I was naïvely underestimating, blithely ignorant of how big it would turn out to be. Workman Publishing had given me two years to write The Beer Bible, an extension of their “Bible” series that began with Karen MacNeil’s landmark Wine Bible. I was so... View Article
Last week, social media burbled for a little while over an article in the New Yorker about the debased state of wine reviewing. Read any wine review or bottle label today and you will likely empathize with their confusion. Swallowing a substance that tastes of “strawberry bubble gum with tar” sounds like punishment, yet somehow... View Article
The first witbier I ever tasted was poured at the Oregon Brewers Festival (OBF). It was roughly 20 years ago, and I was only beginning to realize that the country of Belgium had anything to do with beer. The witbier I had that day, from a brewery long lost to the mists of memory, was... View Article
Earlier this week, I was sitting over a pint of gose with Breakside brewmaster Ben Edmunds, and he asked a question that helped crystallize something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. “What,” he wondered, “do you call a low-ABV lager made with a bunch of late-addition hops and dry-hopped?” (This is a paraphrase—we were... View Article
There are many different kinds of homebrewers. Some barely do more than dissolve extract syrup in water and pitch yeast, while others have miniature-scale professional breweries. Some homebrewers make hundreds of gallons of beer a year and enter competitions; others brew once or twice, making, say, their “famous pumpkin brew” for Thanksgiving. Some homebrewers harbor... View Article
A couple of weeks ago, Jester King’s head brewer Garrett Crowell made an astonishing proclamation. The brewery has made a decision to switch to green bottles, not in spite of the danger it poses to beer, but because of it. “My pursuit of the use of green bottles stems mostly from the character of all... View Article
I recently received a bottle of The Stoic from Deschutes Brewery (Thanks, guys!). When they first brewed it in 2011, Bend’s finest created a deep golden, 11% ale that was generally well-received, except for one thing. Deschutes alluded to it in a press release: “Our first bottled Belgian-style Quad generated lots of buzz … mostly... View Article
