Next week thousands of people who make beer, distribute beer, sell beer, make brewhouses, grow hops, grow barley, culture yeast and write about beer will be in my hometown, Portland, Oregon, for the Craft Brewers Conference. Welcome! As honored guests in our fair city, I hope you have a wonderful time and manage to find... View Article
UPDATE: In case you missed it, this was an April Fools’ Day joke. CHICAGO (April 1)—President Barack Obama is known for his famous “beer summit,” for bringing homebrewing back to the White House, and for sipping Guinness in Dublin. After his presidency, he may be known for making a mean pint of wheat beer. Sources... View Article
In the standard-issue American brewery, the brew kit is a technical marvel designed to make chemical reactions happen within precise specifications—this is as true of the plant in St. Louis as it is at the brewpub around the corner. When building an American brewery, people think of chemistry, not history. But elsewhere in the world,... View Article
Three years ago, almost to the day, I had one of the oddest interviews of my life. I was in the midst of research for my book The Beer Bible, and had already completed one swing through Europe touring breweries and interviewing brewers. It was only by coincidence that the man on the other end... View Article
This morning, Full Sail Brewing Co. disclosed that members of its Employee Stock Option Program (ESOP)—the collective group of employee-owners—voted to sell the brewery to Encore Consumer Capital, a private equity firm in San Francisco. The vote, which was confidential, was 98 percent in favor of the sale. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.... View Article
Let these names roll around your mouth a moment: mumme, jopenbier, Peeterman, Cöpenicker Moll. Delicious, aren’t they? And yet the beers they designated don’t always sound equally so. Jopenbier, for example—a specialty of Gdansk, Poland—had an original gravity of near 1.200 (that’s not a typo), was spontaneously fermented, but was so poorly attenuated that it... View Article
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
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
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
