Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was about to go national. It had found a distribution and marketing partner, and was ready to bust out of Wisconsin. Jeff Fulbright, the founder and president of the brewing company behind Chief Oshkosh, Mid-Coast Brewing, excitedly placed the beer in a spectrum that showed both his ambition and confidence.
It’s not exactly a closely kept secret that the U.S. craft beer industry is growing, and growing fast. Approaching the end of 2012, the Brewers Association’s running tally of U.S. breweries had already surpassed 2,200 (the highest point in more than 100 years), while the number of breweries-in-planning had blown past 1,300 and was on an exponential uptick. In fact, if the number of breweries-in-planning were to somehow maintain the pace we’ve seen in the past five years, each and every one of us would have our own little übernanobrewery-in-planning by early 2040. (No, seriously.) To understate the obvious: Things are getting more crowded.
Writing a manual on hops in 1877, British agricultural authority P.L. Simmonds praised those grown around the town of Spalt in Bavaria. “The products are of a high reputation, and are the Chateau Lafitte, the Clos de Vougent, and the Johannisberg, as it were, of hops of continental growths,” he wrote.
It’s every beer lover’s dream, to jump in the Time Machine, spin the dials and travel back to discover what iconic brews were really like centuries ago: the IPAs of Victorian England, the porters and stouts of 18th-century London, and, when the church once held sway, the robust ales made by monks.
Starry, starry night. The light is low in Orval’s brew house, giving its trinity of copper-clad lauter tuns and kettle the glow of a late sunset, while pinpricks of light adorn the ceiling, the first evening stars. A simple wooden cross hangs on the wall. Colored glass panels featuring devotional scenes add to the sense of contemplation and transcendence. The whole effect is of something more than a place where beer is brewed. Read More…
Appearances can be deceptive. The place is an old stone barn amid a group of farm buildings on the edge of a village in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. This is an area of mellow stone, high hedges, winding lanes and long views over rolling hills. It’s the kind of landscape that is home to many a countryside-based U.K. craft brewer, just like Cotswold Brewing Company at whose base I have just arrived. We are after all in the country where ale is seen by a multitude of beer fans as the nation’s Bordeaux and Burgundy rolled into one pristine, foam-topped glass. As the poet A. E. Housman wrote: “Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink.” Read More…
