As I write these words, my oldest son is upstairs packing up his clothes to head off to college tomorrow. It’s hard to believe that I have a son going to college. I’m only 42. And not only that, he’s going to the same college I attended exactly 24 years ago today, the University of Texas at Austin. Read More…
Being called an expert reminds me of a story.
There was an American who had studied all he could find about bull fighting, he’d read everything and examined all the videos, so he wrote a book and declared himself an “expert” on bull fighting. Soon, he traveled off to Spain to reap the rewards of being an author and an expert. The Spanish bull fighting aficionados welcomed him with open arms, and took him to the great arena. The spectacle was an extraordinary one, the first he had actually witnessed, he was hooked, he was an author, he was an expert and he discussed it with his new friends, using all the right terms. Read More…
In the little town of Leon Springs, TX, alongside a dry creek and nestled behind a grove of oak trees off Interstate 10, there used to stand a cinder block tavern called the Silver Fox. This little dive was not visible from the highway. It’s like that little shack in the movie A River Runs Through It where the gal says, “So, how did the possum get in the tree?” Read More…
New York’s Rheingold Brewery produced the first light beer, Gablinger’s Diet Beer, in 1967, but it was a failure (didn’t sell). It had an original gravity* of 9 degrees Plato (1036 British), 4.6 percent ABV (alcohol by volume), but with almost no dextrin sugars at all (0.1 percent), which are what gives beer its flavor.
I’m a middle-aged beer industry writer. It’s better than being an old beer writer, because old beer writers are always uncomfortably close to their final beer column. And it’s better than being a young beer writer, because I got here first and got the best things.
I’m getting sick and tired of taking the flack for the All-American standard drunk and those who blame it all on beer. I could just scream. I’m tired of the MADD mothers, I’m tired of that outfit in Washington, DC, who wants to raise the taxes on all beer, and not just the yellow industrial stuff from the BudCoorsMiller mob. I’ve had it up to here with the neo-prohibitionists. Good grief! Some of my friends even preach it to me! Read More…
Wed Jul 3rd, 2013
The Young Turks and Old Lions of Breweries
Once a year the whole world of craft brewers, and I do mean the whole world, gathers together for four days of catching up, digesting new ideas, staying up way...
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