By Tom Acitelli One day in August, 1965, a 27-year-old former graduate student in Japanese studies at Stanford walked into his favorite bar, the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco’s trendy North Beach neighborhood. He ordered his usual: an Anchor Steam. The bar’s ...
By Jon Page In his new book, The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, author Tom Acitelli takes readers back to the early days of craft beer and beautifully explains the humble beginnings of pioneers like Anchor Brewing Co. and ...
By Fred Eckhardt The year 1980 was pretty much the real beginning of what has become the craft beer revolution here in this country. Ken Grossman, owner, founder and CEO of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. of Chico, CA, plans to mark 2010 with ...
By Fred Eckhardt Whenever I visit the San Francisco Bay area, I always make sure to have some draught Anchor Steam Beer. This is California’s monumental contribution to America’s great beer heritage, and a cornerstone brew in our ongoing craft beer revolution. California ...
By Amanda Baltazar My husband gulps some Cabernet Franc and declares it “tasty.” We are in the Tri-Cities wine country in Washington state and other guests are sipping their wine and describing its characteristics in elegant prose. It was at this point that ...
By Lew Bryson You’ve probably heard of the ‘inventions’ of Leonardo da Vinci. The archetypal Renaissance Man designed a submarine, a tank, a steam cannon, a bridge to span the Bosporus, an airplane, a helicopter, a hang glider and—quite practically—a parachute. Genius indeed, ...
By Jay Brooks I am a geek. There, I said it. Looking back, I always was. My wife is one, too. Geeks tend to pair up, in my experience. We prefer reading, craft beer, watching documentaries, science fiction and other unpopular pursuits. Our ...
By Brian Yaeger Sierra Nevada’s newest year-round release—Torpedo Extra IPA, an India pale ale embellished by the brewery’s homemade hop-extractor, dubbed “the hop torpedo”—may be viewed as a thank-you to the craft beer drinking community. After all, the brewery helped launch our collective ...
By Lew Bryson We all know how craft beer history goes. Beer was great until the 19th century, when mass production of lagers took over the world, and American brewers put corn and rice in their beer to make it cheaper. By 1950, ...
By Rick Lyke There once was a time in America, not that long ago, when we had brewers, winemakers and distillers. It was a simple, orderly era. Each group existed among its own kind, occasionally venturing to sample the wares of another group, ...