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.
Oh, wait. Not five-cent beer. What we need is five percent beer, although I actually drank what may have been the last five-cent beer ever offered. That was in about 1955, when a local Seattle tavern offered beer in a schooner-shaped jigger for a nickel! Great fun at the time, and one such beer was... View Article
The first multiple tap bars had to be found in Europe. Perhaps it all started early in 18th century East London’s Shoreditch area where publicans came to serve a mixture from three different casks. “Three threads,” as it was called originally, consisted of equal parts pale ale, new (actively fermenting) brown ale, and aged brown... View Article
When it comes to spotting trends, I have a secret tool not available to big-time market forecasters. As the editor of All About Beer Magazine and its related website, I answer the random beer questions that web-surfers type into the ether. So, about four years ago, when the most common question from women correspondents switched... View Article
