Jeff Alworth recently traveled to Boston to divine the secrets of the region’s hazy, juicy IPAs. He brought back several cans of New England IPAs from his trip, and in an effort to determine a correlation between flavor and cloudiness, he and Patrick Emerson poured these beers into an earthenware mug and tasted them blind.... View Article
Twenty-five years ago, the then-Miller Brewing Co. was preparing to roll out a beer it called Icehouse, which it clearly considered an answer to twin realities in American beer in the very early 1990s. One was that beer consumption and sales were basically flat, particularly for the wares that Miller and its biggest rivals Coors... View Article
What do Mexican lagers, the Independent Craft Brewer Seal and Kelsey Grammer’s new brewery have in common? They’re just a few of the summer hot takes discussed on the latest Beervana podcast. Jeff Alworth is the author of The Secrets of Master Brewers, The Beer Bible and Cider Made Simple. You can find him blogging at... View Article
Sapporo Holdings Limited has announced plans to acquire San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Co., which many consider the country’s first craft brewery. The brewery, which was founded in 1896, was near bankruptcy when 27-year-old Fritz Maytag purchased a 51 percent share in the company on August 2, 1965. It was under Maytag’s watch that the brewery... View Article
When it comes to brewing, hops can be challenging. There’s the taste end of things, for every hop can offer something novel and different to a particular beer; there’s the agricultural end of things, since hops are very particular about where they grow; and then there’s perhaps the most difficult aspect of humulus lupulus: the... View Article
Ahead of the 30th annual Oregon Brewers Festival, Jeff Alworth and Patrick Emerson run through the festival’s beer list to discuss the beers they are most looking forward to, and how the festival’s lineup reflects larger trends in the beer industry. Want to dive even deeper? Alworth also breaks down the Oregon Brewers Festival in... View Article
The idea was a simple one: a seal to honor those independently owned purveyors of smaller-batch, more traditionally made beer. The seal caught on pretty quickly after it was announced, and, eventually, dozens of such purveyors proudly bore it. The Brewers Association’s recently announced Independent Craft Brewer Seal? No. It’s the Good Beer Seal that... View Article
The pour is a deep gold, the head a rich blossom of off-white foam. But as you raise the glass, you start to wonder if you’re a little delirious. In fact, a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear seems appropriate: “All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men.” These scents, they... View Article
