COAST Brewing is a tiny brewery run out of an old navy yard in North Charleston, S.C. Its founders, David Merritt and his wife, Jaime Tenney, can only crank out big, hugely creative beers because they first led the campaign to liberalize South Carolina’s brewing regulations.
Until a few years ago, South Carolina’s beer culture was hamstrung by arcane and capricious caps on beermaking, alcohol content and distribution. In a few years, the city has become a true world-class beer destination.
Dave Fleming, head brewer at Portland’s New Old Lompoc Brewery, commands respect in a town full of respected brewers. He does it by combining an openness to new flavors with a simple, straightforward brewing ethos.
Milwaukee’s beer scene is far from dead. You just have to quit looking for an old guard whose days are gone, and start paying attention to Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, where good beer is thriving quietly.
Wayne Wambles of Cigar City was a cook before he was a brewer, and he applies the lessons he learned in the kitchen to the brew kettle. Now, the young Tampa brewery is taking Florida by storm.
A great, friendly city with a strange but refreshing mix of Southern attitudes and blue-collar, Northern atmosphere. It’s compact, walkable and full of stellar places to enjoy a drink.
Stephen Hale of the Schlafly Tap Room has been brewing for over 30 years, and he oversees a brewing portfolio that’s both strongly traditionalist, and freewheeling and experimental.
Like its West Coast counterpart, Portland, Maine, boasts a world-class brewing tradition that’s rooted as far back as craft brewing’s history can stretch. Plus, this Portland also has lobsters and clams and flannel and some rather wicked accents.
Thirsty masses still look to Plymouth for sustenance. And the Mayflower Brewing Company, brewers of traditional and hyper-fresh ales, are happy to oblige.
The beers that brought craft brewing into prominence largely owe their existence to a historic brewing scene that largely revolved around, and served, London’s thirsty masses.
Patrick Rue founded his California brewery, The Bruery, to make the types of high-quality beers he enjoys drinking. They’re also the types of beers that challenge the palates of the most passionate craft beer drinkers.
Los Angeles is an absolutely massive place, teeming with a multitude of people. If only a tiny percentage drank good beer, that would still be a staggering number of craft drinkers sprawled out between the mountains and the ocean.
Dark Horse puts its own unmistakable stamp on whatever comes out of its tiny seven-barrel system, whether it’s a brawling IPA, an experimental Belgian brew or an old-school craft classic bearing a new twist.
In this city, there’s stunning prewar architecture downtown, boulevards of old-money mansions and reclaimed industrial warehouses. And for two decades now, it’s been ground zero in the fight against fizzy macro swill.
Mike Hoops has been at the helm of the Minneapolis Town Hall Brewery for roughly a decade now, and he’s moving faster than ever—he’s doing more with lagers, playing around with more than a dozen barrels, and experimenting with new ingredients and adjuncts.
Asheville’s moniker is “Paris of the South,” but the place feels more like a strangely wonderful convergence of Appalachia and the South, with a bit of Cambridge, Mass., and Boulder, Colo., thrown in for good measure.
When Dann Paquette moved back to New England from Yorkshire a year ago, he had no job and little money. A year later, Paquette’s beer is spreading along the Atlantic coast, and he’s enjoying the one perk he’d never attained: unfettered creative freedom.
Phoenix has grown into a sprawling boom town, a sizzling desert metropolis spilling well over its nominal borders. And as a place to have a pint, it’s no hot mess. These are the top beer destinations in the Phoenix area.
A decade ago, Jeff O’Neil was drinking Racer 5, growing hops in his backyard and sending résumés to every brewery in the Bay Area. Now he’s brewing West Coast-leaning ales out east, at the ever-expanding Ithaca Beer Company.
A couple decades of explosive expansion have left a tall, gleaming downtown, a few up-and-coming post-industrial warehouse districts, booming suburbs and a cultural infrastructure still growing into all that growth. Hence, most of the excellent local taps you’ll find in town come from out of town. That’s changing.
Halfway through his 40s, Bob Sylvester and his wife launched a tiny shoestring brewery in a warehouse near the Gulf of Mexico. Saint Somewhere is a tiny, one-man, Belgian operation, but it has attracted a nation of ecstatic customers.
Academics, artists, bureaucrats, techies and unreconstructed hippies: You throw them in the pot, they simmer for a while, and wind up congealing into a mass that’s thirsting for a quality beverage. And nowhere in the upper Midwest does it all come together like it does in Madison, Wis.
Alan Sprints has been the creative force behind Hair of the Dog for 16 years now. For most of that time, he’s also been the brewery’s only grunt laborer.
This place is a steaming melting pot of Spanish, French, African and Caribbean influences, a magnet for artists, musicians, misfits and criminals, a charmingly seedy town united by its distaste for authority and its mighty thirst.
