Steven Pauwels left Belgium for Missouri nine years ago, bringing craftsmanship, tradition, and a relentless drive to experiment. Here’s how Boulevard became the Midwest’s largest independent brewer—and its most eclectic.
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery celebrates its fourth birthday this August. That’s four years of plying the Southeast with dark, full-bodied, flavorful beers—and proving the cynics wrong.
Gorgeous scenery. Friendly people afflicted by a near-compulsive need to mainline hops. Tons of boats. Is there a reason to not start drinking your way from one end of Seattle to the other? Yeah, we didn’t think so.
David Zuckerman has seen Boulder Beer Co. grow from a brewery on the brink of the abyss to a robust company enjoying double-digit growth and a distribution presence in 25 states.
In this desert wasteland, there are evangelists spreading the gospel of good beer to the darkest corners of Sin City. So read up, and when business (or a bachelor party) comes calling, you’ll be ready.
As a working city, DC is full of politicians and journalists, not to mention influence-peddlers, rich foreigners, bureaucrats, students and the service workers who cater to them all. Which is to say that this town has a wicked thirst.
Like much of Scandinavia, Sweden’s capital and transportation nexus is now enjoying a craft beer revolution, its people trading the fizzy, lackluster lagers that have traditionally dominated its pubs for full, flavorful brews.
Copenhagen’s Mikkel Borg Bjergsø is taking several continents’ worth of brewing scenes by storm. His Mikkeller brewery, while barely two years old, is producing some of the world’s most sought-after beers.
Toronto has quietly become one of North America’s great cities—a haven for sports, culture and, of course, great beers. They love to brew it, and they certainly enjoy drinking it.
Geoff Larson, co-founder and brewmaster at the Alaskan Brewing Company, has overseen a gold rush of a different sort: He has won more Great American Beer Fest medals than any brewery in the festival’s history.
Hugh Sisson has been hawking good beer for nearly 30 years now. In the last few of those, he’s finally made Clipper City into the brewery he always envisioned it to be—Great American Beer Fest gold medals and all.
In a dozen-odd years of professional brewing, Weyerbacher Brewing Company’s Dan Weirback has traded restrained English-style Ales for big, brawling Belgians, bourbon barrels, and imperialized… well, whatever he can make an Imperial, he will.
The city’s brewing culture, long rooted in German lagers, has recently taken a turn towards assertive hops and Belgian yeast; that fact, and the tenacity of Chicago’s neighborhood pub culture, makes this a lively time to go drinking your way across the Second City.
“I make beers that I want to drink. That’s the bottom line,” Avery says. “I love our IPA because I made the IPA for me—that’s the style of IPA I like. I always say: I’m making the beer for me; I’m just making a little extra for everybody else.”
Indiana’s beer scene is rightly dominated by Chicagoland and Michiana, but that shouldn’t preclude a trip a bit further south to the state’s capital, the Crossroads of America.
Since BeerAdvocate is taking you back to school this month, we might as well go whole hog and take a swing by Boston—a city that’s absolutely rotten with colleges and universities.
Ten years ago, Vinnie Cilurzo and his wife, Natalie, brought aggressively hopped beer to the heart of California’s wine country. Since then, they’ve taken Russian River Brewing Company independent, won an unimaginable number of awards and launched a revolutionary line of barrel-aged sour Belgians.
