Author: Sarah Bennett

Los Angeles was still a vodka-cranberry and Champagne town in 2008 when Brian Lenzo launched Blue Palms Brewhouse on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Moropotente, Nicaragua’s largest craft brewery, is more than a brewery, it’s also a classroom, a workshop, a laboratory, and a working farm.

While Anheuser-Busch’s spree of brewery acquisitions makes headlines, its wholesaler purchases have spawned a war at the distribution level that could be one of craft brewing’s most important fights yet.

Across the country, craft breweries have coffee specialists going far beyond mere coffee-beer collaborations. Taking notes from beer, coffee shops hope to increase conversation and connectivity between the parallel crafts, opening both to new customers and ideas.

The shift to seeing a bottle of Lagunitas Pils in a John Mayer music video or Woody Allen movie (both of which have recently happened) is as organic a move as the industry’s growth itself.

Baja California might be best known for its beachside fish tacos and off-road racing, but the northwestern Mexican state has seriously upped its craft beer game, defining itself as the country’s largest contingent for “cerveza artesanal.”

Many companies that make beer in offshore US locations want to grow and bring their local products to consumers on the mainland. And for breweries in Hawaii, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, distributing bottled beers stateside sometimes means relying on the oft-debated practice of contract brewing.

Dutch beer culture has always lived in the shadow of the more flavorful Dubbels and Tripels from its famous neighbors. But over the last 10 years, there’s been a dramatic surge in small brewers and adventurous consumers in the Netherlands.

Distilling isn’t a huge leap from brewing. Today, out of the roughly 235 craft distilleries in America, 18 are operated by craft breweries, and that number is expected to rise as these once-mutually exclusive industries slowly recognize just how much they have in common.

Only 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, however, the autonomous port city of a half-million people is worthy of note, if not for its status as the most ethnically diverse city in the country, then for its recent growth into one of Southern California’s newest craft beer hubs.

Last year saw more craft beer start-ups than ever using creative funding methods to fill in the financial gap, with brewers often going directly to the public with their pleas.