The concept of a beer week is simple: Celebrate, and hopefully bring awareness to, a city or state’s beer scene. In the US alone, we estimate that there’s well over 100 beer weeks, and that figure is rising.
Shortages of aromatic hops forecast for 2014; HopCat to open Michigan’s largest beer bar in midtown Detroit; San Diego leads industry in job growth and wages; and Lakemaid’s beer-delivery drone program grounded by FAA.
CapSnap is a free smartphone app that helps beer drinkers keep tabs on the beers they drink with personal ratings and other details via a collection of bottle caps created by the user for each beer. It’s a lot like Pinterest for beer lovers.
When Lindsay and Andrew Nations were building the look of their Shreveport, La., brewery, Great Raft, they didn’t have to look much further than the art hanging on their own walls for inspiration: the hand-drawn, lithographic style in the music posters created by Tennessee artist Justin Helton.
Beer and railways have a lot of history in London, dating from the 1830s. Today, no less than 14 of the capital’s more than 50 breweries are housed within railway arches of above ground train tracks.
The story of the world’s first Leafcutter Ant Saison starts in the days leading up to São Paulo, Brazil’s O Mercado, an epic gastronomy fair that brings together more than 20,000 foodies, chefs, restaurateurs and a handful of brewers.
Best-by dating is the kind of amorphous, arbitrary tactic that only a manufacturer could love. Masquerading as an effort to help consumers, such dating of beer results in the illusion of honesty, leaving drinkers with no actual tangible information on which to base purchasing decisions.
According to many beer histories, English Stouts—Milk ones excepted—disappeared in World War I, allowing Guinness to dominate. It’s another example of projecting the present backwards. As usual, the truth is much more complicated.
Got a hazy IPA that needs to be served in several days? Try a combination of unflavored gelatin or a two-part clarifier like Super-Kleer KC Finings and 31°F storage and make it shine like a crazy diamond.
These three base recipes—Chocolate Irish Stout Cake, Bailey’s Irish Cream Pastry Cream and a Smoked Salted Caramel Sauce with Irish Whiskey—can be used interchangeably to create a multitude of dessert options.
The Brick Store’s selection has evolved into what it is today: around 30 taps, 300 bottles, a 900-bottle upstairs cellar and thousands more aging in a bank vault beneath the pub. Its 1900s-era building seems like it was always meant to hold the old and authentic.
Tim Clifford thinks of Sante Adairius Rustic Ales—the Capitola, Calif., brewery that he and his wife, Adair Paterno, founded two years ago—as a homebrewery that happens to be open to the public. Sante Adairius sells nearly all the beer it makes through its taproom.
Founder and owner Chris Michner chose Grand Haven, Mich., for the site of Odd Side Ales, settling on a suite in a converted Story & Clark piano factory. The whole idea behind the brewery was to make “unusual ales” that feature offbeat ingredients and bold flavors to intrigue the palate.
Revel in a craft beer scene that is by far the most advanced in Latin America. Today, you’ll find Black IPAs, Saisons, Imperial Stouts, and plenty of Brazilian-themed beers like açai Stouts and cassava Pilsners. Until recently though, finding craft beer in São Paulo was like looking for the source of the Amazon.
Craft breweries of all sizes are shipping their beer to far-flung accounts. So how do they maintain the condition of their beer, please fickle customers, and simultaneously grow their brands? The answer is cold storage.
Increasingly, sour beers—and the foeders used to produce them—are becoming a less-surprising feature among American craft breweries. And while larger breweries with connections acquire as they go, the demand for foeders among smaller breweries is only growing.
As beer journalism blows up right alongside craft beer, Jay Brooks, who has been writing about beer since 1992, is calling on old media to put an end to “sudsy” puns, and for new writers to slow down and really learn the craft.
