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We can all agree on what a beer currently costs. In Portland, a pint will set you back $7. Before Covid it was $6, and not long before that five. So is $7 expensive? It depends
Last week, London’s Meantime Brewery was in the news. Its fortunes are bound up with Fuller’s and Dark Star—by coincidence three breweries I toured 13 years ago. Show did they get here?
Our friends at AB InBev have offered us a new beer promising a “fathomless palate squeeze.” Wait, what? And Juice Dust? That does not sound appetizing. What is going on here?
I have spent the last ten days in Central Europe catching up on the local beer scenes and talking to brewers from the region. Here’s an overview of what I found.
My third visit to Prague is really the first I’ve gotten to know the city, even superficially.
That one post every year when I silence myself and let the pictures do the talking. With these amazing little cameras we keep in our pockets, even a hack like me can make the world look beautiful.
Detroit native George Johnson founded Assembly Brewing in 2019, bringing the authentic pizza from his hometown to Portland. Over the weekend, he opened a second location. It is a great opportunity to revisit the tale of George’s incredible perseverance.
I managed to get inside the old brewhouse at U Fleků yesterday, and offer this illustrated peek inside.
Is it possible that the most unusual brewery in America is the one that just makes two beers? Brienne Allan and Michael Fava are certainly making a compelling case with Sacred Profane, their year-old project in Biddeford, Maine.
While I was in Europe, Carlsberg announced it would finally stop using the antiquate Burton Union system used to make Marston’s Pedigree in Burton, England. The news was sad, but it came far later than I ever expected. A eulogy for a technology that was once state of the art.
In the spring, Dan and others from the brewery head off to a forest just west of town. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips.
Fresh hop season is underway, and it has so far proven to be unusual—and enlightening. Here are a few early lessons I’m taking away from the selection I’ve found.
Nothing in our living memory could prepare us for what was to come, and human brains aren’t wired to understand events as huge and transformational as what we confronted.
I’ve written about beer over the course of something like three million words and 27 years. Almost never in that time have I considered the role beer has played in my own life. Yet there it was, from adolescence forward, through periods when it never seemed to be center frame.
Two years ago, I was so impressed with an obscure technology called GPT-3 that I thought it merited mention on a beer blog. Last year, AI had become such a big deal I wrote a three-post series. We may have come to the final chapter: mundanity. In my possibly final post, I review the situation.
Dating breweries, like counting them, is an act of interpretation. Once a brewery’s age passes into the centuries, interruptions are certain. Sometimes breweries take advantage of those gaps to push their founding date backward. So let’s take the most famous date of all, Weihenstephan and 1040 CE.
A team of Irish researchers just published a paper about their project to recreate a 16th-century Irish ale using period ingredients, equipment, and processes. Along the way, they surfaced quite a few things I didn’t know about beer made nearly 500 years ago.
Craft beer is suffering a real identity crisis as consumers move on to other beverages. But is it also an existential crisis or something more cyclical? Here’s a reason to think it may be the latter.
We can all agree on what a beer currently costs. In Portland, a pint will set you back $7. Before Covid it was $6, and not long before that five. So is $7 expensive? It depends