beervana

Each April, the Brewers Association releases an important package of data, headlined by a list of largest US breweries. This year’s numbers were a mixed bag, and revealed a lot about the state of the industry.

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?

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.

In celebration of Upright’s 15th anniversary, I asked founder/brewer Alex Ganum and three other friends of Upright to describe memorable beers from the brewery’s run.

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.

For hundreds of years, brewers have ranked hops based on their quality. This has led to a sense of nobility among a select class of landrace hops brewers prize the most. But are they noble because they’re old and tested, or because they taste and smell so good?

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.

People typically talk about “American” or “Pacific Northwest” hops as if they’re a monolith. Yet Oregon’s Willamette Valley, on the wet side of the Cascades, is vastly different than the arid Yakima Valley. The hops grown there are different, too. 

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.

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.