Beer News and Where to Get It

At the risk of speeding the obsolescence of my blog, I thought I'd mention a site you should be visiting daily: BeerPulse.  It was founded by Adam Nason as Beer News in 2008 and spent its first years as a feed for press releases.  In the past few months or so, Adam has really stepped up the content.  It still has press releases (useful, actually), but Adam scours Facebook, Twitter, and the news for anything beer related.  He regularly has the latest business news, interesting pieces about collaborations or projects, and even deep-background pieces like this (catnip for me):

German winter barley and rapeseed yields should be about 10 percent higher than last year, based on harvest results, farm lobby Deutscher Bauernverband said.  

In the past couple days, BeerPulse alerted me to these stories:

• Mexican Craft Beer Scene Booming.
• A story on the first nonprofit pub--here in Oregon (natch)
• Craft beer may be booming, but consolidation is, too: so far this year, there have been 45 acquisitions.
• Anchor's growing, a second brewery is "inevitable."  (Most interesting fact: it only produced 104,000 barrels last year.  I thought it was much bigger.

If it's not on your short list, put it there.

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In other news, the Brewers Association released half-yearly numbers, and I am no longer sanguine about the rate of new brewery openings. 

The U.S. now boasts 2,126 breweries—an increase of 350 additional breweries since June 2011. The BA also tracks breweries in planning as an indicator of potential new entrants into the craft category, and lists 1,252 breweries in planning today compared to 725 a year ago. Additionally, the count of craft brewers was at 2,075 as of June 30, 2012 showing that 97 percent of U.S. brewers are craft brewers.

They include this graph, and the near-vertical line on the right-hand side looks a whole lot like the beginnings of a bubble.  (For an unsettling comparison, have a look here.)

It may warrant a bit more blogging once I digest the numbers a bit.