I get it; names are hard. There are 5,000+ breweries in the US alone. Add to that the trademarked beer names and you're getting up there. A lot of the good and obvious ones have either been taken. But come on, breweries of America, we can do better.
Read MoreWe have this very specific number, international bitterness unit, that is invaluable to brewers. It expresses the amount of bittering compounds in a beer. A brewer understands its utility and limitations. All hopped beers have a certain amount of bitterness, and brewers want to be able to measure it. But it has several notable limits.
Read MoreThe age of consolidation has surfaced one of the more unusual quirks of the American craft beer segment: the strange morality that has come to pervade it. There's really no other word, either. Morality is that agreement among groups about what is acceptable. It is a self-protective urge, a code to minimize harm either through social norms or ones of purity. It enforces loyalty, which further strengthens the group. Although our friends the 18th-century philosophers tried to argue for a natural or universal morality, it's clear that morality is a purely a social construct that varies place to place. And there is a moral code both craft breweries and craft beer drinkers recognize, as this latest blowback demonstrates.
Read MoreWhen you start thinking about the American cities that were famous for beer, they were mostly working cities. The industrial cities of the Midwest leap to mind first--Abbott mentioned St. Louis and Pittsburgh, both brewing cities, but add Detroit, Milwaukie, and Cincinnati. But in early generations, New York and San Francisco had amazing brewing scenes at one time, back when they were also grubbier working towns.
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