The start of the Covid pandemic turns three today. It has affected beer in large and small ways that would have been, absent a disruption as profound as a pandemic, unthinkable three years ago.
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Why are some fests dying or dead, while the Festival of Dark Arts was the hottest ticket around? A week after the event, I look at what makes a successful fest—and how others might use it as a blueprint for success.
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When Yvan De Baets and Bernard Leboucq installed their brewery in Brussels in 2010, it doubled the number in the capital city. Since then, a number of new breweries have followed, but none have focused so single-mindedly on creating hometown beers.
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Qatar had 12 years to settle on its World Cup alcohol policy, but decided at the last minute—yesterday—to move Budweiser’s very expensive promotional beer tents outside the venues. This is not the first time a religious city has had to decide what to do with marauding, beer-drinking heathens.
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The annual Norwegian farmhouse ale festival is remote (even in Norway) and tiny. But that’s what makes it a special event.
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Norway boasts three major farmhouse brewing regions, and in each place the brewers make beer like each other—but differently from the other regions. Why?
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Technology like the internet didn’t really change beer. The evolution we’ve seen in styles, processes, and ingredients looks totally normal by historic standards. But the way we interact with beer is radically different.
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Today's post kicks off Portland Travel Week. To get things started, I’ll offer an overview of the Rose City, a bit of beer-centric history, and some of the key features of the local drinking culture. Craft breweries follow a familiar model, and if you just go from one to the next, you might miss some of the character behind all that steel.
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One of the more remarkable stories in the beer world is the incredibly long process of developing a viable commercial hop variety, and the long odds any single seed has of becoming a winner. In this piece, I examine HBC 1019 to see how it all works.
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“Old Portland” is dead. Long live Old Portland!
Read MoreAmericans are increasingly aware of kveik yeast, which comes from the Western fjords of Norway. Too few are aware of the surviving tradition that preserved those yeasts, or how it’s so much more than just about brewing. I hope my description, along with a short film, offer more context.
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Standing in front of the taplist at Brygg in Oslo, you might mistake it for a pub in Ohio. After a few days in Norway, one brewery tour, and three sessions at the Oslo Craft Beer Festival, I can tell you we’re not in Ohio anymore.
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Ukrainian writer Lana Svitankova recently brought a Ukrainian specialty to the world’s attention: a strong, sweet golden ale that has become popular in recent years. She’s hoping it will receive international recognition—and it should!—but it really doesn’t need it so long as locals drink up.
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With one exception, Portland has long been one of the best places in the world for any type of beer you’d happen to fancy. The lacuna has always been cask ale, somewhat curious given that the craft era began with British styles. Now, after forty years, something has changed—cask is surging.
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A Lviv brewery shifted production from beer to Molotov cocktails over the weekend, as columns of Russian soldiers marched toward Ukraine’s cities. War, in an instant, changes everything.
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Culture is often something observed in small gestures or when no one is looking. Here are a few observation from my visit to Dublin in 2016.
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“I love these beers and this tradition,” Ben told me (I didn’t take notes and I’m paraphrasing.) “But it feels a bit strange to be making a perfect recreation of a German beer. I wonder what an American lager would look like if we developed a tradition as rich as Franconia’s.”
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I was pleased to see his eyebrows shoot up during his first sip, and I caught him murmur “this is good” as he placed the glass back on the bar.
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I spent more than a month on the road, passing through several regions in the US, including stops at something like 44 breweries. Here are some notes on what I found in common in the US, and how regions differed.
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Writers and brewers have identified most of the useful frameworks we use to understand beer. An important one, often hinted at but never fully explored, is national tradition. It’s never been more important to understand, though—especially now amid the birth of the American tradition.
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