Hammer and Stitch has been open seven months, but debuted in October, just as the pandemic entered its most debilitating phase. For most people venturing out with the spring sunshine, it is a brand new brewery. Here’s a first look.
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Reinheitsgebot is one of the most famous laws in the world—and surely the most famous in beer—but also the most misunderstood. On the occasion of its 505th anniversary, here’s a full account of its history and impact.
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Today I offer three beers that really impressed me. But they also made me aware of the trajectory their breweries are traveling. With Squeezy Rider, Neon Lights, and Bird-Day #1, we have liquid metaphors for where Deschutes, Ommegang, and Pelican are heading.
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Guinness is treated as if it is one beer, not a brewery. Like Pacifico or Heineken, naming the company names the beer. Yet the beer we think of when we name the brewery doesn't date to 1759, but two hundred years later. Here's its story:
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They’re fruity, expressive, and fun to drink, yet thanks to poor style-branding, people avoid them. A modest proposal: just call saisons IPAs. Okay, maybe “farmhouse” IPAs.
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With the release of two new stouts, Breakside debuts a new approach to barrel-aging. Borrowing a page from the wild ale playbook, they blend not just different vintages, but different beers to create more integrated, subtle beers than the standard approach of single-batch blends.
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We learned over the weekend that the proposed beer tax hike in Oregon, the one that would have given us a tax twice as expensive as any other state’s, has been pulled. Now backers want to set up a task force, but there are many reasons to think they’re not acting in good faith.
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In the final year-end Covid report, Matt Van Wyk of Alesong Brewing describes retooling the brewery’s approach to reaching customers directly.
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In this latest Coronavirus update, the always-candid Ben Parsons describes the real costs and long-lasting trauma he and his team has survived getting through this crisis.
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The pandemic caused major crises for breweries, but also smaller, unexpected side-benefits, including this one: for some small breweries, it meant tank space for neglected favorites.
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Today we hear from Zoiglhaus’ Alan Taylor. During the pandemic, Taylor has retooled the restaurant, added a canning line, and with draft sales picking up, he looks toward the coming year with hope.
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Despite their resilience and creativity, the Covid pandemic didn’t hit breweries equally hard. It hit those focused on a restaurant, like Old Town Brewing, with special violence. The brewery’s owner, Adam Milne, describes how he fought to keep from folding his bad hand.
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In the first report from brewers surviving a year of pandemic, Gigantic’s Van Havig points to the ways beer proved to be more resilient than similar industries.
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On a momentous period that began March 9 and extended through the following Monday, March 16, our world was turned upside down. We were flying off the edge of the road before we realized we were in a car accident. Now, with a year to reflect, we are starting to make sense of our plague year.
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Every now and again, an explorer will follow a path deep into a thicket before finally tracing their way back out. The Sherpa has lately been following American-brewed Czech tmavés deep into the underbrush, and today’s edition reveals what he found.
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The OLCC has released its annual sales figures for 2020, and the numbers are mixed—which counts as good news in a pandemic year. One brewery had an especially good year and another, important one, a worryingly poor one.
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Yesterday Bend’s Deschutes Brewery announced it was buying in-town rival Boneyard. Beware hot takes about how happy the marriage will be: the devil in these kinds of deals involves details we can’t see.
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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 the first of the Sightglass articles, we examine HBC 1019 to see how it all works.
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Remember all the way back to 2016 when brewers were making what they called “zero IBU” IPAs? The notion, not actually so absurd, came from what we understood then about hop utilization. We’ve learned a great deal in those few years, and here’s a quick overview of some of the key lessons.
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Oregon legislators have introduced a new beer tax that would make the state’s beer the most-taxed in the country—at a level nearly twice as high as the next state, and more than ten times the national median. Worse, the rhetoric suggests an explicit goal is to cripple Oregon breweries.
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