Skagit Valley Malting may be gone, but a new start-up from across the mountains gives hope to craft malt.
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Twitter’s not-quite-death has sparked many imitators, but their failure to scale illustrates the challenge with social media platforms. They don’t work unless everyone is on them. And right now, we don’t want to be where everyone else is. So what comes next?
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Global breweries can be optimized to make consistently good beer, but it’s rarely the most interesting. For the fierce defenders of tradition or restless experimenters, tinkerers making obscure styles on bespoke systems, or regional powers whose flagships have become national classics, you have to turn to the independents.
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Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth made a public appearance yesterday to quiet the criticism of Bud Light. It … did not go well.
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Portland is inarguably one of the country’s great beer cities, but which breweries are the jewels in Beervana’s crown? In my annual feature, I offer the ten breweries doing the best work right now, with descriptions to guide any explorers to a perfect pint.
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If you were going to place a bet on one malthouse that might escape craft malting’s difficult economic realities, Skagit Valley would have been the odds-on favorite. That’s why their abrupt closure over the weekend has dark implications for the future of craft malting.
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How the story of Cleveland’s Platform brewery—which launched, exploded in popularity, sold out to AB InBev, collapsed and folded—is the inverse corollary to last week’s Anchor Brewing news. In this case, how optimism can be a bad thing indeed.
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If you look closely at your beer industry news feed, you see a lot of downsizing, consolidation, and renewed focus on core lines. The expectation of inevitable growth has given way to a new pessimism in beer—especially craft beer. But that’s probably good news.
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Blind taste a dozen and a half mass market lagers, and you learn something about this much-maligned style. They don’t all taste the same, and in fact represent a surprisingly broad range. We made a few other discoveries along the way.
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Episode two of our Fireside Chat with Mitch Steele, Vinnie Cilurzo, and Noah Bissell is in the books, but you can still catch the recording here. It’s a great conversation!
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Amid the controversy swirling around the recent Craft Brewers Conference, one unambiguously excellent event happened: the launch of the National Black Brewers Association. I wanted to understand the goals and activities a bit better, and had the pleasure of speaking with the group’s Executive Director, Kevin Asato.
Read MoreAn off-brand website recently posted the latest in the series of supposedly quantified “best beer cities” lists. The problem with these lists—any best cities list, really—is that they haven’t decided what a good beer city looks like. Here’s a run at some better standards.
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We are very excited to announce the next Beervana-Breakside Fireside Chat! Tune in next Wednesday to hear a murderer’s row of hoppy talent set the record straight about IPAs. Expect myths to be debunked, legends dispelled, and old bar tales summarily dispatched.
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Every week, we get news about Bud Light’s latest performance, and every week it gets worse. The brand is in freefall, and according to most commenters, all because of a boycott by conservatives. But these numbers can’t all be from one boycott. What’s really going on?
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The discovery of a new Maryland hop led me on a trail of discovery to the office of Dr. Nahla Bassil, at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository. What I discovered was incredibly fascinating, and went far beyond the scope of a single wild hop.
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Following the hailstorm of criticism that fell on the recent Craft Brewers Conference, I reached out to organizers at the Brewers Association for answers to some of the critiques.
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Hazy IPAs are known for their gentle, sweet tropicality, while West Coast IPAs feature savory, garlic-to-pine notes. In Portland, some breweries have decided to blend the two together. Amazingly, it works.
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I may be an outlier here, but as a rule of thumb, I personally would never green-light a collab with any packaged meats product.
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After an encounter with a single-hop Talus beer, I have a better sense what this newish American hop tastes like, and I am in love. It’s tropical, but less mango and more mangosteen. In this post, I unpack its unusual but somehow familiar flavors.
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The origins for the way John Kimmich makes hoppy ales were many, and as far away as San Diego and Portland. Yet when he canned Heady Topper, “everybody thought that I just blinked my eyes one night and made this beer.” His thoughts on hops and where his offspring have taken IPAs.
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