Here’s the latest Fireside Chat audio and video. The discussion was more intimate, frank, and searching than our earlier chats, perhaps because it touched a particular soft place these breweries have. Namely, how does a brewery live, thrive, and survive selling something other than IPAs in a world that just wants hops?
Read MoreWhat is the state of the art in brewing West Coast IPAs? pFriem took that question as its brief and this week releases a new year-round beer that collects all the tricks, techniques, and ingredients that characterize the style. Here’s what they came up with.
Read MoreWho had “ABI will sell off seven craft properties plus its weird, lame Shock Top brand to a weed company for $85 million” on their bingo card for this fine Monday? It’s pretty big news around these parts, because two of the brands are big in Oregon.
Read MoreWith the release of pFriem’s West Coast IPA this week, I’m taking the opportunity to delve into the style—if it can be called that—more deeply. Soon we’ll discuss how pFriem interpreted the style, but first, how do customers understand it?
Read MoreAt the Horse Brass two nights ago, I found myself playing a deeply satisfying game. It’s simple. You just describe your dream brewery, ignoring all those pesky details like business plans, funding, or—in my case—physics.
Read MoreJoin us next week for the latest Fireside Chat. Tune in live on Wednesday, August 9 at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern, or look for the video afterward. The panel this time will include Dan Carey (New Glarus), Alex Ganum (Upright), and Bill Arnott (Machine House).
Read MoreWhat, precisely, is a hopback, and is it identical to a whirlpool? For this explanation we turn to Miles Jenner, the longtime Harvey’s brewer, who describes how the vessel works and why it was once a mainstay among traditional British breweries.
Read MoreI enjoyed a lot of wonderful beer in my visit to Oklahoma, but the IPAs Jake Keyes is making at Oklahoma City’s Skydance really stood out.
Read MoreOn a recent post, a commenter wrote, “Craft beer has very few stories left to tell.” It echoed a theme in a recent newsletter from Boak and Bailey. But is beer really played out? Hardly.
Read MoreWhether or not you have been to Oklahoma or ever plan to go, it’s worth taking an ethnographic look at a young and developing beer scene that contains its own character and lessons. You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!
Read MoreAn interesting data point from a company that tracks on-premise alcohol sales. In the months since the Bud Light fiasco, an unexpected beneficiary has entered the frame.
Read MoreBefore hazy IPAs (TM) came along, many IPAs in the Northwest were pretty hazy. That’s no longer the case.
Read MoreAnchor was never just a brewery. The story of Fritz Maytag saving a brewery became a founding myth for American craft beer. Anchor was at once the past and the future, the proof that small breweries could exist outside an ecosystem of commodity canned lagers.
Read MoreSkagit Valley Malting may be gone, but a new start-up from across the mountains gives hope to craft malt.
Read MoreTwitter’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?
Read MoreGlobal 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.
Read MoreAnheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth made a public appearance yesterday to quiet the criticism of Bud Light. It … did not go well.
Read MorePortland 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.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreHow 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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