Class will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine. Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do. What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor [...]

NEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency. Full credit for this rule goes to Mark Dorber, the venerable British publican who uttered these words in 1996 at the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago. He was speaking specifically about cask-conditioned ale, but the rule applies fairly to most small-batch beers. This [...]

This is the sort of “blast from the past” we all should appreciate. The Olympian reports that Fish Brewing has revived the tradition of blowing a steam whistle at 5 p.m. to mark the end of a workday, just as the Olympia Brewing Co. did for years in nearby Tumwater. The Olympia brewery whistle last [...]

So just a few days after I waxed poetic about Ken Wells writing a beer column for Porfolio he’s not. But here’s the good news, Lew Bryson is taking it over and will write it bi-weekly. Yes, the same Lew Bryson who hangs out with us bloggers once a month in The Session. Wells, who [...]

Pete Brown suggests his own Three Sheets to the Wind would make an excellent Father’s Day present. Before passing that along I thought: Why would I to want to get into making gift recommendations? Not to satisfy advertisers or even to promote Brew Like a Monk. Probably not to pass along the useless suggestions I’m [...]

What if the American beer clock had stopped in 1962? (It’s a silly notion, because there’s that time marches on thing always happening. But stick with me.) Anheuser-Busch was the largest brewing company in the country, but not by much (it commanded less than 10% of the market). Next were Jos. Schlitz Brewing, Falstaff Brewing, [...]

The guys at Hop Talk have set the theme for the next round of The Session (in which dozens of beer enthusiasts blog to the same theme one day a month). The theme is atmosphere, and Al explains: Beer is about more than flavor, IBUs, and the debate over what is a craft beer and [...]

If you haven’t already read Fortune magazine’s interview with SABMiller CEO Graham Mackay then you don’t have to hurry over to the CNN Money site to do so, because … Only on the Internet could you have the brewer from Lost Abbey Brewing and the CEO of the world’s second largest brewer in a round [...]

The Great American Beer Festival has added two more categories – actually one category and one sub-category – for sour beers in the 2007 competition. American-Style Sour Ales will compete with German-Style Sour Ale (Berliner Weisse) in Category 13. Wood- and Barrel-Aged Sour Beer (Category 16) “is aged with the intention of imparting the particularly [...]

Ken Wells, author of Travels with Barley, was one of the superstar editors hired when Condé Nast decided to launch a business magazine called Portfolio. They didn’t hire him to write about beer, but he has penned two columns in the first two issues, which is good on two counts. First, he’s a wonderful writer. [...]