How do you decide when tweaking a recipe what makes a beer, a bowl of soup or a pot of mash potatoes better? Or, put another way, how many brewers is too many in a brewery? This seemed like a good question to ask the crew at Flying Dog Ales upon the release of Wild [...]

Once a good ol’ beer person, always a good ol’ beer person. Lucy Saunders can’t help herself. She’s a beer person, and that shows up on every page of The Best of American Beer & Food: Pairing & Cooking with Craft Beer. (Disclaimer: Lucy has been a friend of my wife and I for 15 [...]

OK, you don’t have to crank it up. You can put a little Mozart on the stereo, haul out your collection of Oktoberfest drinking songs, or grab a guitar with one hand and a beer with another. Consider this your official reminder to be there Friday for Sesson #9, when the theme is Beer and [...]

Can beer be a luxury and a blue collar product? The rather lengthy discussion — and you thought I wasn’t capable of understatement — Alan provoked by arguing craft beer prices are not too low goes to one of the reasons this blog exists. That’s explained in the mission statement, one of the regularly appearing [...]

For your reading pleasure today: – Alan at a Good Beer Blog takes some of us to task to for suggesting that some small-batch beer should sell for more. Or put another way: Are Craft Beer Prices Too Low? No, They Are Not Too Low. Skip my comments (I obviously was just waking up and [...]

Thought for the day from Mark Matheson, who brews beer at Turtle Mountain Brewing in Rio Rancho, recently started his own winery (Matheson Wines), and also directs the winemaking at Santa Fe Vineyards. He graduated with a degree in fermentation science from UC-Davis, studying both oenology and brewing, and certainly appreciates the the value of [...]

Commenting in another thread, Stonch asked: I’d be interested to know what the top ten selling American craft beers are? Does anyone have that info? The lists I put together got too long to put in a comment. They are not perfect. They are based on data from Information Resources Inc. (IRI), which uses scanner [...]

When somebody talks about “MJ’s list of best beers” do you think about the latest offering from Men’s Journal or one from Michael Jackson? Me too. Working on another project I recently hauled out his first Pocket Guide to Beer, published in 1982 and opened enough times since that the 18 pages containing Guinness through [...]

Stuff you should be reading: I Told You Those Lying Bastards Were Making It Up From Martyn Cornell: “It was fantastically satisfying to see the front page splash in The Times declare what I’ve been saying for years – that the government’s ‘safe drinking guidelines’ of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for [...]

This from a story that dated tomorrow (step into the future with me) in the New York Times: Subtlety is the hallmark of the better Japanese microbrews, while most American craft beers embrace an onslaught of flavor with all the nuance of a sledgehammer. That attention-getting line aside, Specialty Beers on the Rise in the [...]