Prepare your knee. Pabst Brewing announces that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Southampton Bottling to market and distribute its award-winning line of craft-brewed ales and lagers. Jerk. Oh my God, what are they doing? Selling out. Those last words are from Southampton brewmaster Phil Markowski, saying out loud what he knows many [...]

Ted Duchesne at Barley Vine has announced the theme for The Session #10: “Let it snow, let it snow, Winter Seasonal Beers.” The basics: # Pick any Winter Seasonal beer you want. Or a sampler if you’d like (think the Sam Adam’s one I picked up earlier this week). # If you select a single [...]

Think homebrewing is difficult? Here’s a recipe for Cottage Beer: “Good wheat bran 1 peck, water 10 gallons, hops 3 handfuls, molasses 2 quarts, yeast 2 tablespoonfuls; boil the bran and the hops in the water until both bran and hops sink to the bottom; then strain through a sieve, and when lukewarm put in [...]

Exhibit A: At the recent Great American Beer Festival, Pabst Brewing Co. won four medals and Large Brewing Company of the Year. Southampton Publick House on Long Island won a silver medal for its Double White Ale and a bronze for its Saison. Which do we think it cooler? Exhibit B: Wednesday Pabst Brewing announced [...]

You can read more that you’d ever want about this commercial and the return of “Beer Wars” just about anywhere. So I won’t comment. But in case you missed it, AdvertisingAge reported this little gem: According to attendees of a wholesalers’ meeting in Dallas today, A-B execs showed their sales force Miller’s ad – with [...]

Would you trust a philosopher with your beer? Is that in itself a philosophical question? To tell the truth, even though I was careful to bite off portions of the book in small chunks, after reading Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking I’m not exactly sure about either. I seem to have [...]

The Chicago Tribune just ran a story on what the author calls blending beers, but might more accurately be described as mixing beer cocktails. In my mind brewers blend before beer is bottled. That’s a subject I wrote about for the current (November-December) Imbibe magazine. Customers also blend, but I prefer using the word mix [...]

Might one of the side effects of higher beer prices turn out to be counterfeit bottles? It’s hard to imagine problems similar to those plaguing wine, as outlined at Slate, in the a very long story in The New Yorker, and at Wine Spectator. Even Sammy Hagar is worried about it. But consider this lengthy [...]

Here’s a scary thought from Ralph Olson of Hopunion, one of craft brewers’ go-to hop purveyors: “They (large breweries around the world) want your hops now.” Olson was talking on a “packed” tele-conference call this week, along with Ian Ward of Brewers Supply Group, updating members of the Brewers Association on the status of the [...]

Somebody at the San Francisco Chronicle must have got the wrong memo. They’ve got a feature today about wine & music. Hey guys, the theme of today’s Session is Beer & Music. Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s flavors is no lightweight read. It runs almost 1,900 words. As the [...]