One quick link this morning if you want to see just where your priorities lie. Matt Van Wyk of Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery assembled a quick quiz. A couple of his questions: 4) Did you lose a friend this year because you said SNPA was so yesterday? 5) Do you only drink a beer [...]

Not only do I not care if my beer is hip, but I also will not cast my vote for president (in the primary or general election) based upon which candidate I would rather have a beer with. That’s just a dumb idea. Obviously the National Beer Wholesalers Association leadership wasn’t thinking of me when [...]

Monday’s post about wine prices and perception caused Josh Mishell of Flying Dog Ales and BeerDinners.com to drop me a note about an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! (Showtime) featuring a “water steward” hawking high-priced bottled water — in bottles being filled from a garden hose out back. Thanks, Josh. Took all of 15 [...]

Continuing last week’s discourse about barrel-aged beers the thought occurred to me I hadn’t bothered to mention why we even care. It’s not the the story behind any of these beers that matters first, but what’s in the glass. Some you would call spectacular, but there’s good reason to appreciate beers that gain extra complexity, [...]

Now some Monday afternoon musing (because I just came across this). This is how the Times Online leads the story: “Restaurants charging inflated prices for wine could be doing their customers a favour. A study has found that people who pay more for a product do enjoy it more.” This was in fact serious research [...]

I’m not sure what to think of the cover for the latest All About Beer magazine that prominently features New Belgium Brewing co-founder Kim Jordan with a headline that reads She makes America’s Hippest Beer. Jay Brooks writes inside about the greening of America’s breweries (New Belgium is at the forefront), but it’s also made [...]

There are few stories that raise the hair on the back of a good beer geek’s neck as fast as those about the ongoing battles between American Bud and Czech Bud. Thus Evan Rail’s report that the often-rumored privatization of Budejovicky Budvar won’t be happening for at least two more years should produce a few [...]

Stephen Beaumont and Jon Abernathy have added their voices to the chorus singing the praises of barrel-aged beers. Let’s hope everybody is right and more barrel-aged beers are on the way. Right now I’d settle for larger production runs of what’s available. After writing a story about blending for Imbibe magazine and one about barrel-aging [...]

This from the Monthly Mash, a regular dispatch from Avery Brewing in Boulder, Colo: As most of you have probably heard by now, the craft beer industry has been hard hit by a global hop shortage this year. The chronic oversupply that characterized the hop market for the 90′s and much of this decade is [...]

Eric Asimov prepares us: “My column in Wednesday’s paper is on American extreme beers, a topic that I think is fascinating whether you’re a beer drinker or not.” We’ll find out more tomorrow, including what beers the New York Times panelists liked. (Here’s the link, and you must check out the photo.) The place for [...]