Call it a beer mindset, but when I saw “Budometer” I thought beer.
Turns out the test you can take at the Wall Street Journal or here (”get your buds done”) is designed to help you discover what kind of wine taster you.
But before moving along, consider that the guy behind this, Tim Hanni, “is on […]

How much beer will those 10 tons of hops Boston Beer is selling to small breweries make?
Left to their own devices, these hops might provide proper bitterness, flavor and aroma for 40,000 barrels (31 gallons to a barrel) of craft beer. However most of the East Kent Goldings or Tettnang Tettnanger the brewer of Samuel […]

Maybe I should have called this blog Appellation Hops. Or at least created a separate category for Hops, rather than lumping it with Ingredients.
But on the heals of Sam Adams news about freeing up hops for smaller brewers the latest issue of Brew Your Own magazine arrived yesterday with the “Hop Survival Guide.”
It includes substitution […]

Jim Koch sent a big old hops valentine to smaller breweries on Thursday. Ten tons worth.
He told them that Boston Beer, brewer of the Samuel Adams beers, will sell 20,000 pounds of hops that otherwise would not be available to smaller breweries. The company will sell the hops at its cost, which is considerably less […]

We’ve taken all you’ve given
But it’s gettin’ hard to make a livin’
Mr. President have pity on the working man
                   - Randy Newman
Talk about a job that sucks.
Conversation overhead this morning at the gas station/convenience store between a delivery man for the local Anheuser-Busch distributor and woman behind the register.
Driver: So does that mean you want them […]

Out of hops? Try scallops.
British brewer Shepherd Neame has used them to make Scallop Stout.
“There’s a hint of smokiness and a slight taste of the sea but no fishiness. I can find no scientific reason for why it works, but it does,” brewer Stewart Main said. The newspaper report states the 3.7% abv beer “is […]

We’re yukking it up in beer world today. (Except for these guys.)
- First, Bill at It’s Pub Night put an empty bottle of Deschutes The Abyss up for auction on eBay.
You know the drill from Tomme Arthur’s article, “The value of the item is in the collectible container, blah, blah, blah.”
Somebody bid on the bottle. […]

Full disclosure: Our daughter had been in more than 100 breweries before she was two years old. Not that she remembers any of them. Not everybody thought this was a good idea, but we sure learned some interesting facts about strange state laws, such as in Washington.
So stories such as yesterday’s in the New York […]

Roger Protz rightfully asks why the British press hasn’t been all over the news that beer sales by members of the Society of Independent Brewers were up nearly 11% in 2007.

This stunning success story - at a time when giant global brewers are reporting a sharp downturn in sales in Britain - has been […]

Stuff I marked this past week to muse about on Monday (but there’s not going to be room for). In case you haven’t already hit these links do it now:
- Tomme Arthur’s “Last Call” in Beer Advocate magazine — on the subject of auctioning beer on eBay — ignited a thread at BA that’s gone […]