Part of it is pure chance because several beer periodicals just hit the streets, but this seems to have been particularly dreary week for hops news.
The newest issue of All About Beer magazine devotes a chunk of its news section to the hops shortage. Every regional edition of the Brewing News family of “brewspapers” has […]

Well, if we’re going to ask a woman about marketing to women, maybe we should check in with the Gen Y crowd when discussing “millennials” and beer. Both what they say, and what they will do.
Exhibit #1: Swordboarder’s comment the other day. He uses the word “they” but he’s the same age as Sierra Nevada […]

OK, we’re not at the point that Time magazine has put 750ml bottles of beer on its cover and declared “Beer Is The New Wine.” That would definitely be a jinx.
But when the business types start paying attention — as BusinessWeek does with “Micro Beers Brew Up Big Business” — I get nervous.
Particularly when there’s […]

This is a story overtly about wine, so you might not care, and about trends, so you might not care.
Rather than revisiting the discussion about if we want our beer hip or sick I will simply argue that trends matter because they may determine what’s available for us to drink. After all, hipsters managed to […]

I think I need to talk to New Glarus brewmaster Dan Carey, and finish a conversation started 11 years ago.
He was jet lagged but wired at the time, having just returned from Germany, where he bought a beautiful well-used and bargain-priced copper brewing system that would be the centerpiece of New Glarus expansion […]

Those of us just now emerging from a Session #12-induced fog were a bit surprised to see that the topic has already by set for Session #13.
For those of you good a math, #13 means we are heading into the second year of The Session. As we used to say in the Midwest, What a […]

Give beer bloggers an excuse to sit down with a barley wine or 20 and you see what happens . . .
Jon at the Brew Site has the roundup for The Session #12: Barley wine — 38 bloggers, 40 entries, over 64 beers reviewed as I type, with a few more likely to be […]

Note: This is my contribution to The Session #12: Barleywine, hosted by Jon at The Brew Site. Head on over to see what everybody else is drinking.
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered . . . the smell and taste of things remain […]

Now this is getting personal.
Stone XII will not be a hop bomb.
Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? It gets worse. Ballast Point has quit bottling Dorado, one of the style-defining Double (some say Imperial) IPAs. A beer that a beer brewing chemist once described this way: “‘Savage’ flavor but not taste. Hoppy. Hoppy. […]