Beer bloggers have proved adept at breaking news of upcoming beer releases by tracking label approvals. Only thing is, that not all labels turn into beers. We’re still waiting for the Faust Dubbel from Anheuser-Busch.
And perhaps we may also be waiting a while before we see the Kirkland beers from Costco.
We stayed in and […]

Let’s start with good news from Yakima. Here’s one of several new hopyards we saw Sunday and Monday. You can see why farmers point out it takes more than a year to make a hop field productive. Hops are well up the strings in nearby fields.
A day and a half driving through one of the […]

Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see Terminal Gravity Brewing in Northeast Oregon is bursting at its micro-seems, but you aren’t required to look. The pleasure here is, well, right here.
Every seat inside the pub-restaurant was taken within half an hour after it opened Saturday, although that only amounted to about two score customers. When […]

Andy Crouch offers a excellent warts-included report from SAVOR: An American Craft Beer and Food Experience, expressing concern about “the growing snobbery of beer” and using the occasion to post his “Does Beer Really Want To Become Like Wine?” column from Beer Advocate magazine.
I’m already on record with New Beer Rule #7 — “beer is […]

The job doesn’t look exactly like blogging, and you can be pretty sure that when Beck’s owner InBev suggests its digital columnist should be offbeat that means topics only broadly related to beer may be prominent, but here’s the press release and you can decide:
Greener pastures await avid writers! Beck’s, one of InBev’s Global brands […]

No imported beers for us in the next year and change.
Oh, we’ll drink Bavarian beer . . . when we are in Germany. And beers brewed in West Flanders . . . when we are in West Flanders. Beers from upstate New York? You guessed it.
We’ll be drinking local. That means the local water, beer […]

New Belgium Brewing has awarded a $20,000 grant to a Colorado State graduate student to further her research on growing organic hops in Colorado.
Odell Brewing — located in Fort Collins like New Belgium and CSU — has been supporting Ali Hamm’s work for several years.
Hamm’s plan is to figure out what kinds of hops grow […]

A few links to get you to Happy Hour.
- The first is to my own post about Flying Dog Kerberos, because it’s a tripel and those are the sorts of beers Brew Like a Monk is about. Flying Dog recently shipped bloggers a package with the new beer plus others in the Canis Major Series […]

Tired of hearing about trading up? How about a little trading down?
This from the Association Press:
Cash-strapped drinkers are starting to trade down to economy beers, the chief executive of Miller Brewing Co. said Thursday.
The Milwaukee-based brewer saw some shift between higher-priced, premium beers and economy beers such as Miller High Life and Milwaukee’s Best starting […]

I’m not going to tell you that Shiner Bock is my favorite beer or even that it is a bock. I think it deserves better than it gets at the ratings sites (2.6/5 at Rate Beer and C+ at Beer Advocate), but we don’t seek it out when eating smoked meat in Texas. Just as […]