Let’s start out with what’s wrong with The beerbistro Cookbook. It’s too dang pretty to risk taking into the kitchen to refer to. This book is pure food and beer porn. Before moving on to what’s right about the book I must offer a longer than usual disclaimer. Co-author Stephen Beaumont is a long-time friend [...]

Excuse this crabby little rant, but I’ve started reading The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer and the author’s repeat a misstatement I’ve come across several times in just the past week, writing Belgian brewers often use “candi sugar.” No the don’t. They mostly use what we call plain old sugar. Yes, there [...]

The OregonLive headline tells you pretty much all you need to know: Glut of hops unlikely to lower beer prices. This follows a story in Washngton’s Tri-City Herald earlier in the month: Abundant hops harvest is bittersweet. That’s agriculture or you. As I wrote in 2007 there’s nothing new about wild swings in the price [...]

Last week Joe Stange blogged about The Mythology of Glassware. Perhaps that’s why Gourmet moved a very long story about Riedel glassware to the free section of its archives. It’s titled “Shattered Myths” so I don’t think I’m spoiling the punchline when I quote from the end: Georg Riedel finally seemed to be vindicated when [...]

These days “Hop Culture in California” means bitter beers, beers with lots of hop flavors and aromas, and this time of year beers brewed with fresh hops. But in 1900 it was the title of Farmer’s Bulletin No. 115 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Just a couple of excerpts (for now): In New York [...]

A few things you might have missed last week: – The held the Iron City Brewing auction Friday and yesterday in Pittsburgh. – Granted Equity For Punks might be important to the future of BrewDog, has led to considerable discussion about the value of the company, and certainly reminds us that no matter how much [...]

World’s Best Beers: One Thousand Craft Brews from Cask to Glass, which I mentioned earlier this week, is a coffee table book, weighing in at nearly three and a half pounds. Although it includes an introduction to beer up front, thus qualifying as novice friendly, and a beer-and-primer apparently required in all new beer books, [...]

Pardon that the example of how this could work comes from the wine world — making it my second wine originated post in two days — because it’s very beer relevant. Also, as Ed Carson pointed out with his comment about the rather dense posturing about the brain and wine that there’s a danger of [...]

Don Russell’s Christmas Beer: The Cheeriest, Tastiest, and Most Unusual Holiday Brews came out last year while we were in Europe. Thus I write from experience when I suggest this is not a book you want to start reading in January, when these beers have disappeared from the shelves. A few facts: The book is [...]

“Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation.” This link goes to a discussion about wine and numbers and might remind you about previous discussions about the value of blind tastings. Nonetheless if you cross out wine and pencil in [...]