It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting down to write my contribution to The Session #36: Cask-Conditioned Ale. I’m running behind because I just spent the last hour or so reading all the contributions host Tom Cizauskas solicited. Really wonderful and worth your time. I particularly like Steve Hamburg’s recollections from the early, then later, days [...]

Pardon this brief advertisement. The printer will ship Brewing with Wheat next week, meaning it goes to the distributors and then to stores. It could be in your hands by the end of the month. The “public service” announcement here is that you can pre-order it for 20 percent off from Brewers Publications, entering the [...]

Not long after Dan Carey of New Glarus Brewing returned from a trip to Germany in 1997 during which he was able to buy a beautiful copper clad brewing system because consolidation squeezed some breweries out of business he made an interesting observation. He suggested that perhaps the United States was simply ahead of the [...]

Robin Goldstein, already adept at raising a ruckus in the wine world, has turned his attention to beer. The Amazon.com description of The Beer Trials, due in April, promises: “With brutally honest ratings and reviews of the 250 most popular beers in the world – both in bottle and on draft – The Beer Trials [...]

Jean-Marie Rock began brewing beer professionally in 1972. For the last 25 years he’s been in charge of the Orval Trappist monastery brewery. He understands brewing cred. Celebrity? Another matter. He’s been to Kansas City twice recently. Posing for pictures, signing empty beer bottles, he found out quickly he wasn’t in Belgium any more. “The [...]