No, seriously. Next week judges stream into Chicago to taste their way through 3,500 or so entrants in the World Beer Cup and soon they will be joined by thousands of brewing industry members for the Craft Brewers Conference. I expect only the toughest will make it up Saturday morning for “Brewing Belgian White and [...]

With apologies to Samuel Beckett . . . The current, but perhaps not ongoing, demise of really simple BEER syndication has been noted in comments here and in a devoted post by Alan McLeod. For those of you don’t know, it is a site that aggregates the latest rss feeds from hundreds of beer blogs. [...]

Requests like this seem to arrive in cycles and unfortunately we’re in an up cycle. So I thought I’d pass one of them along, in this case with the name and contact information removed. The subject line is “My Home Museum Beer.” I’m not trying to be anti-social but the PS tickled me (I don’t [...]

Southern Star Brewing in Texas basically doubled production from 2008 to 2009 and expects to do the same again this year, according to a story last week in the Houston Chronicle. Curiously, a the manager at a Houston bar says the founders are smart to grow the brewery “at a slow, deliberate pace.” One hundred [...]

Tom Johnson makes a flat-out statement in the Palate Press: Nobody reads wine blogs. A year ago I was an unsuccessful political blogger, entertaining myself and almost no one else. Now, I’m a wine blogger doing largely the same thing, except that no one calls me a Nazi in comments anymore. Though my wine blog’s [...]

The headline alone suggests much hand wringing ahead: “Marston’s redefines Cask Ale.” Pete Brown has an exclusive about the roll out of Fast Cask by Marston’s, one of Great Britain’s most highly regarded breweries. Without going into too much technical detail, Fast Cask is still cask ale because it has live yeast working in the [...]

A post headlined “Less is More? Are There Too Many Beers?” has provoked quite a conversation about beer distribution on the World Class Beverages blog. But only one of the comments I noticed addressed what jumped out at me. Right now, the Brewer’s Association will tell you that there are almost 600 breweries in the [...]

The brewers at BrewDog have made a list of their six favorite (or should that be favourite?) hops. You can see why co-founder James Watt has said, “We like to think of what we do as U.S.-inspired Scottish craft brewing.” 1. Chinook 2. Amarillo 3. Nelson Sauvin 4. Bramling Cross 5. Simcoe 6. First Gold [...]

Sean Inman has posted the theme for The Session #38. With Dark Lord Day 2010 right around the corner you should be able to figure out what he is aiming for. What beer have you tasted recently (say, the last six months or so) that is worthy of their own day in the media sun? [...]

This is my contribution to the Session #37: “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff” or, if you prefer, “Raid the Cellar.” Visit The Ferm for links to more posts. Is there a perfect beer for every particular special moment? Is there a time in every beer’s life when it tastes better than [...]