Today’s Wall Street Journal explains the “current flavor boom.” “The more you taste something, the more you need to taste it,” says Mitchell Davis, vice president of the James Beard Foundation, a New York-based non-profit that works to preserve American culinary heritage. “You always need something spicier, something more, a bigger high.” What does this [...]

Remember the plan for an ongoing Minister of Pubs in England? Big with CAMRA. Seems like the role was short-lived. (Thanks to @pintsofview for noticing.)

Evan Rail writes about his plans for Beer Culture, which has been dark since last fall. I hope to write more stories — to tell the tale of how something happened, in other words. How a beer got made, imported or drunk. To tell you who did it and why. And at the same time, [...]

A press release for the third Philly Beer Week (PBW) indicates at least 865 events are planned for June 4 to 13. That’s pretty [insert your preferred obscenity ending in -in'] impressive. The one that caught my eye: The Forum of the Gods, “a spirited afternoon of beer talk, beer drinking and big names in [...]

As I walked out one evening, down Columbus Avenue, The sushi bars were shuttered, the dark cantinas, too. I stood there in the darkness, as an empty cab rolled by When all at once I heard the sound of Yuppies in the sky. I’ve seen them in commercials, sailing boats and playing ball, Pouring beer [...]

Draft magazine’s On the Beer Blogger Beat: Stan Hieronymus. I think my answers are the the shortest so far. The brevity should surprise those who drink beer with me. Anyway, in case you are wondering, that’s Brother Antoine from Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy in Rochefort on the right of the photo I provided. And it’s [...]

You do have to live within the Greater London area to apply for this position, but what better reason to move? London’s historic Old Spitalfields Market has announced it’s looking for a candidate to resurrect the ancient role of Ale Taster. Entries are due by May 23. From the website: In medieval times, ordinary citizens [...]

Mario Rubio has recapped The Session #39: Collaboration, and Erik Myers has issued marching orders for #40 on June 4: Session Beer. There are a thousand ways to approach this. What is your definition of a session beer? Is it, as Dr. Lewis suggested at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, “a pint of British [...]

Kelly Ryan spoke with a surprising sense of purpose considering this April evening had just turned into tomorrow in a Chicago hotel room, and lord knows what day it was 8,000 miles away in Auckland, New Zealand, where Epic Thornbridge Stout was still conditioning. “I think it needs more time in the tank,” Ryan told [...]

Two observations related only by beer: We’ve been seeing “microbrews” in television shows for many years — Sam Adams on “Friends,” or more recently Albuquerque-brewed Marble in “Breaking Bad.” But Sierra Nevada showing up in Pearls Before Swine seems terribly mainstream. From a 1975 article in New Phytologist about the early history of humulus lupulus [...]