Don’t forget The Session #49 on Friday, when the theme is “regular beer.” The Session is open to anybody, so if you don’t have one and want to write a post I’ll publish it here. If you are a blogger, email me with the URL Friday 4 or post a comment here, and by early [...]

Rather than languishing as the 22nd comment on the previous post this question from Tom seems worth making a new post. There seems to be a conflation between intentionality and fault running through a good portion of the comments here. My question: if AB continually produces a beer with a particular flavor profile, with components [...]

Questions, questions, they abound today in the beer blogosphere. * Mike Sweeney at STL Hops asks, “Can a beer ever be life changing?” It sprang from a tweet about Pliney the Younger: “Great beer = yes! Life changing = no” Read the answers (comments). * Mark Dredge of Pencil an Spoon fame tries various beers [...]

Stuff recently noticed, perhaps because a press release headed my way or I was goofing off. Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter (NY Times) – No mention of beer or wine or cucumber blogs, but this gets my obligatory bit of navel gazing out of the way early this week. Saint [...]

Six of the top eight new “craft beer” brands in the United States in 2010 were IPAs of some sort (sometimes “imperial” or “double,” sorry Mr. B), according to Symphony IRI — which tracks beer sales in various channels. Curiously, although “American-Style India Pale” annually draws more entries than any other category at the Great [...]

There is something terribly circular about this. What follows is inside baseball, blogging about blogging instead of the beer itself. I asked last year if anybody really reads beer blogs (other than other bloggers), pointing to a post at Palate Press digging into why wine blogs fail their readers (so don’t have many). Today Jeff [...]

I have not so much made peace with “best” lists as run out of new ways to say why I don’t care for those that don’t provide sensible context. Thus when the latest lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate (in its print edition) arrived I sat silent. Sure, I was amused reading the conversations [...]

Back in November I linked to an essay from George Orwell about picking hops. Now Charles in Canada has added an article Orwell wrote about his favorite pub, Moon Under Water. If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most [...]

This might have been more fun the first time than the second, but that won’t keep me from asking again. (However, I do promise not to roll out a quiz on St. Patrick’s Day, the next official beer drinking holiday.) The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the [...]

ABSTRACT You may declare that a beer sucks because it is genuinely flawed. For instance, you spot the tail of a mouse in the bottle. You might say it sucks because you’ve had the beer before and it was much better then. That’s probably not the word I’d use, but I understand. You might yell [...]