As part of the run up to the Great American Beer Festival Denver’s Westword features the relatively new Cheeky Monk Belgian Beer Cafe. Co-owner James Pachorek comes across a little, well, cheeky. One particular paragraph got me thinking. In fact, Pachorek was amazed at how quickly craft brewers had been able to make beers that [...]

During a recent episode of the television series “Mad Men” newcomer Faye Miller told the iconic Don Draper, “I don’t know how people drink the way you do around here. I’d fall asleep.” Miller serves as a proxy for those of us in the twenty-first century who are astonished at the amount of alcohol consumed [...]

Here’s what the beginning of brewery consolidation looks like. Last week I dug up a bunch of figures about the number of breweries and how much beer they made more than 100 years ago. Mike asked for a little perspective. So this chart starts in 1870 (the number of breweries peaked in 1873) and includes [...]

The Christian Science Monitor’s feature “5 famous pork projects: Beer museum and more” includes, as you might have guessed, funding for the National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wis. In 2004, The Potosi Brewery Complex restoration project received a $449,574 grant from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program to help renovate the building in [...]

So MillerCoors has launched a separate company to manage its portfolio of (existential warning) craft beers and imports, calling it “Tenth and Blake Beer Company.” Is this different than what America’s megabreweries breweries tried in the mid 1990s? On the surface, but maybe not that different. Will Tenth & Blake prove more successful? We’d be [...]

Or beer and roots music. Or beer and alt.country (“whatever that is,” at the late, great No Depression magazine said on its cove). Truth is we like wine in our family. We like all manner of jazz. Still I was surprised to see Wine and Jazz magazine today at the book store. Turns out it [...]

So the story behind the taster tray and the Bent Nail IPA at Red Lodge Ales in the Montana town of the same name is the same. The beer was named as a tribute to the construction workers who were among the brewery’s first customers. “They said it (the beer) made for a lot of [...]

In the front matter of his new book, Great American Craft Beer: A Guide to the Nation’s Finest Beers and Breweries, Andy Crouch revisits the never-ending discussion about “What the heck is craft beer anyway?” If you’ve followed this online, including at Crouch’s blog, this won’t be new. That he notes it is (at least [...]

Derrick Peterman has posted the roundup for The Session #42. Once again, the beer blogosphere provided many unique, memorable personal perspectives, this time, about how beer connects us to places. In many cases, the “special” beers associated with special places where rather ordinary, even substandard, as most posters readily acknowledged. And as I anticipated, “place” [...]

The bathrooms at Sam’s Tap Room and Kitchen, which is the tap room for Red Lodge Ales Brewing Co. in the Montana town of Red Lodge, has glass holders like this one in both the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The holders — set beside the toilets, the urinals and the sink — hold both large [...]