Perhaps we should have headed to one of the nearby casinos last night. It takes a certain amount of luck to open seven bottles of Thomas Hardy’s Ale and find them all outstanding. Particularly when the last one is 40 years old.
By the time we got to the 1968 the sun had set on the […]

Did you hear the one about an Illinois man who plans to be buried in a coffin designed to look like a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon?
Bill Bramanti, 67, isn’t in a hurry to use it — for now it makes an excellent cooler. Saturday he threw a party for friends and packed the future […]

Funny T-shirt today at Shirts on Sale (no affiliation deal; just a link), but the fact is that beer costs a lot more than gas. A gallon of gas around here — $3.35 to $3.45 in these parts this morning — will set you back less than half what a half-gallon growler of beer costs […]

You don’t have to come here to read that Magic Hat is acquiring Pyramid.
It’s here, there and everywhere. Including the possibility that Pyramid will brew Magic Hat beers for the West Coast and perhaps vice versa.
So some stuff you may not have seen, mostly about the business of beer but bound to affect what […]

To jump start your brain this morning: Two beer posts and a wine link that provoked one of the posts.
Stephen Beaumont on Great Beer vs. Popular Beer.
The number one beer in the United States, for example, is Bud Light, a pale lager with, frankly, some complexity of character, but a flavour profile so that […]

If you remember American Bandstand, or perhaps have seen clips, you recall the popular segment where host Dick Clark would take two teens from the audience. He’d have them listen to a couple of brand new songs, then rate them.
When asked for an explanation about the number they assigned it many would say, “You can […]

The Hoosier Beer Geek has pictures. Check out the line. Let’s just say showing up as late at 1:30 was not such a good idea.
Passion on display. Mostly. Unfortunately a little cold-hearted greediness. From a thread at Beer Advocate:
I drove from Minneapolis with a trunk full of Surly to enjoy and trade. Instead, I stood […]

It seems so 2007 — a vintage year for new beer blogs — to note the arrival of a new blogger.
But I will anyway: Charlie Papazian is blogging.

At the risk of poking the hornet’s nest — I don’t have a category here for “ethics” and not really criticism per se — I must pass along this story. Seems like a better deal than a trip to St. Louis.
From the UK wine magazine Decanter:

Wine magnate Bernard Magrez has outraged a group of journalists […]

Today a tree: the Simcoe hop. Tomorrow the forest: the rest of the hops in the world.
And not just because it seems that how you describe the aroma of Simcoe determines if you drink/smell beer like a man or like a woman.
Simcoe was only released to the brewing world in 2000 and really is a […]