‘Tis the season for predictions. The Future of Beer, or at least for 2012. The rise of gluten free beer, discovering gruit, more hoppy beers, fewer hoppy beers, old school beers, new fangled beers. There are more where those came from. They can’t all be right in 2012, but they could be in the long [...]

If you’d like to see what my head looks like on a platter, you might try to reconstruct1 the happenings on Twitter last week when I naively noted: “Sorry, but it seems strange to call an unconfirmed rumor one of the ‘Top 5 beer stories’” of the year’” along with this link. Because this was [...]

It’s Monday, so a few links. Big picture and 2011 recap stuff. Some are lists. * The boom continues. In Chicago, in New York, and in Longmont, Colo. Maybe this is why I spotted a beer delivery truck advertising Dale’s Pale Ale in Manhattan. * Big Eddy. Don Russell makes Leinenkugel’s Big Eddy Russian Imperial [...]

This afternoon Jeremy Danner (@Jeremy_Danner) of Boulevard Brewing “mentioned” (via Twitter) a story a wrote a little while ago for CraftBeer.com that was published today. I’d kind of forgotten about it, and that I planned to post some outtakes here. So before I resume deciding how many words to allocate to hops from Caucasus one [...]

This arrived in the mail Saturday, a pleasant reminder this is the season for happy surprises. But also that I have a book to finish. So I’m swearing off Appellation Beer until some time in January. I might post a few comments and photos on Twitter, because there are fun events (like this and this) [...]

Or maybe it is Things I never thought I’d see . . . Anyway, more than 14 years ago our daughter, Sierra, not yet a year old, matched her hand up against a sticker in the brewery at Left Hand Brewing in Longmont, Colorado. For years I told a perhaps-made-up-story about how she learned to [...]

Two tidbits from today’s Shanken News Daily: * Heineken has announced a global marketing partnership with Facebook to create digital campaigns for the company’s brands around the world. The agreement will help Heineken reach over 800 million Facebook users. Heineken says its Facebook fan page is the largest for any beer brand, with over 4.6 [...]

The headline above is simply an answer to a question asked at Rate Beer that made its way into my Twitter feed. Confession. The question actually reads “When did craft beer jump the shark?” I think making the conversation simply about [no modifier needed] beer will do. (It seems that the discussion at Rate Beer, [...]

Start with this premise: “It seems that in today’s uncertain and flagging America, one sign of community prosperity and revitalization is a microbrewery or brewpub in town.” The Ecocentric blog examines in some detail the role of small breweries in towns where they operate. The history gets a little iffy now and then, but ultimately [...]

Because the topic of beer marketing pops up here from time to time, and because my obviously too subtle effort to provoke comment on Miller’s World Beer Cup commercial fell flat I’ll quietly pass along information about a contest Port Brewing/The Lost Abbey is holding. Basically, they plan to film a commercial, are inviting suggestions, [...]