The always interesting Matt Kramer uses the news that Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Starbucks and other coffee vendors are embracing lighter roasts to point out America’s tastes are changing. Not a shocking conclusion, but it goes directly to a wine bottom line. As the marketing mavens of Starbucks have discovered, the American palate is seeking [...]

We ventured across Missouri this past weekend, where I spent most of my time in the company of the Kansas City Bier Meisters, judging beer, talking about beer, drinking beer, talking excessively about beer, speaking at the awards banquet for their 29th Annual Homebrew Competition (making it older than all but a few American breweries), [...]

Nine hundred and five breweries closed between 2000 and 2010, an average of a little over 82 a year. The numbers for 2011 aren’t in yet, so I couldn’t include them. Closings ran higher in the front half of those years, but in even the best of them, other than 2010, a brewery closed at [...]

OK, I’m probably just out of it. This may have already been discussed to death on various beer forums. Perhaps under Innovation, as in “Is this more are less innovative than Green IPA for St. Patrick’s Day?” Anyway, opening Ale Street News today I sure was surprised to see a full page advertisement for take [...]

Did every local television station get the same marching orders this past weekend? Super Bowl: Go find a beer story. In Cleveland it was about Mickie Reinhart, who has come up with seven flavors of “hops drops,” liquid additives intended to be used in light lagers. The varieties include chocolate and coffee, as opposed to [...]

Remember those hilarious videos from Breckenridge Brewing a while back? My favorite was “Gravity Activated Pouring.” They’ve released two more. Probably as good as at least half of those that will be on display Sunday during the Super Bowl.

In the early 1980s, Anheuser-Busch chairman of the board August Busch III ordered that freshly brewed cans of Budweiser and Bud Light would be cryogenically frozen, so that they could be tasted against each other over time. More than 20 years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison described a scene where Busch and Doug [...]

Ray Daniels predicts that his Cicerone program will 10,000th certification in a matter of weeks. And it seems like only yesterday, as opposed to 79 AD in Pompeii (which is where this photo was taken; in 2008 rather than before Mount Vesuvius erupted). Here are the basics from a little press release: It may seem [...]

If you read blogs and don’t write a blog then your answer to the question Alan McLeod asks, “What If I Posted A Series Of Posts For A Fee?” will likely be read with great interest by Alan and others who write blogs. Go. Comment. Otherwise, a few links I’ve collected in recent weeks and [...]

It was nearly one hundred years between the time philosopher Henry Finck proposed humans literally have a “second way of smelling” and University of Pennsylvania Paul Rozin established the role of retronasal smell in perception of flavor. In 1886, Finck suggested that smell was responsible for at least two-thirds of gastronomic enjoyment. In an essay [...]