Andy Crouch offers a excellent warts-included report from SAVOR: An American Craft Beer and Food Experience, expressing concern about “the growing snobbery of beer” and using the occasion to post his “Does Beer Really Want To Become Like Wine?” column from Beer Advocate magazine.
I’m already on record with New Beer Rule #7 — “beer is […]

The job doesn’t look exactly like blogging, and you can be pretty sure that when Beck’s owner InBev suggests its digital columnist should be offbeat that means topics only broadly related to beer may be prominent, but here’s the press release and you can decide:
Greener pastures await avid writers! Beck’s, one of InBev’s Global brands […]

No imported beers for us in the next year and change.
Oh, we’ll drink Bavarian beer . . . when we are in Germany. And beers brewed in West Flanders . . . when we are in West Flanders. Beers from upstate New York? You guessed it.
We’ll be drinking local. That means the local water, beer […]

New Belgium Brewing has awarded a $20,000 grant to a Colorado State graduate student to further her research on growing organic hops in Colorado.
Odell Brewing — located in Fort Collins like New Belgium and CSU — has been supporting Ali Hamm’s work for several years.
Hamm’s plan is to figure out what kinds of hops grow […]

A few links to get you to Happy Hour.
- The first is to my own post about Flying Dog Kerberos, because it’s a tripel and those are the sorts of beers Brew Like a Monk is about. Flying Dog recently shipped bloggers a package with the new beer plus others in the Canis Major Series […]

I’m not going to tell you that Shiner Bock is my favorite beer or even that it is a bock. I think it deserves better than it gets at the ratings sites (2.6/5 at Rate Beer and C+ at Beer Advocate), but we don’t seek it out when eating smoked meat in Texas. Just as […]

Those are Michigan hops on the right.
How can I tell? It’s a trick. I shot the picture in 1995 when we were on our way to visit Kalamazoo Brewing, as it was known then, and talk with founder Larry Bell for a story Daria was writing for Brew magazine. We stopped at a roadside farm […]

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 […]