The May/June issue of DRAFT magazine has hit newsstands, though none I’ve seen. So now you can read the rest of the story from when I reported on beer in Italy back in October and December. Since I haven’t seen the print edition I don’t know what photos appeared with my words. Perhaps the one [...]

OK, it’s not the French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley ($240 tasting menu, hard-to-get reservations, $50 corkage fee if you bring your own wine), but French Laundry Café & Market in Fenton, Michigan, has announced it will pour only Michigan beers. In a press release, bartender Jon Foley says the restaurants’s nine handles will offer [...]

This is my contribution to The Session, today celebrating two years of beer bloggers (and now Twitter users) writing about the same topic on the first Friday of the month. Visit Musings Over a Pint for the roundup. To follow it “live” on Twitter head to that site and search for #thesession. Today the theme [...]

Given the sudden outbreak of tales about Italian beer (see below) and the reality I should save something interesting for a couple of print assignments I’m going to write a lot less here than I planned for Italian Beer Part II. Instead I’ll steal an idea from this wine blog, which reviews wines using a [...]

We’re far enough south in Italy right now that we’ve spotted the water buffalo responsible for Buffalo Mozarrella. I’ve learned that Italy grows 300 different kinds of chestnuts and that Italian brewers make at least 40 different chestnut beers. More later, but if you need to read more about Italian beer now, check out Evan [...]

This one seems pretty easy to me, so no hint. For those uncertain about what’s going on, check out the Where in the beer world? archive. For the first time, no reader knew where last week’s photo was taken. In Douglas, Alaska, of a building that could have been the first home of Alaskan Brewing. [...]

Not sure if the seagull adding a pastoral note to this photo taken at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia is the culprit, but yesterday we got dive bombed by a gull determined to eat some of our ice cream. First it swept over me (and missed), but it doubled back and nailed Daria’s cone as [...]

Beer bloggers have proved adept at breaking news of upcoming beer releases by tracking label approvals. Only thing is, that not all labels turn into beers. We’re still waiting for the Faust Dubbel from Anheuser-Busch. And perhaps we may also be waiting a while before we see the Kirkland beers from Costco. We stayed in [...]

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 [...]

Until robots take over our tasting world we’re left to consider how to communicate the aromas and flavors we experience with beer. A review of “Perfumes: The Guide” in the current New Yorker magazine makes that point. The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and [...]