“Brauereisterben: The sad state of German beer culture” has been making the rounds since Slate posted it yesterday. Not exactly news to those who have been paying attention. But Slate doesn’t devote much bandwidth to beer, and doesn’t count among those paying attention. The word Brauereisterben, drawn for the term for Germany’s dying forests (Waldsterben), [...]

Rather than languishing as the 22nd comment on the previous post this question from Tom seems worth making a new post. There seems to be a conflation between intentionality and fault running through a good portion of the comments here. My question: if AB continually produces a beer with a particular flavor profile, with components [...]

Questions, questions, they abound today in the beer blogosphere. * Mike Sweeney at STL Hops asks, “Can a beer ever be life changing?” It sprang from a tweet about Pliney the Younger: “Great beer = yes! Life changing = no” Read the answers (comments). * Mark Dredge of Pencil an Spoon fame tries various beers [...]

Six of the top eight new “craft beer” brands in the United States in 2010 were IPAs of some sort (sometimes “imperial” or “double,” sorry Mr. B), according to Symphony IRI — which tracks beer sales in various channels. Curiously, although “American-Style India Pale” annually draws more entries than any other category at the Great [...]

ABSTRACT You may declare that a beer sucks because it is genuinely flawed. For instance, you spot the tail of a mouse in the bottle. You might say it sucks because you’ve had the beer before and it was much better then. That’s probably not the word I’d use, but I understand. You might yell [...]

I’ve already figured out I’m going to be behind what almost everybody else in the beer world is reading for all 2011, accepting that learning a hell of a lot about hops is a fair trade. Thus this three-week-old entry from Miss Manner just hit my radar. Dear Miss Manners: My boyfriend and I were [...]

“I am special, I am special! Please, God, please, don’t let me be normal!” — Louisa, from The Fantasticks Would you think me more special if I had tasted every particularly rare beer on the Rate Beer or Beer Advocate top howmanyever lists? Is your palate better than mine because you appreciate the subtleties of [...]

It was kind of fun the other day, so let’s give it another try. The goal, again, is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind. a) Three Floyd’s Alpha King b) Fuller’s [...]

The story Adam has at beernews.org that Belgian brewery Duvel will produce Brewery Ommegang beers — otherwise made in Cooperstown, New York — may seem familiar. Duvel briefly brewed Ommegang beers five years ago when demand outstripped capacity. Back then I took samples of Ommegang Abbey Ale brewed both in Belgium and New York to [...]

Fine post at DesJardin Brewing centered on Jason Oliver, Devil Backbone Brewing and the excellent lagers Oliver brews there. Oliver gets a chance speak at length about why decoction (during which some of the mash is removed, boiled and returned to the original mash, often two or three times) matters. Good stuff, but I do [...]