Let’s start with the license plate on the back of production manager John Mallett’s truck (above).
Then there’s the collection of plates at the entrance of the Eccentric Pub, which is where Larry Bell started what was then called Kalamazoo Brewing. They still brew “downtown” but most of production — which will surpass 100,000 barrels this […]

Beers from Alaskan Brewing taste like this:

And like this:

They taste like they are from Alaska, and once you’ve traveled the Alaskan Marine Highway from one port to another you’ll realize that more specifically Alaskan Brewing beers taste of Southeast Alaska.
Quite honestly I paused for a moment last week when Alaskan co-founder Geoff Larson said that […]

Don Russell has an excellent little interview with Boston Beer founder Jim Koch today.
As well as everything you could want to know about Samuel Adams Light he addresses the matter of rising beer prices. As always, Koch offers some great sound bites:
- “But you can’t reduce costs by taking ingredients out. People will forgive us […]

Our next local beer will be from Alaska. Good deal.
We’ve been seeing beer from Alaskan Brewing since we hit Idaho, but it wasn’t the local beer then. Instead we bought an Idaho Riesling (instead of Alaskan Amber) in a gas station — an idea that turned out to be about as good as we expected […]

Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see Terminal Gravity Brewing in Northeast Oregon is bursting at its micro-seems, but you aren’t required to look. The pleasure here is, well, right here.
Every seat inside the pub-restaurant was taken within half an hour after it opened Saturday, although that only amounted to about two score customers. When […]

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 […]

Hold your horses, Wired magazine. This headline, “Craft Brewers Reformulate Beer to Cope With Hop Shortage,” might leave the wrong impression.
Think Samuel Adams Boston Lager is being reformulated? Sierra Nevada Pale Ale? Coors Blue Moon White? New Belgium Fat Tire Ale? Deschutes Black Butte Porter? Bell’s Oberon? Etc. Etc. The beers that most people buy, […]

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 […]

Doesn’t look the message to wait until July of 1969 is going to be a problem . . .
The time has come to open the 1968 bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale.
Daria gave me this bottle for Christmas more than six years ago, and the immediate question was what to do with it. It’s not […]

Writing about beer certainly changed my relationship with beer, and made what might look like a simple question next to impossible to answer.
I got to thinking about this because for The Session #15 Boak and Bailey asked those of us in the beer blogosphere to answer this question: How did it all start for you? […]