Would you trust a philosopher with your beer? Is that in itself a philosophical question? To tell the truth, even though I was careful to bite off portions of the book in small chunks, after reading Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking I’m not exactly sure about either. I seem to have [...]

Once a good ol’ beer person, always a good ol’ beer person. Lucy Saunders can’t help herself. She’s a beer person, and that shows up on every page of The Best of American Beer & Food: Pairing & Cooking with Craft Beer. (Disclaimer: Lucy has been a friend of my wife and I for 15 [...]

What if the American beer clock had stopped in 1962? (It’s a silly notion, because there’s that time marches on thing always happening. But stick with me.) Anheuser-Busch was the largest brewing company in the country, but not by much (it commanded less than 10% of the market). Next were Jos. Schlitz Brewing, Falstaff Brewing, [...]

So would you call Beer & Food: An American History a cookbook or a history book? This question particularly matters to me because we own a few beer related books and I can waste a fair amount of time trying to figure out on which shelf I put whatever one I am looking for. And [...]

In A New Religion in Mecca: Memoir of a Renegade Brewery in St. Louis, among the many topics Tom Schlafly touches on are workingmen and the image of beer (maybe that’s just one topic). Schlafly, whose Saint Louis Brewery opened as a brewpub in 1991 and grew into a regional brewery, makes a fine point [...]

Depending on what you drink and where you eat you might have thought sommelier refers to a mythical character in a fantasy restaurant world. But there seems to be no way these days for a small-batch beer drinker to avoid the concept, and perhaps the physical reality, of a person – whatever you call him [...]

When Vinnie Cilurzo stepped to the helm at Blind Pig Brewing in Temecula, Calif., in 1994 he started out by brewing the first commercial Double (or Imperial) IPA anybody had ever heard of. “Our equipment was pretty antique and crude, so I wanted to start out with something that was big and, frankly, could cover [...]

More than 10 years ago Mark Dorber, the venerable publican from London, told perhaps 30 beer enthusiasts who had gathered for a seminar prior to the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago, “The god of beer . . . is not consistency.” Dorber might appreciate the new book Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer [...]