Yesterday’s news, I guess, but I only saw this morning, courtesy of Twitter, that New Belgium is discontinuing Mothership Wit. (If you can’t see the image it says, “Based on declining sales, and making room in the portfolio for new beer, Mothership Wit is getting shelved.”) In contrast, Blue Moon Belgian White and Shock Top [...]

Nine hundred and five breweries closed between 2000 and 2010, an average of a little over 82 a year. The numbers for 2011 aren’t in yet, so I couldn’t include them. Closings ran higher in the front half of those years, but in even the best of them, other than 2010, a brewery closed at [...]

If you’d like to see what my head looks like on a platter, you might try to reconstruct1 the happenings on Twitter last week when I naively noted: “Sorry, but it seems strange to call an unconfirmed rumor one of the ‘Top 5 beer stories’” of the year’” along with this link. Because this was [...]

Quick. Name three brands that have driven national awareness of craft1 beer. Given that Boston Beer Co., Sierra Nevada Brewing and New Belgium Brewing emerged as the Craft Big Three credit must go to Samuel Adams Boston Lager, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and New Belgium Fat Tire. But these aren’t the brands leading growth for [...]

RIP, Beermapping Project Great American Beer Festival Fantasy Draught. Jonathan Surratt has come to his senses and let the crazy-to-administrate beast ride into the sunset after four fun-filled years. But a new game has arrived to fill the void, the FBAG 2011 Brewery Pick’em Contest. So put down that beer judging glass, Jay Brooks, and [...]

OK, it makes a nice headline: “8 beers Americans no longer drink.” Problem is the first example is Budweiser. Yes, sales shrunk 30 percent in five years, and that amounts to 7 million barrels (at 31 gallons a barrel) lost. But A-B InBev still sold 18 million barrels of Bud. So it’s not like nobody [...]

Sales of IPA (known as India Pale Ale in some parts, but quite often simply called I-P-A) in the United States surpassed those of Pale Ale for the first time this year, according Symphony IRI. The data is primarily for packaged goods sold in supermarkets, convenience stores and big box stores but there’s no reason [...]

It’s been several years since Russian River Brewing co-founder Vinnie Cilurzo introduced the notion of “Lupulin Shift” and, in fact, he was talking about graduating from very hoppy beers to still hoppier ones. I thought of this today as I was catching up on my reading, in this case an interview with Ken Grossman of [...]

The folks at Wikio sent me their latest beer blogging rankings to preview for you, so this seems like a good time to throw together a bunch of stuff about beer blogging and tweeting before getting back to beer and topics more aligned with the alleged mission here. First, Wikio.* I’ve included the previous month’s [...]

Some people will actually tell you they hate New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale. It’s complicated, and I really just want to pass along a few numbers, so I’ll simply says it seems silly to me, but it’s their energy. Fact is that as New Belgium drives deeper into the East Coast this year it [...]