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 [...]

I have not so much made peace with “best” lists as run out of new ways to say why I don’t care for those that don’t provide sensible context. Thus when the latest lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate (in its print edition) arrived I sat silent. Sure, I was amused reading the conversations [...]

Shame on me for being sloppy and hats off to Chad for noticing. I overlooked the addition of the American-Style Brett Ale in the 2011 Brewers Association Style Guidelines. Geez, it was in the press release. That addition led to changes in the description of American-Style Sour Ale. I’m pulling Chad’s comment from the Bock [...]

The Brewers Association made a few changes to its style guidelines for 2011. The most talked about likely will be renaming the beer formerly known as American-Style India Black Ale, now calling it American-Style Black Ale. The press release also notes several beer style descriptions have been significantly updated. I thought you might be curious [...]

If you followed Ray Daniels’ tweets earlier today you know that a presentation by Symphony IRI to members of the Brewers Association confirmed that “craft beer” sales are kicking butt, that mainstream beer sales are in the dumps and that IPAs seem destined to rule the world. You also know that Blue Moon Belgian White [...]

Here’s what the beginning of brewery consolidation looks like. Last week I dug up a bunch of figures about the number of breweries and how much beer they made more than 100 years ago. Mike asked for a little perspective. So this chart starts in 1870 (the number of breweries peaked in 1873) and includes [...]

A couple of times recently I’ve read stories — or, yikes, tweets — that mentioned how many brewing companies remained in operation in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, then reported the current number of breweries. That’s not exactly apples to apples. Many brewing concerns operate multiple breweries, and the proper comparison would [...]

Southern Star Brewing in Texas basically doubled production from 2008 to 2009 and expects to do the same again this year, according to a story last week in the Houston Chronicle. Curiously, a the manager at a Houston bar says the founders are smart to grow the brewery “at a slow, deliberate pace.” One hundred [...]

In still another story about gloomy beer sales that focuses on the largest brewers BusinessWeek provides this eye-opening number: “One segment of the beer industry that has resisted the recession is craft breweries, increasingly popular for flavorful beers made in smaller batches. According to data from the Nielsen Co., craft or microbrew sales rose 12.4% [...]

This is my contribution to Session #36: Cask-conditioned ale that involves actual drinking of beer. Host Tom Cizauskas has the recap (plus plenty himself). I also wrote a little about cask ale in U.S. 15 or so years ago and posted an additional story (from 1997) in The Library. This seems like a good Valentine’s [...]