Welcome to my fool’s errand.
Last week in the responses to my “The business of beer” post I started a quick exchange with Alan McLeod. I made a reference to a Beer Advocate thread I didn’t have a link to at the time and Alan asked another question I started to answer off the top of [...]

Thank goodness for Google books. Otherwise if you wanted to read The theory and practice of brewing, from malted and unmalted corn, and from potatos it would cost you $602.75 plus shipping.
But you can read this argument for brewing with potatoes, apparently spelled “potatos” in 1829, for the price of your Internet connection. Author [...]

We’re almost done unpacking stuff we stuck away during our grand journey.
Yesterday I hauled out small beer items that decorate the tops of book shelves in the guest bedroom and office, including boxes of hops from the Prohibition era and before. In the 18 months the Glee Club box spent in hiding it became more [...]

I’m a sucker for a story that begins . . .
Roger was drinking barley wine that night.
Roger is a lawyer. His partner, Jim, is a former Nike executive whose great-great grandparents farmed hops in Norway.
They are starting a company called Indie Hops to supply Oregon-grown aroma hops to craft brewers.
The Willamette Valley’s rich alluvial [...]

Excuse this crabby little rant, but I’ve started reading The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer and the author’s repeat a misstatement I’ve come across several times in just the past week, writing Belgian brewers often use “candi sugar.”
No the don’t. They mostly use what we call plain old sugar.
Yes, there are [...]

The OregonLive headline tells you pretty much all you need to know: Glut of hops unlikely to lower beer prices. This follows a story in Washngton’s Tri-City Herald earlier in the month: Abundant hops harvest is bittersweet.
That’s agriculture or you. As I wrote in 2007 there’s nothing new about wild swings in the price of [...]

These days “Hop Culture in California” means bitter beers, beers with lots of hop flavors and aromas, and this time of year beers brewed with fresh hops. But in 1900 it was the title of Farmer’s Bulletin No. 115 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Just a couple of excerpts (for now):
In New York States [...]

Last week a customer returned a 12-pack of Boulevard Wheat Beer that’s nearly 19 years old to the brewery.
The Pitch, a Kansas City food blog, reported:
“My office is pretty close to Boulevard and they’re a real admirable company. I just thought they might be interested in having it,” says (Eric) Henry, co-owner of the City [...]

A company called Novozymes has introduced a new brewing enzyme “capable of working without malt and with barley as the only raw material.”
Does that sound like something you want in your beer?
Launched at Drinktec (in Germany) this week, Ondeo Pro is marketed as a tool to offer brewers freedom and flexibility than existing options. [...]

On July 9 Luke Nicholas put two casks of Armageddon IPA on a New Zealand ferry, sending them on a journey that would last six weeks, 126 trips back and forth across the Cook Strait.
Colin Mallon, manager of Wellington specialist beer bar The Malthouse, and Nicholas, owner and brewer of Epic Beer, hit upon the [...]