The Washington Post reports a Japanese consortium hasy released a Health and Food Advice Robot that can distinguish among 30 kinds of wine, as well as various cheeses and breads, and “has the irritating capacity to warn its owner against poor eating habits.”
The expert taster sat silently in the brightly lighted room, surrounded by 53 […]

How much beer will those 10 tons of hops Boston Beer is selling to small breweries make?
Left to their own devices, these hops might provide proper bitterness, flavor and aroma for 40,000 barrels (31 gallons to a barrel) of craft beer. However most of the East Kent Goldings or Tettnang Tettnanger the brewer of Samuel […]

Maybe I should have called this blog Appellation Hops. Or at least created a separate category for Hops, rather than lumping it with Ingredients.
But on the heals of Sam Adams news about freeing up hops for smaller brewers the latest issue of Brew Your Own magazine arrived yesterday with the “Hop Survival Guide.”
It includes substitution […]

Jim Koch sent a big old hops valentine to smaller breweries on Thursday. Ten tons worth.
He told them that Boston Beer, brewer of the Samuel Adams beers, will sell 20,000 pounds of hops that otherwise would not be available to smaller breweries. The company will sell the hops at its cost, which is considerably less […]

Out of hops? Try scallops.
British brewer Shepherd Neame has used them to make Scallop Stout.
“There’s a hint of smokiness and a slight taste of the sea but no fishiness. I can find no scientific reason for why it works, but it does,” brewer Stewart Main said. The newspaper report states the 3.7% abv beer “is […]

Part of it is pure chance because several beer periodicals just hit the streets, but this seems to have been particularly dreary week for hops news.
The newest issue of All About Beer magazine devotes a chunk of its news section to the hops shortage. Every regional edition of the Brewing News family of “brewspapers” has […]

Those of us just now emerging from a Session #12-induced fog were a bit surprised to see that the topic has already by set for Session #13.
For those of you good a math, #13 means we are heading into the second year of The Session. As we used to say in the Midwest, What a […]

Now this is getting personal.
Stone XII will not be a hop bomb.
Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? It gets worse. Ballast Point has quit bottling Dorado, one of the style-defining Double (some say Imperial) IPAs. A beer that a beer brewing chemist once described this way: “‘Savage’ flavor but not taste. Hoppy. Hoppy. […]

Gee, I wish I’d received the press release before we were in Las Vegas and I went looking for a doppelbock to try for The Session rather than a few days ago.

For the second straight year, the Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas is pouring a draft beer that is truly special - even by the standards of […]

We should have seen this coming. The “hops crisis” has reached the point that hops are up for sale on eBay.
Forget the bottles of Stone Epic Vertical and Lost Abbey Angel’s Share. Now you can buy the pure stuff. Just rip open the package and stick your nose in (somewhat like the drawing on the […]