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 […]

Continuing last week’s discourse about barrel-aged beers the thought occurred to me I hadn’t bothered to mention why we even care. It’s not the the story behind any of these beers that matters first, but what’s in the glass. Some you would call spectacular, but there’s good reason to appreciate beers that gain extra complexity, […]

Stephen Beaumont and Jon Abernathy have added their voices to the chorus singing the praises of barrel-aged beers.
Let’s hope everybody is right and more barrel-aged beers are on the way. Right now I’d settle for larger production runs of what’s available.
After writing a story about blending for Imbibe magazine and one about barrel-aging in the […]

Not sure what your head is ready for this Monday morning, but we’ll start with the heavy lifting and then move on to good fodder for the around the water cooler. (Does anybody still hang out around water coolers or do they just use IM?)
- Don Russell writes about the developing battle over Frankenbeer in […]

I’ve already ragged on Firestone Walker for the Plane Jane names attached to spectacular anniversary beers. So to be constructive I should suggest a sexy alternative to “Firestone 11,” the beer they’ll be lining up to buy today at the Firestone Walker taproom in Paso Robles, Calif.
With apologies to Dickens let’s call it a “Tale […]

Think homebrewing is difficult? Here’s a recipe for Cottage Beer:
“Good wheat bran 1 peck, water 10 gallons, hops 3 handfuls, molasses 2 quarts, yeast 2 tablespoonfuls; boil the bran and the hops in the water until both bran and hops sink to the bottom; then strain through a sieve, and when lukewarm put in the […]

Here’s a scary thought from Ralph Olson of Hopunion, one of craft brewers’ go-to hop purveyors:
“They (large breweries around the world) want your hops now.”
Olson was talking on a “packed” tele-conference call this week, along with Ian Ward of Brewers Supply Group, updating members of the Brewers Association on the status of the 2007 hops […]

Did I ever mention that my father was a professor of agricultural economics and wrote a textbook called The Economics of Futures Trading? I’m not saying that much of his brilliance rubbed off on me, but I grew up in an Illinois household where commodities were discussed almost every day. He always knew a range […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words then 27 photos (at flickr) might be worth a million.
The Interstellar Galactic Brewery team carved one pumpkin to create a mash tun, then fermented in another.
What could be cooler? A three-tier pumpkin system, I guess. And maybe one in which the lid didn’t collapse into the beer […]

What happens when you use about twice the malt and as many as five times the hops of a mass-market brew, like Budweiser or Miller High Life and commodity prices go up?
The Wall Street Journal joins the conversation about looming higher prices for craft beer that’s been going on in multiple beer blogs the past […]