Well, I guess he first question is if you’d pay $200 for a bottle of beer. That’s because eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale are up for auction at eBay. The starting bid is $1,500 (none as I type), the “buy it now price” is $5,000 and the auction closes May 28. From the [...]

Nice work by Al at Hop Talk with tips for saving a bit when you buy beer. He starts from a post at the Personal Finance Advice which deals with beer the commodity, and turns it into a discussion about buying the beer we all drink. Might as well start at the top: 1. If [...]

My father considered it something of sport to browse through estate sales and see what other people were asking for their “junk” (his word). “I must be worth more than I realized,” he would tell me. “If I could get somebody to buy the junk.” I feel that way sometimes when I look at prices [...]

In this corner we have Stephen Beaumont, pointing out to us the affordable pleasures of beer. (Noted earlier in the day.) In this corner we have Mike Seate of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review telling us that Beer snobs forget the true meaning of beer. He writes about how expensive beer he finds beer in some Pittsburgh [...]

Interesting story in the Contra Costa mostly about small breweries in the San Francisco Bay Area. The headline: “Craft brewers hit bottleneck: Costs cap output, stifle growth for smaller businesses.” Kind of the other side of the feel-good stories craft beer has enjoyed of late. Although the sector still is growing by volume, the pace [...]

Here’s another prediction for 2007 I should have made: Vintage beers will command more attention. Item 1: Liquid Solutions, which sells beer through the mail and from its Oregon City store, plans to begin auctioning vintage beers next week (Jan. 19). First up are a bottle of Chimay Grand Reserver from 1994, a six-year vertical [...]

This really isn’t another beer & wine post, but we have to start with a little wine research. The Economist carried a report a while back pointing out that the relationship between the price of a bottle of wine and its taste is weak, according to two studies in the Journal of Wine Economics. In [...]

. . . and that’s OK. The Brew Blog reports that Miller’s “Take Back the High Life” campaign begins tonight. With the ads Miller is positioning Miller High Life as the best beer value. Miller High Life brand director Tom McLoughlin sees the campaign fitting in with a countertrend to the trading up movement. “We [...]

New York Magazine – high profile in a high impact market – has a story about beer. Before you begin celebrating with hopes another mainstream publication gets it read what Stephen Beaumont has to say at World of Beer. (The magazine piece is online, but you should read his commentary, then use the link he [...]

This story was first written as a sidebar for the one archived in The Library about why paying more for beer may benefit us all. Sidebars don’t work all that well in this format, so I’m turning it into a basic post (with a note it was written in the summer of 2005). The idea [...]