The Saint Louis Brewery Tap Room, the brewpub where Schlafly beers were first brewed, at this moment serves a beer called Optic Golden Ale. It was made with floor malted Optic barley grown in Scotland and Aramis and Strisselspalt hops from the Alsace region of France. Will The Oxford Companion to Beer provide further detail?1 … Read more
True? Not true? Has hard seltzer brought us to this? In his substack newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante reaches this conclusion: “[Flavored Malted Beverages] aren’t just changing drinking habits. They (will) also swing beer business’ collective center of gravity away from brewers (“all about the liquid”) and back towards marketers. Or, to put it another way: … Read more
Back when you could crack wise when discussing The Oxford Companion to Beer I casually mentioned that it would be nice to find the tasting notes written more than 400 years ago by Heinrich Knaust. His book — Fünff Bucher, von der Göttlichen und Edleen Gabe, der Philosphischen, hochtewren and wunderbaren Kunt Bier zu brawen, … Read more
You have any idea how many books Oxford University Press published in its “companion” series before it got around to beer? A lot. Heck, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is 640 pages. There’s The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television and The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the … Read more
Can you name the most influential (living1) beer writer in the world? I couldn’t even begin to try. But right now you could make an argument for Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver — given the attention being lavished on The Oxford Companion to Beer, the four-pound beer book that is a top seller at Amazon. … Read more