With slowly creeping hop levels and increasingly complex degrees of barrel aging, the very definition of beer has evolved if not mutated into some improbable beast of flavor and fancy in recent years. But this era of spiraling expressionism has led to the rather unfortunate development of a new, particularly pernicious kind of beer snobbery. [...]
With many brewers, bar owners, and writers just settling in from a long week at the annual Craft Brewers Conference in San Francisco, the week was supposed to be relatively quiet. We of course now know that this past week was destined to be one of the craziest that craft beer has experienced in a [...]
Continue reading about A Brew Masters Clarification and the Crazy Beer Week That Was…
Now I have in the not-so-recent past been accused of being a Goose Island-apologist and even a touch sycophantic when it comes to my hometown brewer. And I have made clear my respect for Goose Island and its founding family, including John and Greg Hall. To their credit, the Hall’s have made no bones about [...]
Continue reading about Why the Anheuser Busch InBev – Goose Island Deal Is Good For Craft Beer…
America’s largest commercial breweries have long had a love-hate relationship with craft beer. Often run by families with long brewing pedigrees, the macro brewers took serious offense at suggestions that their beers-pictures of consistency and efficiency-were somehow inferior to those produced by the bands of ragtag, scraggly haired, tattooed wannabes. The big brewers didn’t view [...]
Continue reading about What Will The Big Brewers Do About Craft Beer?
The Brewers Association today released news that it had once again changed its definition of the term ‘craft brewer.’ The change relates to the association’s use of the word small to refer to its qualifying members. As the press release noted: In the BA’s craft brewer definition, the term “small” now refers to any independent [...]
Continue reading about Is It About Beer Or Beer Politics: The Brewers Association’s Baby Step…
Give and Take…