beervana

Two recent news items point to a phenomenon that will reshape the beer industry over the next decade. Call it the reset, when the perceived value of breweries comes in line with their actual sales.

Tilray may not be the cuddly, half-baked owner 10 Barrel thought it was getting when the cannabis firm took ownership from Anheuser-Busch last year. Today we learned Tilray had fired 10 Barrel's entire, award-winning innovation brewing team.

Douglas Lager got a soft launch last fall, but an unexpected shortage of draft Rainier in Seattle offered a rare opportunity to expand this spring. I check in with this new project to create a domestic lager in the long lineage of the Northwest’s old breweries.

Did you know that there’s an American Oktoberfest, distinct from the kinds of beers you find at Munich’s famous fest? Did you further know that it’s a more characterful and interesting beer? Well, it is, and here’s why.

FH Steinbart, the 106-year-old Portland institution, has been sold. This should ensure that the nation’s oldest homebrew shop will carry on for years to come.

One of the great artifacts of brewing culture was saved from history’s dustbin when Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought Anchor recently. If you had Chobani money, which other important breweries would you save? Our researchers have investigated hte question and have a definitive list.

I was recently sipping a cask Bachelor Bitter at Deschutes Brewery and I started reflecting on its excellence and influence. I hope it becomes one of those grand old breweries future generations enjoy and celebrate. 

I am compiling a database of breweries in Oregon for a website that will launch soon. It needs to be up-to-date and comprehensive, which means I’ve been poring through websites and social media accounts to find out which breweries still exist. The result? A lot fewer than I expected.

No top ten breweries list this year. But I can’t leave you entirely in the lurch, so here’s Portland’s brewery of the year. As a fun factoid, it has never appeared on one of my top-ten lists, either. Who says beer isn’t exciting anymore?

A rivalry is developing in the world of fresh hop beer. Proponent of one team believe the best character comes from use on the cold side, others on the hot side. It's time to get to the bottom of the debate.

For hundreds of years, brewers have ranked hops based on their quality. This has led to a sense of nobility among a select class of landrace hops brewers prize the most. But are they noble because they’re old and tested, or because they taste and smell so good?

While I was in Europe, Carlsberg announced it would finally stop using the antiquate Burton Union system used to make Marston’s Pedigree in Burton, England. The news was sad, but it came far later than I ever expected. A eulogy for a technology that was once state of the art.

Did you ever wonder if the art on a beer can might have been generated by AI? Increasingly, the answer is likely to be yes. Let’s look examples from two breweries to see where this is all headed. 

On Monday night, Cascade Brewing announced it was closing, effective immediately. It was one of the most indelible of the golden-age sour breweries, and its beers were truly unlike any others on the market. A remembrance. 

Dating breweries, like counting them, is an act of interpretation. Once a brewery’s age passes into the centuries, interruptions are certain. Sometimes breweries take advantage of those gaps to push their founding date backward. So let’s take the most famous date of all, Weihenstephan and 1040 CE.

A team of Irish researchers just published a paper about their project to recreate a 16th-century Irish ale using period ingredients, equipment, and processes. Along the way, they surfaced quite a few things I didn’t know about beer made nearly 500 years ago.