Chestnuts are a big deal in Italy; a major crop, they find their way into dozens of recipes. Milled into flour and used something like wheat, they can be made into cakes. And, as Italian craft brewers soon discovered, beer.
Read More
How do you relate to twenty-five dollar six packs? If I were a brewery with a very hot brand, I'd be very keen to find out what the answer was before I started asking my most loyal fans to pony up six dollars for a can of my beer.
Read More
There are 91 regular beers at this year's Oregon Brewers Festival and another ninety-odd in the specialty tent. How on earth will you navigate this surfeit of choice? By listening to the Beervana Podcast, of course, in which Patrick and I--Certified Beer Authorities*--give you the short list of the beers you'll love.**
Read More
Thirty years is not a terribly long time, really. But in the life of beer, this interval marks a period of radical change. Tomorrow the Oregon Brewers Fest (OBF) will open its doors for the thirtieth time, and looking back allows us to see the distance we’ve come, and remember why the fest has always had a special place in Beervana.
Read More
There it is on the calendar, a holiday as sturdy and reliable as Thanksgiving or New Year's, and one as given to celebration--the Oregon Brewers Festival. This is the 30th running of the beers in Waterfront Park, and I offer a tradition now entering its second decade, the annual OBF by the numbers.
Read More
The American Homebrewers Association launched an interesting project yesterday. They selected one beer from one brewery in each state and did a Secrets of Master Brewers thing: a full recipe and formulation. Where possible, the AHA has tried to track down a classic beer.
Read More
Three descendants of famous corporate families decided the world needed another brewery. This is their powerful story.
Read More
That spirit animates the new building, which draws throngs of young pubgoers. Sound and light bounce off hard surfaces and ricochet around, creating a sense of vibrancy. The little nooks and pockets offer different types of seating for groups of varied sizes and purposes--there are even couches and coffee tables. Even in this enormous space, you can find places for more intimate groups.
Read More
The case in point is Portland Brewing, which became an unexpected focal point for how quickly breweries can collapse. The brewery still exists, but is a living tar pit containing the bones of two deceased breweries, and the struggling, trapped bodies of a couple more.
Read More
I was interested in two very basic questions: 1) Did breweries believe it was important for consumers to know about breweries' independence?, and 2) were they planning to use the seal? I canvassed a half dozen breweries of different sizes from different parts of the country and got responses from four--Ninkasi (OR) and Harpoon (MA), large craft breweries, Port City (VA), a medium-sized brewery, and Gigantic (OR), a small brewery.
Read More![The Role of Luck in Success [Plus a Podcast Update]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5876279bbebafb82a7c81c00/1499801489507-YP2H4D06LKSXFO7OS7JK/clovers.jpg)
We all know that hard work, careful planning, quality, and consistency are important antecedents to brewery success. But if you start looking at the biggest breweries, it's hard not to see the hand of fate intervening.
Read More
Twenty years is a very long time to wait on a brandy, so French farmers invented another way to preserve their apples by using young Calvados, typically just a year an a half old. They add it to freshly-pressed, unfermented juice, at a ratio of between two-to-one or three-to-one, creating a mixture of 15 to 18% alcohol.
Read More
Why don't more people write about bad beer? This is a question posed by Boak and Bailey in their excellent consideration of Michael Jackson over at BeerAdvocate. As they evaluated his work and legacy, they noted that his writing was nearly uniformly celebratory.
Read More
A couple of weeks ago, I received an unusual package from Widmer Brothers. It contained six beers (not unusual), including one from Widmer (also not unusual) and five from other breweries (highly unusual).
Read More
There were several cities that led the new-brewery renaissance in the 1980s--Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver-- but they all had a different flavor. One of the key features of Portland's quick adoption of good beer happened in the pubs. I don't think any city in America is more firmly rooted in the brewpub tradition than Portland.
Read More
An independently-owned brewery is no more likely to make a tasty pint than a multinational conglomerate. And yet there are differences. Big companies play in the shallow waters of the mass market, where oddity must be kept in check. The independents, who can afford to select their (niche) audiences, are keepers of the weird and wonderful.
Read More