A troubling case in Iowa illustrates the power imbalance between owners and workers. Customers, though, have the final say.
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Duluth, Minnesota’s new breweries have been credited with helping spark a revival in this lovely town at the tip of Lake Superior. I discovered on a recent visit that this wasn’t the first time a brewery had helped the town get back on its feet.
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As the 31st Oregon Brewers Fest arrives this year, it is shadowed by an existential question. What is the role of the beer festival in a city with 75 breweries within a country that has 6,500? More pointedly, is the model of the beer fest itself obsolete?
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Dos Equis is planning to launch a Mexican-inflected pale ale in September. Mexican imports have been in a serious growth cycle for years, so this new beer allows us to test the market. Do people like anything that’s Mexican, or do they like lagers?
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In the final installment on my report about Guinness’s new $80 million Baltimore brewery, I look at the brewers and their approach in creating “American Guinness”—and how reproducing the way beer used to be made at St. James Gate might point one path to the future.
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The brewers who formed the vanguard of what would one day be called “craft brewing” did so as a way of returning beer to its traditional, no-additives roots. Let’s check in on where it is today.
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How many breweries are there out there, further than an hour and a half from a major population center, that have beer that would be buzz-worthy in a large city? My visit to Astoria, Oregon and Reach Break Brewing made me wonder how many others we’re missing.
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Friday marked the anniversary of the biggest deal in the history of beer—InBev’s purchase of Anheuser-Busch. But in terms of impact, a different acquisition caused a bigger earthquake.
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One of the best guide books on any subject, and even in its eighth edition and featuring a new co-writer, it hasn’t lost a step.
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Constellation Brands has purchased its third American craft brewery yesterday. The distance between the purchase of Four Corners and the initial acquisition of Ballast Point, however, illustrates just how much beer has changed in two and a half years.
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Historian and archaeologist Alexander Langlands has a new book called Cræft, the purpose of which is to reclaim the meaning of "craft" as it existed before it became a marketing slogan or an expensive item available at boutiques. How might this apply to beer?
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Oregon has perhaps the most robust local market for cider in the country. A large amount of the credit goes to Bushwhackers, the first ciderhouse in Portland, which closes tomorrow. A few words on how important the pub has been.
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The headwinds blowing at independents in terms of structural disadvantage, long hours, modest profits, and generational change make their long-term existences tenuous. So to those scrappy, determined, offbeat, and traditional independent breweries out there, I salute you.
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Peter Bouckaert is one of the most celebrated brewers in the world. He got his start at Rodenbach and then came to the US and New Belgium Brewing where he started the wild program. I interviewed him about that project in 2012; he has since gone on to found Purpose Brewing.
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Most breweries have jumped on the hazy IPA train, and many breweries offer several different versions. This means more mediocre hazies are flooding the market, diluting the trend. Will matters stabilize, or are hazy IPAs about to suffer a fall?
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