Today marks the 15th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. Yet 2022 would only be his 80th year. What might he have written had he had this past decade and a half to document the ever-evolving world of beer?
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There’s a real danger that the constant chemical invention that makes beers taste more vivid is also changing the way we think about them. We know that a chemist can synthesize flavors with a magician’s skill, but the reason we once liked beer was because we admired how a brewer could make beer taste.
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I’m interested in whether “legend” is a final stage of brewery evolution, a beery transcendence that can’t be revoked once achieved. Can a brewery become a legend and then survive even while backsliding into something un-legendary?
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It’s the competition time of the year, when beer writers send their best work off to peers at the North American Guild of Beer Writers. I had to dig through the archives for the pieces I was most proud. Here they are.
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Gavin Lord, one-third of the ownership team that recently launched Living Haus, has a new side project. The news that the former pFriem head brewer is opening his own brewery is perhaps less interesting, however, than his journey getting there.
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Writers are, more than anything else, the deities of small worlds—they feel compelled to create these universes of imagination. The stabbing of Salman Rushdie illustrates just how real those imaginary worlds can become.
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For recent brewery openings highlight a trend that is increasingly common in brewing: new companies taking over the breweries of departing ones.
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Hop terroir is real, as a new paper from Oregon State University documents. But you don’t have to tell brewers that—they already know that hop selection is at least as important as variety, given the different expression state-to-state and even farm-to-farm.
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As a periodic reminder, regular beer people basically have no idea what the words on a beer label mean. (It’s one reason they grab the IPA.)
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Technology like the internet didn’t really change beer. The evolution we’ve seen in styles, processes, and ingredients looks totally normal by historic standards. But the way we interact with beer is radically different.
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