CATEGORIES

Beer On Wheels

What arrives on three wheels, keeps your kegs cold, and pours fresh beer out of two taps on its side? The Coaster Beer Trike.

Aftermath Pale - Ale Black Market Brewing

The zombie apocalypse might be a product of contemporary culture, but for Randy Mosher, “red-sky dreams of The End at night” lingered for many years.

Strength in Numbers

Will Mergers Help Small Breweries Compete with Big Beer.

Far from the Field

Downtown Breweries Embrace Urban Farmhouse Beer.

Cast In Stone

Brewers Experiment with Equipment that Has Winemaking Origins.

The Dram Shop

As a creative writing major, former touring musician, and the son of two entrepreneurs, it was only a matter of time until Zach Millar started an interesting business of his own. After spending 11 years at Missoula’s Big Sky Brewing, first in the taproom, then as a distribution manager for the brewery’s 26-state wholesaler network, he decided to apply his skills to the only one of the three tiers he hadn’t dipped his toes into. The Dram Shop was born.

Lucy Session Sour - Indeed Brewing Company

While bars and beer gardens in Europe are typically child-friendly, in the US, many of these businesses remain for adults only. At Indeed, however, kids are welcome in the taproom, and the brewery sells soda and sparkling water in addition to ales and lagers. The only rule? Minors must be accompanied by a parent or guardian after 8 p.m.

Tiffany Fixter & Tanner Schneller - Founder and Head Brewer, Brewability Lab

Tiffany Fixter, a special education teacher with a master’s degree from the University of Kansas in autism spectrum disorders, moved to Denver to run a day program for adults with special needs.

Feral Ones

The Unlikely Origins of Firestone Walker’s Barrelworks.

Brewing For Beasts

Beer Companies Raise Money for Conservation Organizations.

Pat Fahey

The Personal Trainer.

a hazy shade of winter

it’s true—love is in the air, spring is springing, and flowers are (almost) ready to bloom.

ginned up flavor

old tom inspires a new generation of brewers.

the eagle flies again

like many innovations in this column, this month’s feature started with an email. but unlike any other, what followed was a yearlong correspondence providing insight into the exciting yet frustrating process of bringing a product from concept to reality.

nowhere to go but up

the dreaded craft beer bubble. there is perhaps no greater bogeyman in the world of craft brewing, and no greater straw man in debates over its future. derided early on as a fluke, a blip, a passing trend, craft brewers slowly, purposefully propelled themselves forward, even if they didn’t always know where they were going.

Drinking Undercover

It all has an air of film noir: You enter the brewery tasting room, order a beer, and settle in. Inconspicuously, you note everything that’s going on around you: how the beer is poured, how the glassware is handled, how you and others are treated by the staff.

Tree Beer Brewing With Wafer Ash

Throughout brewing history, fermented beverages have used native ingredients. Plentiful and readily available, honey, dates, corn, as well as various herbs and spices often appeared in the recipes of historic or ancient beers. In much of Northern Europe, grog, Gruit, mead, and Braggot were commonplace before the German Reinheitsgebot, or purity law, of 1516 was instituted specifying that beer should contain nothing more than barley, yeast, hops, and water. 

Lord Of The Barflies

Beechwood-aged Bourbon County Stout. Goose Island Light. A Shocktop-Honker’s Ale mash-up.

Morgan Alexander Founder And Brewmaster, Tacoma Brewing Company

Tacoma Brewing Company was born as a side project out of a Tacoma, Wash., coffee shop, where owner Morgan Alexander sold his ales alongside his coffee. After 5 years of running the brewery like a commercialized homebrew venture and sweating out 10-gallon batches, Alexander moved into a new, larger space in May 2017. From the city’s historic Brewery District, he now has the fermentation capacity to satisfy demand for his bold, flavorful IPAs, and the elbow room to brew more of his sought-after Stouts and barrel-aged ales. “It’s definitely a labor of love,” says Alexander. “I like a good challenge. I’m stubborn. I don’t like giving up. For me, this has been all about the journey, and the people you meet along the way.”

Living Beer Styles And The Death Of William Younger's XXP

Coming across a beer I once drank in the records of a brewing archive sends a frisson down my spine, almost as strong as the first time I heard Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” on Top of the Pops. XXP is one of those rare beers.

Not (Just) For Tourists

Patagonia’s Beer Boom.

ODD13 Brewing

Every good comic book character needs an origin story, and the one for our hero, Codename: Superfan, begins a few years back, not in Gotham but in Portland, Maine.

Wort's Weird Journey

Following Beer’s Sometimes Unpredictable Path From Grain to Glass.

Laura Boada

Founder & brewmaster, Zambo Creek Microcervecería.

A Festive Shift

Why Beer Events Are Moving Beyond the One-Size-Fits-All Model.

Hazy Days And Brighter Futures

Craft brewing once defined itself by wide-ranging innovation. Brewers pushed past previously defined boundaries to explore the outer edges of what constituted beer. They based some ideas on long abandoned brewing traditions, conceiving others out of sheer boredom or pure devilish curiosity. The age of extreme was a wild one, where anything could (and did) happen. It was fun, brutish, and, thankfully, a stepping stone on the path to greater beer knowledge.

Albany, New York

America’s Forgotten Beer City.

A Theory of Evolution

It’s been a year of intrigue, plot twists and turns no one could plausibly claim to have seen coming. The big guys continued their steady shopping adventures, scoring many flashy new outfits while quietly lamenting craft-on-craft deals, like one Tampa-based looker that went to a peer. Multimillion dollar deals begat billion dollar deals, while a half-dozen or more transactions constantly swirl in the rumor mill.

Reuben's Brews

We’ve all heard the old adage about teaching a man to fish.With a slight twist, it often rings true in the beer industry,too: Buy a man a beer and he’ll drink for an hour, but give him a homebrew kit and he’ll quit his day job and open a brewery. Something like that.

Big In Japan

Stouts in the Land of the Rising Sun.