Craft Brews News

This has been a bit of a hobby horse of mine lately: what happens when the founding generation ages out and want to retire from brewing? They sell their baby. Case in point:The North Bay Business Journal broke the news today that the Anderson Valley Brewing Company, now in its 23rd year, was sold to HMB Holdings, LLC. A year ago I interviewed AVBC founder Ken Allen regarding family-owned breweries and he revealed he was already in discussions to unload his brewery. “The problem is that...

Ah, Saint Paddy's, the day we celebrate old traditions. Like the bad old days when beer was so colorless and insipid that people dyed it green. Yet now we can celebrate truly green beer. Off the top of my head, a few shout outs to:Full Sail, for using less water per gallon of beer produced than any other brewery;Roots for being Oregon's first organic brewery and sponsoring the Organic Beer Fest;New Belgium for pioneering the way on green design and recycled water;Lucky Lab and Fort George...

Raise a pint of Guinness, Smithwick's, Harp, Murphy's, or Beamish in honor of Lá 'le Pádraig aka St. Patty's Day. Here is Portland, we don't even need to dye the Willamette green thanks to all the gunk in that thing. Here's a few beers that we suggest might shape up your Irish holiday in a proper Pacific Northwest Irish-American craft brew spirit. Sláinte!

Which is more bitter, an export stout, a pale ale, or an English barleywine? We have ways of measuring certain constituents in beer, and these translate into calibrations. To assess bitterness, brewers measure how much of a hop's alpha acids are present in the beer and produce a standard measure of bitterness ("international bitterness unit," or IBU). But of course, where flavor is concerned IBUs are relative measurements; malt sweetness dulls the clean expression of bitterness. The bigger...