Month: February 2017

There are a whole lot of taxes behind the price of your six-pack of beer. But how much you pay depends largely on where you live, and how beer-friendly your state is in general.

Before you even purchase a pint, six-pack or case of beer, excise taxes are imposed on that beer on both the federal and state levels. In the untamed corners of state beer law, excise taxes range from a scant 2 cents per gallon in Wisconsin to $1.29 in Tennessee, more than double the federal levy.

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My 2017 resolution to write shorter posts is sitting at about fifty/fifty, pass/fail. So I’m going to climb back on the bike, here:

Jim Vorel is a beer writer from Atlanta; a guy who – despite what he probably thinks – I actually like but have frequently gone after like a dog on a hamburger for some of his apparently uninformed lists, many of which read as though he had simply scanned RateBeer and BeerAdvocate and then compiled them. He has also done several lists which I thought were dead-on. I know he has the capability of doing them well, so I go after him because I’m hoping he’ll devote the same care to all of them that he does to that occasional gem.

 

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The FedEx guy is my beer pimp. Unintentionally, of course, but in the past month or so, that guy has dropped off some seriously superior stuff on my narrow little front porch and, if he keeps this up, I see a fruit basket in his future.

The first was a couple of cans from a brewery about whom I’ve been crazy intrigued for several years now. Upslope Brewing, located in one of my favorite places on any map – Boulder, Colorado – has been on tap a couple of times when we’ve been in Denver, visiting our son. I first tasted their IPA and Brown at a bar in Denver’s Larimer Square, back in 2015, and was instantly a fan. They weren’t distributed in Seattle, though, and I struck out, back then, in finding anything in packages to take home. Those two stayed with me, though: the seamless, resiny, finely-malted, user-friendly character of the IPA and the malty, subtly spicy roundness of a truly fine Brown. So, when I opened the box to find two cans of their new Upslope Citra Pale Ale, I was instantly excited, both because of the brewery and my ongoing quest to find that ultimate Citra Pale or IPA that I can imagine but have not yet found.

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What’s one of the most common responses that we got?  People loving their beer too much!  Planning for expansions from the start is key… especially with how quickly the craft beer industry is growing!

Derek from 192 Brewing

I am still amazed at how fast we are growing, so I think that if I had seriously known how fast the growth was going to take place, I might have spent a little more time researching “next steps” in the growth process. I assumed I would be able to grow at a slow comfortable pace, but there is too much demand to let pass by, so the hours are much longer than expected to try our best to keep up with the next immediate needs of the business, and that tends to be the only focus for about 6 months out of the year. It can be a constant rat race to get the projects done just in time for them to be already behind production needs upon completion. This also causes a lot of stress on the team, even for those that also see the potential for the constant growth. A larger brewing system is a next step that looms over our heads at the moment, and will require a change of location for that operation.

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I’ve had to make a couple of exceptions to my iron-clad rule against reviewing any brewery that’s even obliquely affiliated with Anheuser Busch. It wasn’t prompted by any sort of softening of my stance about the heinous history of this avaricious pack of shit-weasels. They are still among the most amoral, vicious, and unprincipled thugs ever to occupy any business category in US history but I’m all for great independent breweries using them as they use so many, many people and situations and two breweries in particular have managed to sing on with AB and use their massive distribution system to their advantage, while otherwise telling the consultants and “efficiency experts” from the Brazil/Belgium mothership to go f**k themselves – politely, of course.

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