Author: Professor Good Ales

This may actually be short – and yes, I CAN hear you laughing! – because the whole subject just irritates me so badly that I want to transform my body into electrical impulses, flow through the internet, emerge on the other end, and just slap the shit out of all those people who seem so freakin’ determined to turn this into an Issue.

This business of craft beer and boutique wineries and artisan distilleries suddenly experiencing a bust on the order of the dot-com collapse is pure nonsense, promulgated by people who have little or no knowledge of economics and the average American consumer.

FACT: the dynamic that kept Anheuser-Busch atop the brewing world for generations was the simple act of kids coming of drinking age being raised to think that the precise definition of “beer” was one of a relative handful of adjunct Pilsners, all of which looked and tasted almost identical. If a child grows to his/her majority and sees nothing in their home’s fridge but BudMillerCoorsPabst…

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The total number of U.S. breweries reached an all-time high in 2015, according to a year-end review from the Brewers Association.

The professional beer industry in the United States has passed a milestone this year with 4,144 breweries, topping the historic high of 4,131 breweries in 1873. Since prohibition, the United States saw its lowest number of brewing companies in 1978, with just 50 brewing companies and 100 brewing facilities.

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My Thanksgiving weekend didn’t include a turkey, tree, or even a single Mariah Carey song, but it did include an afternoon of brewing beer—which I’d argue is just as holiday appropriate.

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On Sunday, after three days of baking pie, playing cards, and taking long, chilly walks, I coaxed my boyfriend away from a crossword puzzle to brew some beer with me. While it was already a little late to be starting the three-hour process—made even longer by an unexpectedly lengthy boil time, a leaky sanitizing solution, and a bodega-run for more ice—it ended up being one of the best things we did all weekend.

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Starbucks has done it. Taco Bell has done it. And now it’s the microbrewery’s turn. The 40ft Brewery in Dalston, London, opened earlier this year. Its name comes from the fact that it was constructed out of two, 20-foot-long shipping containers that sit atop an old car park.

“The spot has a very short rolling lease from the council due to being part of a greater redevelopment plan for the area,” co-founder Andreas Pettersson says. “So by using shipping containers, we can turn this derelict place into a place to brew and serve great beer. If or when we need to move we can pick up our brewery to a new plot of land, we own the brewery and the containers.”

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

To age, or not to age?

This temporal variation of a timeless existential question is one that’s being asked with growing frequency in the craft beer world.But even if cellaring beer has become an increasingly popular topic of conversation of late, it’s still relative terra incognita for the craft beer community writ large.

Beer and Time. To age, or not to age? You’d be forgiven for considering the question absurd, for we’ve been conditioned to think that old beer is bad beer. And in most cases, beer doesn’t fight a winning battle with time.

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When I started brewing about 3 years ago, I jumped right into all grain using 1 gallon kits then soon after bought a batch sparge setup with converted coolers for larger batches. I made many good beers, no doubt, but I found myself pining for a less complicated method, one that didn’t involve as much setup or clean-up but resulted in a finished product with similar quality. It wasn’t until a year or so later I learned about Brew In A Bag (BIAB) and, amid a run to win my homebrew club’s Homebrewer of the Year title, abruptly adopted it as my primary approach after buying a used e-BIAB system on a whim, sending me down a much simpler and less time consuming path.

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If you are familiar at all with the 2008 BJCP guidelines (AKA every competition for the past seven years) then you are mostly familiar with the major categories for the 2016 competition–with three differences:
1.American Pale Ale, American IPA, and Strong Stouts (Tropical, Foreign Extra, American, and Imperial) have all been split into separate categories to better distribute entries in highly impacted categories.
2.Specialty IPA is now a sub-category of IPA, so stop entering your Black/Brown/Red/White/Session IPAs in the Specialty Beer category! 🙂
3.Many of the new 2015 BJCP styles have been added to what are essentially the 2008 major categories, so go wild entering your Gose, Wheatwine, and Sahti (amongst others) as first-class styles.

Otherwise everything else should feel pretty familiar, just make sure you review the updated style guidelines; many of them have been significantly updated. For instance, English Pale Ales mention significantly less caramel character than previous years after the guideline committee admitted the older guidelines were based on old/oxidized imported examples (which increases perception of caramel).

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