Author: Professor Good Ales

David Thomack looks up at the hop vines growing out from the plant out over strings at the Thomack home in Clarksville, Tenn., on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. Thomack uses the hops he grows in his garden in each of the beers he brews in his basement.

On the fridge he uses for his home-brews, a light stick of wood transformed into a tap signifies the lighter beer and a hockey puck from a Nashville Predators practice session accesses the dark beer at the Thomack home in Clarksville, Tenn., on Tuesday, April 27, 2021.

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“Good people drink good beer.”

If you spend long enough in craft beer circles, you will almost certainly hear this adage, cribbed from Hunter S. Thompson and repurposed as an industry motto. (As writer Dave Infante recently recounted, you might also hear that craft beer is “99% asshole-free.”) Here, both seem to suggest, is an industry full of fine folk, doing what they love and making beer—and maybe the world—better for it. What’s not to like about that?

The self-congratulatory sentiment these sayings express has pervaded craft beer for decades, alongside the industry’s understanding of itself as a morally upright underdog. Many make the parallel between David and Goliath and craft beer’s progenitors: Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the U.S. beer market was dominated by multinational breweries, and the handful of brewers imagining an alternative to mass-produced, one-dimensional beer was an almost-literal drop in the ocean. And yet those scrappy upstarts succeeded in fighting back, in imagining a brighter future for beer, and in changing the way we drink for the better.

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This article is by Greg Kitsock and originally appeared in the Novemeber/December 2006 issue of Zymurgy magazine.

In the Washington, D.C. area, every 17th spring belongs to the cicadas.

We’re not talking about your garden-variety annual cicadas whose chirruping can be heard on sultry July and August evenings. No, these cicadas belong to a species nicknamed Brood X. Most of their existence is spent underneath the earth, sucking the sap from tree roots. In the 17th year of their lives, they emerge in immense hordes—as many as a million insects per acre—and metamorphose into adults: inch-and-a-half long black bugs with red eyes and gold-laced veins in their wings.

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Mergers keep happening – this time between two Bend power houses. What to make of it? Pirates? Mummies? And Denny talks to Ryan Farrell, the director of the AHA and, well, the tables might get turned!

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BOONVILLE — By the late fall of 2019, Fal Allen had about enough as the brewmaster at Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Mendocino County since 2000.

He was no longer working full-time there since the Boonville brewery had fallen on hard times, under management that could not chart a new course after nine years of ownership.

Founded in 1987, the craft beer pioneer had become an afterthought in the marketplace with a massive drop in production. Plus, its beers were not a topic of conversation among beer geeks who craved the latest hoppy versions of the India pale ale style. Its bucolic taproom situated on the sunny west end of Anderson Valley off Highway 128 became less and less of a destination.

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PUBS AND THE SCOTTISH LITERARY TRADITION

Edinburgh’s classic pubs are legion, and most have a lyrical quality about them — hardly surprising given that Edinburgh was once an eminently literary city, home to the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the bard of the barleycorn himself, Robert Burns. Burns is widely known for his Auld Lang Syne. He’s also known to a narrower circle of beer enthusiasts as the composer of a variation of a popular ballad about the suffering, death, and resurrection of the famous cereal crop that provides the lifeblood for ale and whisky.*

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Good news and bad news, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is releasing a new lower alcohol seasonal with Summer Break Hazy IPA, but the classic beer ‘Summerfest’ lager has been discontinued. Hitting store shelves in mid-April, the national roll-out of the new session hazy IPA is targeted to deliver hoppy mango and passionfruit flavors, over a smooth malt note and very low 4.6% ABV. It will debut in draft, and 12oz cans in six-packs, 12-packs, and 24-packs.

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San Diego-based Ballast Point Brewing tried to make a statement three years ago when it opened its brewpub in the West Loop. The venue — with a rooftop deck offering scenic views of the skyline — was meant as a declaration that Ballast Point was ready to court Chicago beer drinkers on their competitive home turf, to give the California company more credence as a national brand. Now, three years later, the brewery — under new ownership— has announced that brewpub’s closure.

The shutter of the officially named Ballast Point Tasting Room and Kitchen.

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Profiled by Ken Carman

 To me, even more than beer, mead is about balance. This is not bad, compared with some, but the alcohol creates a bitter that is unacceptable. Understand: drinkable, I enjoyed, but not a mead that is a delight to the tongue. Perhaps the bitter is tannins, but don’t think so.
 I think the buckwheat honey was supposed to balance it out. It didn’t.
 Medium mouthfeel, not carbonated. Moderate sweet to the nose. High; not distinguishable as far as type, honey sense to the nose, or taste.. Flavor sweet (medium) honey, firm but not over bearing acidity,

 So moderately sweet, body seems medium due to buckwheat. But the alcohol just seems to pierce through it all. The acidity is fine: great in the balance. Once again it’s the alcohol that ruins the balance. The buckwheat honey is fine, just more body, more sweet (just a hint at best) and a yeast like KIV that provides complexity. This should balance out alcohol.
 Otheriwse an excellent quaff. The acidity, the tannins, everything is balanced well.

Score 3.5 on a scale of 1-5.