Craft beer in North America has stalled. That much is plain to see. From the era of annual double-digit growth, which has lasted for an inordinately long period from craft’s naissance in the early 1980s until the late 2010s, the past few years have seen more-or-less stagnant sales, with the US seeing a 1% drop …
Continue reading “Lost in a haze: North American craft beer searches for mojo”
Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard A TECTONIC SHIFT At first blush, the Munich Baker-Brewer Dispute might look like a curious footnote in the annals of medieval history.[1] But it’s much more than that. Flaring up sporadically between 1481 and 1517, this inter-guild dispute is not only a colorful story, it …
Continue reading “THE MUNICH BAKER-BREWER DISPUTE: YEAST AND THE EMERGENCE OF LAGER”
Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard In between evenings of losing myself in my annual “big book” (Don Quixote this year), I’ve been reading Terry Theise’s What Makes Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime. Theise makes a compelling case that people who write about wine or who sell wine …
Continue reading “ACCOUNTING FOR MY TASTES IN BEER”
(Thanks to Deb Evans for the link.) New York is home to many great breweries, but there might be none that are more revered than Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown. Brewery Ommegang was established in 1997, which also makes it one of the state’s oldest breweries. Located on a 140-acre hop farm, they claim to have …
Continue reading “Brewery Ommegang: Cooperstown’s Destination for Beer Lovers”
you a letter…and in this letter, your friend said that he or she needed your help; would possibly suffer without it? What if that friend was facing a profound injustice. Would you stand up with them and say, “This Far and No Farther!†What if it were even simpler than that? What if they just had their roof damaged in a big windstorm and you wanted to help. Would you grab that hammer, climb the ladder, lend them a tarp, bring a dinner plate so they’d know you’re there for them?