Category: Front Page

Written by Michael Agnew for starttribune.com

The selection of palate-pleasers for Minnesota craft-beer fans has grown a little bit larger. Three high-profile national breweries entered the state this spring and one new home-grown start-up has put beer on store shelves.

Stone Brewing Co. of San Diego crashed the state in March. Their highly hopped ales and cocky promotional copy have made them legendary among craft-beer aficionados. Fans in the Land of Lakes previously had to trek across the St. Croix for these palate-pushing brews. Now they are as close as a trip to the local beer store.

The label for Stone’s best-known beer, Arrogant Bastard, throws down an audacious challenge, proclaiming that the drinker may not be worthy of consuming the bottle’s contents. It boasts an aggressive bitterness that lingers long into the finish. Pine-resin hop flavors overlay a malt profile that features a complex mix of toast, bread and raisins, with touches of Tootsie-Roll-like chocolate. It’s a style-bending beer that would be great with a grilled steak.
Continue reading “Liquid Assets: Wide-Ranging Flavors of Beer”

Written by Ken Ellingwood for The Los Angeles Times, McClatchy-Tribune News Service and Clrvrland.com/The Plain Dealer

MEXICO CITY — It sounds like a movie where high jinks ensue: A teetotaling Mexican hotel worker travels to England, befriends a whisky-drinking Irishman and scrubs toilets in a pub while learning to brew killer beer.

Such is the odd path Jose Morales has taken since a sweltering day five years ago when he found himself wondering how to make a beverage he doesn’t even drink. The daydreaming has led Morales, then a hotel warehouse manager, to an unlikely new calling as a beer maker.

Morales, 36, is among a burst of Mexican brewers who are testing recipes and investing in imported equipment in hopes of finding the same formula for success that microbreweries north of the border have found.

Mostly self-taught, the Mexican brewers have launched an array of offerings, from Belgian-style wheat beers and imperial stouts to an ale aged in tequila barrels. They want to translate a hobby into commercial success in a country that is increasingly quick to embrace foreign trends, from smartphones to designer coffee.

Continue reading “Brewing Up a Craft Cerveza”

Welcome to (sign 400)

Millie 300 in front of brewhouse

Stairs 300(hazy pic)

Nice 400 size Interior upstairs shot

From the Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — The craft brewers plotted their revolution

in a bar evoking the era of Prohibition speakeasies.

Their goal felt equally subversive: nothing less than the transformation of Mexico’s beer-loving culture into one that thirsts not for the mild flavors of Corona or Dos Equis, but for the richness of stouts, the dark body of double malts and the bitterness of India pale ales.

The brewers said they were fighting for choice: “Por la Cerveza Libre,” or “For the Liberated Beer.”

“To choose what we consume based on our tastes, translates as free choice, a fundamental right of every person,” they wrote in a manifesto.

Even though Mexico is known worldwide for its beer, only two companies dominate the domestic market and determine what millions of people swig.

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Another success story in craft beer world!-PGA

Written by Jason Cato for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

If one good beer deserves another, there is good news on tap for East End Brewing Co. lovers.

The Homewood craft beer maker is close to purchasing a building in Larimer that will increase its space from 4,000 square feet to 17,000 square feet. The new location at 6580 Frankstown Ave. is less than a mile from the current Susquehanna Street location.

“Where we are now, we’re in such a tight box that it’s hard to see where the end of the rainbow is,” said founder and owner Scott Smith. “With more room, the sky’s the limit. … We’ll instantly be able to double our production capacity, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

The business started selling beer in December 2004 and now has two full-time employees, three part-time workers and a handful of volunteers. It has increased the amount of beer produced by 30 to 40 percent each year, Smith said.

Last year, East End Brewing Co. produced about 1,800 barrels of beer, Smith said. A barrel is 31 gallons.

“And right now, we’re turning away business through our distributors,” he said.

The 1,700 members of the craft brewing industry in the United States produced nearly 10 million barrels last year, according to the Colorado-based Brewers Association, a trade group for craft brewers.
Continue reading “East End Brewing Co. Eyes Larimer Expansion”

Written by Josh Noel for chicagotribune.com

On one of the most important days on the beer calendar, when fevered drinkers from across the U.S. travel to Munster, Ind., to buy one of the world’s rarest beers, the unthinkable happened.

Cradling a box of his newfound bounty, a man in jeans and a black jacket dropped a bottle of the day’s manna. The 22-ounce bottle of Dark Lord — a pitch black, high-alcohol stout made by Three Floyds Brewing for release this very day — shattered, its black frothy gold spreading across the asphalt and toward a sewer grate.

Hundreds of beer lovers saw it happen, some standing in a two-hour line to buy bottles of their own, others merely drinking and rejoicing in the office park surrounding the brewery. They were of a single mind.

“Boooooooooooooo!” the chorus shouted.

Sheepishly, silently, the man plucked the glass shards from the ground and moved on.

Then the thinkable happened.
Continue reading “Love of Beer Reigns at Dark Lord Day”

Posted for our west coast readers- Prof. Goodales

Jay R. Brooks for the Bay Area News Group and mercurynews.com

 

As the sunny California weather kicks into high gear, so too does festival season. Between the suds celebrations, brew fests and even a beer circus, there’s a craft beer festival nearly every weekend through the beginning of summer.

Here’s just a sampling:
Continue reading “Brooks on Beer: Festival Season”

“While this is a New York State story, the Professor is sure this is going on all over the country. Old story: big brewers attempt to limit, even put out of business, smaller brewers through distributors that often rely on those big brewers for their main bread and butter. Often by getting lawmakers to back them up with rules and regulations.”- The Professor

Small manufacturers push to revamp New York law that can lock them into deals with indifferent wholesalers.

After Brooklyn Brewery entered a contract with an upstate wholesaler to distribute its beer outside of the city, its upstate sales steadily increased for a few years. But the wholesaler began adding more craft breweries to its portfolio, and the Brooklyn company saw its sales slip, even as its wholesaler’s overall sales grew.

When the brewery tried to terminate its contract, the wholesaler sued under New York’s alcoholic beverage control law—which binds brewers to one distributor within a marketing region once an agreement is in place—Brooklyn Brewery shelled out more than $200,000 in legal fees and had to pay the wholesaler an undisclosed sum to get the divorce it wanted.

Brooklyn Brewery survived, but its president, Steve Hindy, said most small breweries in New York cannot afford the litigation required to dump a neglectful distributor.

“That kind of money would sink them,” he said.
Continue reading “Brewers, Distributors Battle Over Beer-Contract Bill”

Written by John W. Miller for the Wall Street Journal

The 2011 Anheuser Busch-InBev shareholders meeting on Tuesday was never going to generate news. “We’ll have a press conference but you won’t learn anything,” a spokeswoman said.

First-quarter results are due to be presented on May 4, so the company didn’t want to jump the gun, although the so-called “quiet period” before earnings is a cultural choice, not the law.

What the company did want to talk about was its new alcohol-free drink, the Hoegaarden 0.0. The Real Time Brussels team agreed to taste-test a six-pack, as it did for the Jupiler Force.
Continue reading “Anheuser’s New 0%-Alcohol Beer”

Written by John Holl for Craftbeer.com

Shortly after being diagnosed with celiac disease, a few regular customers of the Old Hat Brewery & Grill approached Brewer and Owner Tommy Fuller to ask for a favor. Having celiac meant they could no longer consume gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. As such, the beers they once enjoyed at Fuller’s Lawton, MI, brewery were now off limits. The favor they were asking was for Fuller to brew up a gluten-free beer.
Continue reading “Gluten-Free Doesn’t Mean Craft Beer-Free”