Category: Front Page

Seven years ago, I would have taken a Full Sail beer if one was handed to me but the name was not at all in the front of my mind. I had tasted everything and it was all enjoyable but none of it – except for that majestic barrel-aged Imperial Stout – moved my meter much at all.

Funny how times change.

Let’s just get this out there: Full Sail Brewing, of Hood River, Oregon IS…KILLIN’…IT.

And they’re not just doing it once in a while. They send me a box of beers to review and I have to bust out my aluminum yardstick to measure just exactly how far my jaw drops with each beer. Lots of people here in the PNW felt like I did and many of them still do. They THINK they’ve seen and tasted it all from Full Sail and, in fact, I get emails from saying things like, “Full Sail? REALLY? You havin’ a slow month or what?” That used to irritate me…

Now, I just feel sorry for them.

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AB has sunk its tentacles into yet another property designed to do absolutely NOTHING but gain them cred that they cannot earn for themselves and which they will now use to weaked and erode the solidarity and spirit of the American Indie Brewing community.

I posted this comment on Joe Tucker’s own post – the founder and owner of the seminal beer rating website, RateBeer.com – so I’m not going behind his back. This is what I wrote on the partnering of RateBeer with a division of Anheuser Busch…and this was me showing every bit of the restraint that I have in me…

“Joe, let me blunt, here: There is NO POSSIBLE WAY that you’re going to be able to rationalize this out and make it palatable for MOST of your users. You have just struck a deal with the Devil and NO amount of slick explanation is going to invalidate or blunt the simple FACT that you are now beholden to the very company that is making the most concerted effort – in fact, pretty much the ONLY concerted effort – to hamstring or destroy altogether this culture that has spawned your own personal success, that of the 5000 small, independent breweries that make up the Indie/Craft community, and the happiness and enjoyment we all have lived out for the past 25 years, in watching our beer horizons open wide and carry us up and out of the century+ morass of sameness and forced homogeneity of beer.”

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LITTLE FALLS, NY — Today a set of huge beer fermentation tanks destined for the Genesee Brewery in Rochester will float down the Erie Canal past a factory in Little Falls.

They will pass just 100 feet or so in front of a plant owned by Feldmeier Equipment, a Syracuse-based company that makes stainless tanks similar to those heading to the brewery in Rochester.

But the 12 big beer tanks on the canal weren’t made by Feldmeier, or even by an American company. They were made by a company called the Lehui Group in China and shipped 6,000 miles, ending with a 225-mile journey along the canal (they’re too big to move by truck).

 

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When Cold Spring Brewing retired Gluek Beer in 2010, after decades of the brew passing through different ownership hands and struggling to survive, the company had lost hope for the historic label.

“They told me ‘Nobody cares about Gluek Beer except you,’ ” Linda Rae Holcomb said. “That really fueled me.”

So Holcomb, whose family connection to the legendary lager dates back to prohibition, took matters into her own hands. In 2015, she obtained the trademark and copyrights for the 160-year-old beer. Then she found a German chemist to rewrite the recipe and enlisted a Denver brewing company to handle production.

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YES, by God, I’m talkin’ Peer Pressure. Make 10 Barrel San Diego – I’m sorry, make that “Anheuser Busch San Diego” – the sole province of the Clueless and the Sleazy.

As a continuation of what I wrote in the aftermath of Anheuser Busch/InBev’s purchase of North Carolina brewery, Wicker Weed, about AB’s strategy of buying themselves a presence in America’s largest Indie Beer markets, it seemed like a good idea to also point out Phase Two of AB’s shoddy little master plan to either destroy Indie Beer or control it…and, make no mistake about it, that is exactly what’s going on.

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Intense juicy and resinous hop flavor and aroma, less astringent vegetal flavors while using half the amount of hop material–I’m interested! In this article, I look at some of the research surrounding hops, proteins, and clarity and how those might apply to using a new product called lupulin powder. I brew an experimental side-by-side Mosaic pellet to Mosaic lupulin powder beer and reach out to two breweries who have been included in the testing stages of LupuLN2 to get their opinions and results.

YCH Hops was nice enough to send me samples of their Mosaic lupulin powder product called LupuLN2, which they describe as being a purified lupulin powder containing most of the resin compounds and aromatic oils derived directly from whole hop flowers. They create LupuLN2 with a proprietary cryogenic separation process that preserves the aromatic hop components and removes most of the vegetal leafy material.

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We have all read the caveats offered by those who sold Wicked Weed to InBev. Here’s another perspective-PGA

Dear Rick, Ryan, Luke and Walt,

Let me start by saying I loved working for you. For four years I looked up to your business acumen and craft beer concepts. I was proud to wear, serve and represent Wicked Weed. I enjoyed going to work for a man who knew my name and a company that seemed to echo my personal values and those of Asheville.

How quickly it all changed. I left in December citing an increasingly corporate atmosphere and a declining quality of food. The company I signed on to work for would not have tried to marginalize my health coverage for its bottom line. Ultimately this is why I left.

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Let’s be real, for a moment…

Mexican lagers, in general, are crap beers. I hear people, fresh back from their trip to Cabo or Puerto Vallarta or Cozumel or one of the less-famous Mexican resort towns, seriously comparing the relative virtues of Modelo vs. Corona vs. Indio vs. Victoria vs. Pacifico and it just…makes me tired. I remember similar conversations I sat through, patiently, years ago in Greensboro, before there were Indie breweries, when friends of mine were debating Bud and Bud Light, Miller vs. Coors, Pabst and Keystone. I rarely said anything but I can vividly remember thinking, “This is like comparing Tap Waters of Many Places”, because whatever differences actually were present in those beers were usually the result of the person’s memories that attach to them, rather than anything significant in the bottle.

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I’m just gonna put this here and you can call it whatever species of hyperbole you want but I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t ready to own it…

Larry Sidor may just be the best brewer in the United States.  And I suspect he could probably whup Europe’s ass, too, if he wanted.

I hear the muttering already: “Well, this Fool person is obviously an idiot! Better than Vinnie Cilurzo? Tomme Arthur? Sam Calagione? Wayne Wambles? Anthony Bourdain!?!”

(Oh, sorry…that last one isn’t a brewer, although, with all the declarative popping off about beer that he’s been doing for the past two years, you can understand how I’d get confused.)

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