Category: Front Page

Time for a history lesson: The India pale ale was invented in the 1870s as England’s means of providing beer to its citizens living abroad in India. It was too hot in India to brew beer, so heavily-hopped strong ales were made in Britain and aged aboard ships making the six-month journey.

It was not until the 1970s that beers with huge hop profiles became popular stateside. Anchor Brewing’s Liberty Ale and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale are considered the first modern American pale ales and their aggressive hop use place them at the forefront of the American IPA movement.

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Beer is arguably one of the most democratic drinks in the world. Yes, beer uber-nerds have their white whales to chase, but the rest of us can enjoy world class beers like St. Bernardus Abt 12, Ballast Point Sculpin, and Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout with a little patience and leg work. And not only are life-changing beers available coast to coast, they almost always run less than $20 per bottle. Hell, sometimes that’ll buy you a six-pack. So then what do you make of Boston Beer’s Sam Adams Utopias release that hits shelves (usually) every other year with a sticker price of $200 for a 24-ounce bottle?

 

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First, let’s stipulate that what you’re about to read comes from a very unapologetic Beer Snob. MAJOR beer snob. I’m not a snob about wine or Whiskey or Vodka or anything else I review and, even in beer, I’m a snob about ONE thing: cheaply made, cynically conceived, watery, insipid, mass-produced adjunct Pilsners like BudMillerCoorsPabst. That’s it. That and anything else made along those dumbed-down lines.

I’ve had people who took this to mean that I just don’t like Pilsners; some even extrapolated that to include all Lagers…which is crap. I adore a well-made Pilsner but, until the past eight or ten years, most Americans had never tasted a well-made Pils. My own fave is Pinkus Ur Pils but there is an ever-increasing number of American craft breweries that have taken to making Pilsners and the results have ranged from wretched to stunning – leaning strongly toward “stunning”

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The global giant that owns Budweiser wants to dominate the craft-beer market in China.

In late 2015, Chandler Jurinka realized someone was spying on his beer taps.

Jurinka and a partner own Slow Boat Brewery, a Beijing craft-beer maker that distributes its beers across a dozen cities in China and runs a new three-level brewpub in Beijing’s nightlife district. (Jurinka named the brewery after the 1940s Frank Loesser love song “On a Slow Boat to China.”) The business is driven in part by sales of kegs to restaurants and bars in China’s capital, where good beer isn’t as easy to find as it is in, say, Seattle or Kansas City.

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The Lucky Seven Selection

Blame Guinness for declaring St. Patrick’s Weekend. Not that I’m complaining. Stouts of all stripes are among my favourite beers, after all. Guinness has also given me an excuse to bundle my occasional Saturday Six-Pack Series together with the commemoration of a saint who drove snakes out of a country that has never seen a snake. We’ll leave that to naturalists and hagiographers to debate while we tuck into a few stout beers.

Stouts, though. Not exactly a clear-cut style. Case in point: the marked proliferation of sub-styles in the 2015 edition of the BJCP Style Guidelines compared with the 2008 edition –– proof positive that style categories are anything but static. And then we have all those legends worthy of St. Patrick, guaranteed to keep self-styled beer historians debating till the wee hours. Though I’m not (yet) what I’d call a historian of beer, I know enough about the shifting sands of beer styles to say that you’re not alone if you’ve ever confused a porter with a stout. And don’t even get started with Russian Stouts. Or do. Interesting stories of icy sea journeys and opulent courts abound, along with no shortage of confusion over nomenclature. For now, I’m content to let the legends be. If nothing else, the heated debates and sedulous myth-busting make for entertaining reading.

 

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Ah, the poor, sad Porter…

A little background: in England, truck drivers are called “porters” – and were even before there were trucks. They’re manly men, just like here, and – just like here – they don’t exactly scoff at a cold pint of something. But, in Britain, that “something” was usually a brawny Stout and often at lunchtime…which led to the too-frequent spectre of lorry (Brit for “truck”) drivers being peeled out of crumpled cabs, up against bridge supports, sometimes without a pulse. It was a problem even back when all the porters hauled their wares with horse and cart and Porters were born of necessity, somewhere in the 1722 to 1730 window, when a notable London brewer, Ralph Harwood, was experimenting with blending lots od beers that were lying about in his warehouse. Harwood came up with a lower-alcohol dark that he originally called “entire” or “entire butt” (butt was the old-timey term for “barrel”). and offered it to porters at a nearby produce wholesaler, who liked it so much that Harwood dubbed it “Porter”, in their honor. Drunken porters – believe it or not – was a serious problem and transport company owners, police departments, and Parliament all harrumphed around for years, issuing warnings and scolding drivers and generally being ineffectual…just like here. So when a viable alternative to Stout-driven road rage became available, most of England lapped it up immediately.

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This will be short and sweet because it’s very simple:

Garrett Marrero owns Maui Brewing Company.

Period, end of story.

He started Maui Brewing in 2005, after buying pioneering Hawaiian brewpub, Lahaina Fish & Game Brewery and Rotisserie. With partner, Melanie Oxley, Lahaina morphed into Maui Brewing, the success of which, spurred by some truly great beers, turned a local Maui brewpub into a modern state-of-the-art brewery, whose beers are now available in several states and even overseas.

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There are a whole lot of taxes behind the price of your six-pack of beer. But how much you pay depends largely on where you live, and how beer-friendly your state is in general.

Before you even purchase a pint, six-pack or case of beer, excise taxes are imposed on that beer on both the federal and state levels. In the untamed corners of state beer law, excise taxes range from a scant 2 cents per gallon in Wisconsin to $1.29 in Tennessee, more than double the federal levy.

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My 2017 resolution to write shorter posts is sitting at about fifty/fifty, pass/fail. So I’m going to climb back on the bike, here:

Jim Vorel is a beer writer from Atlanta; a guy who – despite what he probably thinks – I actually like but have frequently gone after like a dog on a hamburger for some of his apparently uninformed lists, many of which read as though he had simply scanned RateBeer and BeerAdvocate and then compiled them. He has also done several lists which I thought were dead-on. I know he has the capability of doing them well, so I go after him because I’m hoping he’ll devote the same care to all of them that he does to that occasional gem.

 

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