Category: Front Page

NOTE: Blackberry Farms, apparently, comes from a GEORGIA brewery, not TN.-PGA

There are now over 3,000 breweries in the U.S., which is amazing, considering there were about 44 just thirty years ago (and 1,700 in the middle of 2011). But consider this: there are 990,000 restaurants, a $680B industry. So when icons of the food world pay attention to the brewery scene, it’s real perspective. Some of very best food industry players are working towards lofty ideals, too. As Good Food Awards founder Sarah Weiner announced to the latest winners (at a bash attended by the likes of guest judges Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, and Mark Bittman), “wed to a vision of a better, more delicious world, all of you have chosen to be creators. Beyond the not trifling feat of making something utterly delicious, what you do and the way you do it creates tighter, stronger, more just societies.” And who can compete for a GFA? Makers of great beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, confections, pickles, preserves, spirits,and even cooking oils and honey—which pass the GFA’s sustainability and social responsibility criteria.

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Albany

New York state’s frothy craft beer market could go flat in the next 10 years if it can’t find a better way to grow malt barley.

Along with water and hops, malted barley is one of the key ingredients used to make beer, and it’s also a key ingredient in making bourbon.

But farmers in the Capital Region and across New York state are finding it difficult to make money on malt barley, which can be easily ruined by moisture, mold and severe weather.

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This shit is getting out of hand. Lagunitas is so paranoid that the words IPA on some packaging are going to cut into their sales of their IPA. How about craft breweries focus on making great beer instead of focusing on frivolous lawsuits against their brethren.

Laguintas does NOT own the words IPA.

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Bad news for small breweries…
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida liquor stores and beer distributors are challenging the way the state issues licenses allowing craft breweries to sell their products in tasting rooms, a move that brewers say could put dozens of breweries out of business or, at the very least, halt rapid growth in the industry.

The Florida Retail Federation is suing the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and the associations that represent Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors distributors have asked to intervene in support of the suit. Separately, the Florida Independent Spirits Association filed a challenge with the agency. The association includes ABC Fine Wine & Spirits chain, which is the state’s largest liquor store chain.

The groups said they aren’t trying to shut down the brewery tasting rooms, but rather to clarify the law that allows the brewers to serve draft beer to drink on site and cans and bottles to take home.

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Perhaps one of our writers can visit and do an interview in the future?– The Professor

ASHEVILLE – Executives of a California biotech company that makes yeast for alcoholic drinks plan to open a 26,000-square-foot combination laboratory and tasting room on South Charlotte Street.

The San Diego-based White Labs will hire 65 people and invest $8.1 million in the facility during the next five years, Chris White, the company’s founder, president and CEO, said Thursday.

“We’re excited. We hope to add to Asheville’s community of craft (beer) brewing,” White said.

The Asheville Brewers Alliance boasts 36 member organizations.

Wages for White Labs jobs will range from about $15 an hour for shipping and tasting-room positions to roughly $60,000 a year for microbiologists, White said.

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For reasons known only to God and the little man in Nebraska who runs the internet, a post from 2013, from one of my favorite general interest websites, Slate.com, suddenly rose from the dead and dragged its putrid corpse back into wide readership. The post  –  entitled “Against Hoppy Beer: The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews.” (and which seems to have another sub-head, contained in the link: hoppy beer is awful or at least its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation“) was written by a woman named Adrienne So, a young writer from Portland, Oregon, who appears to be about 30-something and whose Slate oeuvre consists of two articles on beer, out of maybe 20 total. She writes about a wide range of subjects and, as her resume says, “pitches” articles to a list of editors, which basically means that, when she gets something to say, she uses it as a way to get assignments. And, of course, the way that the publications gauge the effectiveness of a writer is to count the number of clicks and/or page hits that the post generates.

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Driving around Iceland in winter, you wonder how anyone could have settled such a barren* island before the invention of greenhouses and electricity and reliable international trade. I knew the sun-deprived December landscape would be misleadingly gloomy during my brief visit — they get a concentrated summer full of sun, after all — but Iceland sure doesn’t look like a place conducive to salads and fruit smoothies. (*Fun fact: you wouldn’t know it now, but the island used to be covered in trees. Humans just broke them all, as we do. Currently, however, Iceland is making up for tree genocide by planting more per person than any other country). Clearly, the diet of such a place was always going to consist largely of meat, fish especially. But even off the snowy glaciers and volcanic highlands, the extreme conditions around the island are gonna make fishing excursions in the dark of winter fairly treacherous. Like any culture around the world — those in equally inhospitable climates and those not — early Icelanders developed methods for preserving precious food through hard times. And mostly, that means fermentation.

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Written by Franz Hofer for Tempest in a Tankard

A belated Happy New Year to all ye faithful Tempest readers! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season filled with plenty of good cheer.

It’s been a few weeks now, but I’m back at it after my Kentucky adventures tracking the shy and retiring Pappy and the increasingly elusive Weller. For this, my first post of 2015, I’m going to share some tips that have helped me become a better drinker over the years. No, not the “Dude! I just slammed ten tequilas and I’m just getting started” kind of drinker, but a more informed and engaged beer enthusiast.

Tasting beer, wine, saké, and spirits is one of life’s more enjoyable rituals, but it’s also an aptitude you can hone with a bit of practice. True, some people have a keener sense of smell than others, and some people have a more refined palate. But despair not! A modicum of attention to what you’re drinking and how you’re drinking it cannot help but enhance your enjoyment and appreciation of what’s in your glass.

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Columbia? Taken. Mississippi? Taken. Sacramento? El Niño? Marlin? Grizzly? Sorry, they’re all taken.

Virtually every large city, notable landscape feature, creature and weather pattern of North America — as well as myriad other words, concepts and images — has been snapped up and trademarked as the name of either a brewery or a beer. For newcomers to the increasingly crowded industry of more than 3,000 breweries, finding names for beers, or even themselves, is increasingly hard to do without risking a legal fight.

Candace Moon, aka The Craft Beer Attorney, is a San Diego lawyer who specializes in helping brewers trademark ideas and also settle disputes. Moon tells The Salt she has never seen a brewery intentionally infringe upon another’s trademarked name, image or font style. Yet, with tens of thousands of brands in the American beer market, it happens all the time.

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When Widmer Brothers and Deschutes first started brewing in the mid- to late-1980s, craft beer didn’t exist, never mind a community built around it.

The term “craft beer” didn’t show up until Vince Cottone put it in his book “Good Beer Guide: Breweries and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest” in 1986. That was about two years after Kurt and Rob Widmer began setting up their Portland, Ore., brewery. Even when Gary Fish opened Deschutes Brewing Co. as a brewpub in Bend, Ore., in 1988, what is now known as craft beer was still being referred to as “specialty beer” or “microbrew.”

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