Professor Good Ales

Pennsylvania’s Voodoo Brewery has, since its inception, followed a relatively non-traditional path. Despite growing in recent years to become one of the East Coast’s most buzz-worthy breweries, garnering attention for Good Vibes, their West Coast-style IPA, an assortment of Hazy IPAs, and one of the country’s most well-regarded barrel-aging programs, at one point early in their 15-year history, the Meadville, PA-based brewery nearly faced bankruptcy.

However, since brothers Curt and Matteo Rachocki joined the organization as owner-operators in December 2011, they’ve sent the brewery down a path that bucked industry standards, and are now aligned to explode by employing a new twist on a familiar business model.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

I’m sure just about every one of us could do with a beercation right about now. It’s been a year like no other in recent memory. Virtual happy hours have largely replaced the comradery of the taproom, tavern, and beer garden. No Oktoberfest this year, no local brew fests either. And beer travel, a pastime that has grown in popularity with each passing year, has all but ceased.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. With the lightning-quick development of vaccines against Covid and their hopefully steady rollout, my optimistic bet is that we’ll be travelling again by summer or early autumn. And it just so happens to be the holiday season right now, which always lightens the mood.

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I’ve had this belief, for a long time, that it is just as possible to “know” a person from their social media posts, their work ethic, their stances on social and environmental and human rights issues, and their SENSE OF HUMOR and humility and decency, as it is to know someone we’ve met face-to-face. What we respond to, unless we’re hopelessly shallow, in those we choose to call friends, is their character, their intelligence, their humor, and their values. Maybe social media friendship is even more possible, since the first way involves a distilled version of their character, minus all the self-conscious glad-handing of most in-person interaction. In writing this, I’m testing that theory…but also saying something I really believe.

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In the comments to section of a Facebook page for my friend, Sue Kidd, former food reviewer for our local Tacoma News Tribune, she covered the closure of a Seattle brewery which opened a pub in a ritzy (well, ritzy for Tacoma, anyway) new shopping and retail center on the Commencement Bay waterfront. The center is called Point Ruston and at least aspires to be an upscale location with more in common with our neighboring Seattle than sweet ol’ blue-collar Tacoma. The brewery occupied a large retail space there which had previously been the pub for another out-of-town brewery. The new closure was significant. People noticed…and came to a Conclusion.

Hundreds of Tacomans started to call this space “cursed”.

There is nothing at all “cursed” about the location. As someone who has been actively involved in the beverage trade for 37 years, I saw what was happening with those breweries going into Point Ruston and told my wife I gave them both less than six months…and that is because of ambition exceeding their realities.

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The popular Goose Island Brewhouse in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood has permanently closed after two-and-a-half years of operation, the latest fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 10,500-square-foot brewpub announced the shuttering late Friday afternoon via its Facebook and Instagram accounts. Goose Island Beer Co. is based in Chicago, and has been owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev since 2011. The company wrote Covid-19 has had a “significant impact” on its Philadelphia business.

Goose Island Beer Co. opened its Philadelphia concept at 1002 Canal St. in spring 2018. The local brewhouse was well-trafficked by Philadelphians across the city, Fishtown residents and people attending shows at neighboring music venue Fillmore Philadelphia. The project includes indoor space as well as a large outdoor seating area.

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For the second time, the Pabst Brewing Company is leaving Milwaukee.

The brewer announced today that the Captain Pabst Pilot House, 1037 W. Juneau Ave., located in Milwaukee’s Brewery District – which occupies the original Pabst Brewery complex – will close for good in December.

The brewing system – which was making 4,000 barrels a year – located on the lower level will be moved to Pabst’s now-headquarters of San Antonio.

Pabst shuttered its brewery here in 1996 after 152 years.

The current iteration opened in spring 2017 in a former church building that was once part of the original Pabst Brewery.

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What we do NOT do – ANY of us – is taste every IPA made in the US. Nobody does. So when anyone says, “This is The Best IPA”, they’re just indulging themselves either in homerism or hyperbole. In truth, there is NO SUCH THING AS “BEST”. There is ONLY “best of what I have sampled”.

There are over 8,000 breweries working in the US, now. Most which make an IPA at all usually make more than one. Let’s just say that each one makes three. That 24,000 IPAs. No one has even come close to trying them all. And it follows that there will be some out there that you might like better than the Plinys and Enjoy Bys and the 90s.

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A half-century ago, Peoples Brewing became Wisconsin’s first Black-owned brewery.

We are still waiting for the second one.

Craig Crosby remembers being 7 or 8 years old when his father, Henry, joined a group of Black businessmen in purchasing Peoples Brewing in Oshkosh. It was the early 1970s, and Craig was young enough that the drive to the south side of Oshkosh seemed longer than it was. The brewery appeared to hulk in the distance.

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