Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, which dates from medieval times, is a web of ancient cobbled streets teeming with trattorias, pizzerias and bars. A lively street scene and animated nightlife draw both locals and tourists to the west bank of the Tiber River for an evening of entertainment. In the heart of Trastevere, you’ll find Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà, the city’s most famous beer bar and the first to feature independent breweries exclusively.

Despite its understated exterior, the pub isn’t hard to locate. Make your way to the street named Via Benedetta. When you encounter a cluster of people drinking beer and socializing in front of a graffiti-strewn building with a decaying facade, you’ve arrived.

The entry is flanked by a collection of stickers from breweries around the world and is topped by a simple sign displaying the name Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà. The name translates loosely to “What did you come here for?” and is a soccer chant sung by the fanatic fans of Rome’s Lazio soccer team to taunt their opponents, especially during lopsided matches. In addition to being a first-rate beer bar, the pub is also a local’s soccer bar, and has been throughout its 16-year existence. Macchè, as it’s called locally, can take credit for introducing many a Lazio fan, and numerous other residents of Rome, to the joys of great beer.

There’s nothing fancy about the place. You enter into a tiny taproom with counter seating on one side and a small bar on the other. Together, the room seats 10 patrons. Behind the bar sits a row of a dozen copper-colored beer towers, each sporting a hand-written card with information about the beer being dispensed. A modest selection of bottled beers is on display in a refrigerated case mounted on the wall. During my visits, most of the bottles featured wild ales from Belgium and the United States. The ever-changing draft list is posted on a chalkboard on the opposite wall.

Beyond the bar area is a second compact space with table seating that might accommodate 30 people, assuming they’re not averse to close encounters of the beer kind. Televisions in each room broadcast soccer matches without sound while rock music plays in the background. The diminutive size of the two rooms is conducive to befriending fellow beer-lovers from around the world. The locals seem to prefer drinking on the street in front of the pub, which is quite acceptable in Rome.

There’s a downstairs room with a different vibe. Upholstered chairs and cubby-like spaces evoke a more lounge-like feel, suitable for quiet conversation. While the room was seldom used during my visits, it’s here that Lazio fans gather on game days to cheer on their beloved team, according to Macchè’s founder, Manuele Colonna, a Lazio supporter and passionate beer fan who opened the pub in 2001.

Colonna is a well-known figure within Italy’s tight-knit community of independent beer-makers. In addition to showcasing many small Italian breweries at Macchè, Colonna travels throughout Europe in search of beers to serve at the pub. When I ask Colonna how he selects beers, he barely mentions styles. Rather, he stresses the importance of a brewery’s philosophy and of a brewer’s heart and soul. “I like to recognize the brewer’s personality in the beer that I drink,” he explains.

The draft menu lists 15 beers and a cider. Italian breweries are well-represented. Beers from small German and Belgian breweries appear frequently. Styles cover a broad spectrum of German, Belgian, British and American ales and lagers. It’s likely that most patrons, even seasoned beer travelers, will be unfamiliar with many of the featured breweries. One exception is the well-known Cantillon Brewery, whose beers are often available on draft. Colonna has a close relationship with the owners of the revered Belgian Lambic producer.

Servers at Macchè are friendly to a fault and knowledgeable about the beers they serve.

“We like to tell our customers a story behind the beer they are drinking,” Colonna tells me over a glass of kellerbier procured from an obscure Franconian brewery. “That’s really important for us.”

The post On Location: Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in Rome first appeared on All About Beer.

The secret to getting a restaurant-quality sear on your scallops starts long before you heat the frying pan, and it’s an important step that will give your dish a professional level taste. The issue most home cooks have with getting that lovely crust on their scallops has nothing to do with their abilities: it’s the scallops themselves. Most scallops are soaked in a phosphate solution that allows them to stay fresher longer. This same solution prevents the little sea creatures from searing properly and instead lends a slightly “soapy” taste once cooked.

The answer: either buy freshly harvested scallops that never see the need for this freshness extending liquid (hard to do in the vast majority of the world), or give them a good soak in a nice brine. A brine will help “wash” the solution out of the scallops, letting you avoid the soapy taste, and giving you a nice crust. It’s the easiest way to impress your dinner guests with the best home-cooked scallops they’ve ever had. Yield: 4 servings.

For The Scallops

12 ounces pale ale (pilsner, wheat beer or pale lager will also work)
2 tablespoons salt
1 cup water
1/4 cup lemon juice
12-16 large or jumbo scallops
2 tablespoons butter

For The Asparagus And Romesco

2/3 cup sliced almonds
1 large bell pepper, roasted (from a jar is fine)
1 cloves garlic, smashed
1 can (6 ounces) tomato puree
2 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley
3 tablespoons stout beer
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1 pound asparagus, trimmed
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper

Preparation

1. In a large bowl stir together the pale ale, salt, water and lemon juice.
2. Add the scallops, cover and refrigerate for an hour.
3. rain the scallops and place on top of a stack of paper towels. Add another layer of paper towels and allow to drain and dry for 15 minutes.
4. Make the romesco. Add the almonds to a pan over medium high heat. Pull the pan back and forth across the burner to toss the almonds until they have lightly toasted, about three minutes (keep a close eye, they burn quickly).
5. Add the almonds, red bell pepper, garlic, tomato puree, parsley, beer, red pepper flakes, smoked paprika, salt and pepper to a food processor.
6. Process for about one minute, then slowly add the olive oil until well combined (romesco can be made several days in advance, store in an air-tight container in the fridge until ready to use).
7. Melt two tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium high heat until very hot. Add the scallops, flat side down, and allow to cook until a dark golden brown crust forms on the bottom, about two minutes. Flip and cook until seared on the opposite side. Remove from pan when a slight hint of translucent pink still remains at the center—don’t overcook.
8. Melt three tablespoons butter in a large skillet over high heat (you want the asparagus to form a nice char but to still retain a good bite and not get soggy, if the heat is too low the asparagus will overcook before getting the desired char). Add the asparagus, tossing until most of the asparagus has charred slightly on one or both sides, remove from pan.
9. Plate the asparagus, top with romesco sauce and scallops, serve immediately.

The Chef’s Pairings: Yuzu Beers

Brewers continue to experiment with specialty ingredients, pushing the boundaries of flavor. Since a good beer deserves a good meal, All About Beer Magazine asked Jackie Dodd, founder of TheBeeroness.com, to taste a few beers brewed with yuzu fruit and offer tasting notes and pairing suggestions. Get more pairing ideas and recipes at allaboutbeer.com/food.

The post Beer-Brined Scallops Over Asparagus With Stout Romesco first appeared on All About Beer.

By the time Catherine the Great, Empress of All Russia, started commissioning porter from London breweries in the 1780s, the ale had been a favorite import for decades. The fame of these strong, barrel-aged beers was already circling the globe, and versions of it were being made in Scotland, Ireland, and the newly-independent United States.

Those original London porters were made with a rough, smoky grain known as brown malt, and the beer, as it came out of the kettle, apparently wasn’t much fun to drink. Once brewers learned to let their porters sit in wooden vats for up to two years, though, a magical transformation happened; native microorganisms transformed an acrid beer into something refined and sherry-like.

Yet the word “imperial” that became associated with the porter bound for the Tsarina’s court—purportedly the strongest of the London porters—had a double meaning. That porter was made for imperial purposes, but porter itself had become beer’s monarch.

Eventually, of course, the great vat-aged porters gave way to other, lesser ales. The strongest versions—the “stout” porters—withered and grew tame. They were further diminished by the world wars, and by the 1950s, not a single brewery in England made a porter. Except for the success of its distant ancestor, Irish stout, the era of this style seemed over.

Three decades later, Mark Ruedrich and two cohorts were putting together the plans for a brewery in Fort Bragg, California. Ruedrich had been a homebrewer and had lived in England for two years, and long before starting North Coast Brewing, he’d become enchanted by stouts.

“I had also made my own special study of Guinness while living in England,” he says—and indeed Old No. 38, an Irish stout, was one of the beers North Coast offered when it debuted in 1988. But it was a different stout that would make North Coast famous, one he’d discovered as a homebrewer years before: Bert Grant’s Imperial Stout.

“It was a revelation for me,” he recalls. It was an evocation of those ancient Baltic-bound porters. “I thought that was a beer I’d very much like to brew one day.”

It took six more years before he began formulating Old Rasputin, and though it was inspired by Grant’s, he wanted it to be entirely original. Grant’s had been sweeter, maltier, and was only 6% ABV. “I thought, ‘I think we need to plant a stake in the ground.’ It was logical to give this beer a very American twist. Instead of doing a malty beer, doing something that was much more hop-forward.”

What emerged was nothing like the old vat-aged brown porters sent to Russia, and yet in its booming strength and intense flavors, Old Rasputin did capture their spirit. Ruedrich wanted it to express the character of American hopping, so he infused it with 75 international bitterness units of Centennial, Northern Brewer and Cluster hops. The Clusters are a nice touch—an old American hop, they were widely used in British brewing as a bittering hop in the 19th century. The hops give it a resinous, almost oily layer that augments the powerhouse roasted malts.

“One of the early lessons we learned in making Old 38 was that roasted barley is critical, and not using too much black malt is also critical,” says Ruedrich.

He created a foundation of caramel malts to add some balancing sweetness, and what he called “intermediate” malts for flavor. What’s an intermediate malt? Brown malt, for one—another wink to St. Petersburg.

As we were discussing the beer, Ruedrich called it “creamy but quite dry,” and that has always been my impression, too—right down to the words I’d used in tasting notes. Shortly after North Coast launched Old Rasputin, Goose Island began making a bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout, which now seems the default for American brewers. It has led the lineage of American stouts in a much sweeter direction than Ruedrich envisioned. The latest trend in “pastry stouts”—very sweet, confectionary ales—extends that tradition further. As a consequence, recent reviews have tended to ding Old Rasputin. “A bit light on body,” Craft Beer and Brewing observed. “Slightly astringent,” said Draft Magazine. “Too astringent, somewhat coarse,” one reviewer at Beer Connoisseur decided.

But these seem to take modern, gloopy, sweet imperials as the benchmarks, when Ruedrich was shooting for something entirely different.

“We use a low mash temperature to make an extremely fermentable wort to make sure this beer finishes as bone-dry as a [huge] beer can,” he says. And this is where Old Rasputin sings. The relative dryness reveals the layers of hopping and roast, so the palate shimmers with different flavors as it passes over the tongue—dark chocolate and cocoa, yeast esters that evoke cherry or red wine, that piney resin, a touch of char, and delicately sweet toffee, all wrapped up in that unusual creaminess. Most of the modern, sweeter imperials are built to be drunk in volumes of a few ounces. Old Rasputin, despite its intensity, sustains and nourishes the soul over the course of a full pint.

Porters and stouts have been many things over the past 300 years. At their most robust, they were beers that warmed the coldest Russian winter nights and inspired a world to start making them. Of all the modern interpretations, few match Old Rasputin’s ambition, daring, and accomplishment. It has earned the right to be called “imperial.”

Jeff Alworth is the author of The Secrets of Master Brewers and The Beer Bible.

The post Old Rasputin: North Coast’s Imperial Interpretation first appeared on All About Beer.

Smuttynose sold at auction. Saratoga Brewing closed. Sales at Boston Beer and Sierra Nevada are down. The sky is falling!

Lagunitas sold, and its sales are up. Ballast Point sold, and its sales are up. Goose Island sold, and not only is its beer everywhere, but beer geeks are still buying Bourbon County Brand Stout as if there was nothing traitorous and evil about that (yeah, that’s sarcasm). The world is turned upside down!

Millennials aren’t drinking as much beer. Generation Z is drinking even less. They’re both drinking more spirits, and wine, but they’re drinking less overall. The Big Growth is over and will never return. Beer is threatened!

Everything is an IPA. IPAs are crowding out other beer styles. Kettle sours are dragging down the sophistication of sour beer. Hazy IPAs have no shelf life and drive people away from packaged beer. Beer stores may not survive!
Beer prices keep going up. “Craft” brewers keep selling out, or merging, or taking on private equity. The taproom model is killing larger brewers. Limited can releases are eating up disposable beer income. Aluminum tariffs will make canned beer even more expensive. Lower federal beer taxes are bad optics in the current political climate. The sky is falling!

Breathe, brothers and sisters. Grab a can, fill a glass, take a seat at the bar … and breathe, while Old Mister Lew tells a story.

Way back in 1996, beer was, wow, crazy. Growth had been around 40 percent! It was slowing down, but you know, can’t stay that hot forever. Still, bunches of new breweries were opening, almost a thousand, and established brewers were buying bigger kettles and tanks. New beers, new ideas, crazy names and labels. You could find a wide variety of beers, in more places all the time. Beer was fun, cool, and not just in a frat boy, pyramid-of-empties way. It was great.

But there were problems. Success attracted greed, and money gushed into the niche without much thought. The speed of expansion meant breweries were poorly planned, brewers were poorly trained, and quality control corners were cut, especially in packaging. All those new beers overwhelmed a system that was used to six to ten suppliers that might add a new bottle size every other year.

The result: old and/or bad beer on shelves and taps, poor practices in the marketplace. Eventually this led to breweries closing and sales of “microbrew” flatlining. Now, that’s not easy to substantiate, because our definitions of what was in the niche and not in the niche had started to change. We had more and more conversations and arguments and even legal battles about who was and who wasn’t a microbrewer, a craft brewer.

Stop me when all this sounds strangely familiar. I mean, we have much more wholesaler consolidation now, the average price of a pint or six-pack has gone up (like everything else), the big brewers have finally woken up (it took the decline of light beer to do it), and everything’s moving much, much faster—but it looks a lot like 1996 around here.

What does that mean? I’m not completely sure; if I were, I’d be selling this for a lot more money. But at a guess? The year 2018 looks like just another bump in the road, but not an end to beer as we know it. No, this is at most a correction, as is almost every aspect of disaster I checked above.

The main core of it all, the small brewery phenomenon, is not going away. There are half again as many breweries in America than at the previous height 130-odd years ago, and the population is six times as large. Hell, there were only 38 states back then! It even looks like it did back then; a lot of small breweries, largely serving their local areas, with some larger exceptions, and some even larger that ship across the country, even the globe.

Barring another crazy experiment with Prohibition, that’s not collapsing completely anytime soon. Too many of us have tried it and liked it. It reminds me of the cigar boom in the early ‘90s that peaked, “collapsed,” and resulted in a steady market almost three times the size of where it was in the 1980s.

The IPA fascination? Sure, but no one’s putting “IPA” on the blond ales led by the success of Firestone Walker’s 805, and no one’s suggesting that the surge of interest in pilsners would be increased if we called them “intense pilsner ales.” It’s here now, it will likely stay, but it’s not everything.

Relax. The sky is not falling. Breweries will close. Some iconic breweries may close. More will merge or be sold. It happens. It happens in other industries: distilleries change hands often, and they just keep making whiskey, and we keep drinking it.

So if the millennials drink stuff other than beer? Why not join them? I just started drinking aquavit, and it’s awesome stuff. A bit of competition won’t hurt. Might even make beer better overall, and that’s what this is all about.

Breathe.

Lew Bryson has been writing about beer for more than 25 years and is the author of Tasting Whiskey. On Twitter @LewBryson.

The post There Are Reasons for Concern, but the Sky Isn’t Falling first appeared on All About Beer.

In August 2011, Chris Harker, co-founder of Triple C Brewing Co. in Charlotte, North Carolina, walked down a platform along the city’s light rail system, a half-barrel keg of his brewery’s Light Rail Pale Ale on a green dolly as cameras clicked and well-wishers, including relatives, walked along with him.

Harker was delivering the beer to Triple C’s first commercial account—The Liberty gastropub, which also happened to be one stop away along the same light rail. He did not actually take the train the one stop to The Liberty—“the city got wind of it,” he says, and dissuaded him from taking alcohol aboard—but Harker says the brewery wanted to highlight the role the light rail had played in Triple C’s young life.

It was a small, but illustrative moment in the relationship between American small-batch brewing and public transit, in particular the nation’s warrens of subway, trolley and light-rail routes. In some places, the two have grown up around each other—Charlotte’s so-called LYNX system dates from only 2007, a few years before the city’s new wave of breweries would take off.

In all cases, the two have powered a symbiotic relationship: Get back and forth from sampling the latest brews, liberally or not, at a transit cost well under that of even an Uber. In fact, ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft might be the biggest threat to this symbiosis.

In the meantime, anecdotal evidence abounds of the happy relationship between breweries and their proximity to a public transit stop. The hard numbers, too, suggest there’s something about hops and hopping a train.

Putting Beer Cities on the Map

In the summer of 2006, Gail Ann Williams and Steve Shapiro, a married couple living in San Francisco, were planning to attend an IPA festival at The Bistro, a groundbreaking bar in Hayward several miles to the south (the pub had hosted some of the nation’s first festivals dedicated to India pale ales and double IPA).

“You know, you should take BART there; it’s three blocks away,” someone suggested, given the strength of the beers that The Bistro would be serving.

The suggestion planted a seed in the minds of Williams and Shapiro that sprouted the following year into a website called Beer by BART—which is literally what its name implies: a curated guide to breweries, brewpubs, bars and bottle shops near Bay Area Rapid Transit stops.

Beer by BART has grown during the past 10 years from 34 recommendations within one mile of BART stops to at least 112 not only within one mile of a stop—the distance that Williams and Shapiro thought most Americans would be willing to walk before giving up—but near other trains and buses that connect with BART. (The recommendations reflect that some selections have closed or have been taken off the site.)

So great proved the appeal—inexpensive and safe transport to the region’s best beers—that the couple soon had prospective brewers assuring them that they were looking for locations near the San Francisco Bay Area’s trolley and subway system. Brewers wanted in, basically, on the publicity that Beer by BART could provide.

What’s more, Williams and Shapiro became mini-celebrities not just in their own city, but also the world over.

“It’s amazing how many people we meet traveling, including Europe, who say they use this as part of their vacation planning, including for where they should book a hotel,” Williams says.

Similar updated and one-off guides have sprung up in Beer by BART’s wake. And some cities and regions interweave brewery visits with their transit systems. In Phoenix, for instance, a downtown booster group sponsors an annual “Urban Ale Trail,” a “walkable beer tasting tour [that] runs along the light rail corridor from Downtown Phoenix to uptown.” In Charlotte, there’s the 4.5-mile “Light Rail Trail” that not uncoincidentally runs by several breweries and brewpubs (including the aforementioned Triple C).

In Chicago, the Blue Line of the city’s vaunted L system happens to run right from O’Hare Airport into downtown—and past roughly 10 breweries and brewpubs. That includes Revolution Brewing, which opened near the Blue Line’s California stop in 2010 (the company opened a second location near the line’s Belmont stop two years later).

“Nelson Algren called the L Chicago’s ‘rusty iron heart’ because it forms the arteries that connect the city’s people and neighborhoods,” says Josh Deth, Revolution’s founder, referring to the 20th-century novelist. “I got an urban planning degree with a focus on transportation, so forgive me if I get a bit romantic here.”

The Benefits of Building Near Public Transit

Romance or not, that utilitarianism benefits breweries and even draws them close to public transit in the first place.

“We definitely searched out a space and weighed its proximity to public transit in choosing the location,” says Laura ­Dierks, co-founder of Brooklyn’s Interboro Spirits & Ales, which is less than one-third of a mile from New York City’s L train connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. “It was part of our decision-making in locating the business from the beginning.”

Fellow Brooklyn operation Other Half Brewing saw things the same way in its 2014 opening near the F and G lines. “We felt lucky that we found a space—really, a garage—that suited our needs and also happened to be on the edge of a great neighborhood, near a subway stop,” says Andrew Burman, co-founder of Other Half. “The reality is, in New York, location is key. Easy access to public transportation can mean a lot for a new business.”

The biggest reason is obvious, given the intoxicating core product of breweries and brewpubs.

“Especially when people are enjoying some fine craft brews, it’s great to have public transit around the corner so they don’t have to drive home,” says Revolution’s Deth.

The proximity can also have fringe benefits, brewery principals say, including lower-cost transportation for brewery staff and advertising opportunities onboard the transit itself (though some systems, including the nation’s largest in New York, forbid alcohol ads).

Perhaps the biggest benefit besides a safe, cheap way home after drinking is what public transportation can bring to a neighborhood. Triple C’s Harker noticed it in his South End surroundings in Charlotte.

Too-quiet streets and empty buildings, including the 20,000-square-foot, high-ceilinged building that Triple C eventually opened in, pocked its future neighborhood. The 4-year-old New Bern light-rail stop offered promise, though, Harker says. And now the brewery-plus-taproom is part of a more vibrant enclave with fresh condos and apartments. Hyde Brewing recently opened across the street from the brewery, and Triple C opened its own new event space next door as well.

“So we get a lot of walk-ins and repeat taproom business from people just because it’s easy for them to come see us,” says Harker.

Public transit stops not only facilitate such activity, but also sustain it once it’s there—sometimes for decades, in the case of the nation’s older systems. The L line in New York City, for instance, dates from the early 1920s, Chicago’s Blue Line from the early 1950s. They were in place long before the current brewing renaissance kicked off in the late 1970s, ready and waiting to help spirit it along.

And they might yet outlive their usefulness to it.

The Rise of Ride-Hailing Apps

Public transportation ridership nationwide spiked to 10.8 billion rides in 2014, the highest ridership in 58 years, according to the American Public Transportation Association, an advocacy nonprofit. In 2015, systems in Chicago and Boston recorded their highest ridership figures ever (the Chicago milestone was for trains alone). The same year, 1.76 billion people rode New York’s system—including a single-day rec­ord of 6.2 million straphangers on Oct. 29, 2015.

These mid-decade figures, however, might have represented a high-water mark for public transit. Figures from 2016 and 2017 show steep declines in some cases. In Charlotte, bus ridership was down 15 percent for the three years that ended in mid-2017. In Los Angeles, overall ridership was down about 19 percent over a similar period.

Part of the drop is due to aging or inadequate infrastructure. The tracks, tunnels, vehicles, fare machines and other systems simply aren’t up to the task of moving so many millions daily, and that fact manifests itself in delays, re-routings, and even accidents. New York officials, for instance, plan to close the tunnel that carries the L between Manhattan and Brooklyn for 18 months beginning in 2019. It needed repairs before Hurricane Sandy damaged it in October 2012, and now the need is particularly urgent.

Then there’s Uber and its ilk. The rapid rise of ride-hailing apps—Uber launched in 2009, and archrival Lyft in 2012, both initially in San Francisco—has upended the taxi industry. It has also, to a lesser extent, started to eat into public transit with sometimes-competitive fares and typical door-to-door service.

A survey of app users in seven major U.S. metro areas that University of California-Davis researchers administered showed that Uber et al have led to a 6 percent decline in bus use and a 3 percent decline in light rail use among those who have used the apps. The survey’s results, released in 2017, also showed that avoiding driving drunk was the second-most-cited reason for using the apps, right behind avoiding parking headaches.

For now, though, the symbiosis continues. The number of breweries in the U.S. continues to climb, with many opening in cities with already widespread transit systems, or ones that are on the fast train there. New York City has 30 breweries and brewpubs, according to the Brewers Association, and Chicago has 47.

Breweries continue to open near the LYNX light rail in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood, and a new extension will see it head north through the city’s North Davidson and University areas.

Existing breweries in its path stand to benefit, and new ones may spring up as a result. For Harker, there’s little doubt the light rail played a part in his brewery’s success over the years.

“Had it not been for the light rail,” says Harker, “it would’ve been a pretty sketchy proposition to do something here.”

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution. He lives just off the Boston area’s Harvard Square Red Line stop.

The post Taking the Ale Train first appeared on All About Beer.

FULLSTEAM UNSCRIPTED
Fullsteam Brewery
Durham, North Carolina
5% | India Pale Lager

A collaboration with the new, mid-century-inspired Unscripted Durham, this beer is as retro and contemporary as its namesake. It’s a throwback in that it’s at its heart a lager, but made modern in its use of local malt (from Durham’s Epiphany Craft Malt) and trendy hops (Mosaic, Galaxy, Citra and Simcoe). Those hops give off a distinct lemon note in the aroma, which on the palate is joined by light grapefruit, pine and orange peel, with a crackery malt character. None of those flavors, though, are so bold that you lose sight of the crisp and clean lager base. There are a lot of poorly executed India pale lagers out there, beers so inundated with hops that you can’t distinguish whether it’s an ale or a lager. This isn’t one of them. It’s balanced and bright, everything you would want in an India pale lager.

BOULEVARD BOU LOU
Boulevard Brewing Co.
Kansas City, Missouri
5.5% | Wheat Ale w/ Pineapple & Coconut

Breweries partnering with bands and musicians is nothing new, but one genre often overlooked in these collaborations is hip-hop. That’s changing. Deltron3030 collaborated with Dogfish Head on Positive Contact, Nappy Roots recently brewed with Against the Grain Brewery and Monday Night Brewing, and now Tech N9ne has partnered with Boulevard Brewing Co. Bou Lou, named after Tech N9ne’s song “Caribou Lou,” is inspired by the cocktail from that same song. There’s no Malibu Rum, but the wheat beer is brewed with pineapple and coconut. Both of those ingredients are there but in perfect harmony; it achieves that tropical profile that so many IPAs are going for right now, but courtesy the fruit instead of hops. There’s a hint of vanilla, too, and the wheat beer base is refreshing and cleans up quickly.

CAPE MAY ALWAYS READY
Cape May Brewing Co.
Cape May, New Jersey
4.8% | Northeast Pale Ale

An homage to the Coast Guard and its base in Cape May, Always Ready isn’t, unfortunately, always available. It’s a seasonal that runs through this month, however if you’re lucky enough to see it around you should do yourself a favor and pick up some cans. Always Ready offers a big hop punch of pine and pithy citrus, with a satisfying bitterness. And it does it all in a well balanced, sub-5% package. If you miss Always Ready, keep an eye out for upcoming hoppy offerings from Cape May Brewing Co.

CORONADO MARINE DREAM
Coronado Brewing Co.
San Diego, California
6.5% | Hazy Oat India Pale Ale

The second in the brewery’s new Art Series, Marine Dream is brewed with oats, London III yeast and Citra, Vic Secret and Mosaic hops. Given these ingredients and the word “hazy” on the can, you might expect it to look as murky as many others on the market. Instead it pours bright orange and only slightly hazy, but it’s an attractive beer from the jump. The nose is more dank than tropical, with green onion standing out. On the palate, though, juicy notes of orange peel and pineapple come to the fore, along with a bit of juniper and watermelon rind. There’s a decent bitterness and the oats lend the beer a creamy body. While it doesn’t jump headfirst into the New England style, it’s a tasty IPA from a brewery that’s been making such beers for quite a while.

CREATURE COMFORTS TRITONIA – CUCUMBER & LIME
Creature Comforts Brewing Co.
Athens, Georgia
4.5% | Gose w/ Cucumber & Lime

You can smell the cucumber in this beer well before the glass reaches your lips. On the nose, it’s difficult to discern much more, but the cucumber is actually more subdued on the palate. Tritonia lacks the lactic, tart-bordering-on-sour quality that many American goses have, but this makes the beer all the more refreshing and allows the lime and salt to come through. Make no mistake: you’ll need to like cucumber to enjoy this beer, but it is certainly no novelty. The cucumber departs quickly in the finish, where a wheatiness lingers. With a clean, refreshing quality and light tartness, this beer would pair well with lighter fare (we’re thinking salad or sushi).

PURE PROJECT / CELLADOR SCYNDICATION
Pure Project Brewing & Cellador Ales
San Diego, California
8.1% | Flanders-Style Red Ale

Released back in March, Scyndication is a collaboration between Pure Project Brewing and Cellador Ales that spent time in brandy, bourbon and red wine barrels. It’s the latter that is most noticeable in the aroma, but the barrels become tougher to pick out individually on the palate — the mark of a blender who knows what they are doing. The beer’s sourness and acidity are well balanced by sweet and jammy flavors such as tart cherry, plum, concord grape and caramel, with a dry oakiness on the finish. It feels light in the mouth, and all the more drinkable for it.

The post Six to Seek: The Best Beers of the Week first appeared on All About Beer.

Pozole is such a classic Mexican dish that nearly every family that grew up eating it, grew up with a different variation. Some like it with a red chili base, others prefer the verde version. Some recipes call for pork, chicken, fish or even goat. In its most classic form, pozole is hearty, filling, full of beautifully slow-cooked meat and filled with a nice helping of hominy. Don’t forget the toppings—they are an essential component to balancing the flavors of the dish. Pineapple beers, with their tropical flavors and bright pop of acidity, pair perfectly with the deep, rich, spicy flavors of a hearty bowl of pozole.

Ingredients

2½ pounds chicken (bone-in: thighs, wings and/or drumsticks)
1 teaspoon salt
1 white onion, quartered
1 large carrot, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
12 ounces Flanders red beer
3 pounds hominy from a can, rinsed and drained
4 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon dried cilantro
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon cumin

Garnishes

¼ whole green cabbage, thinly sliced
1 large tomato, chopped
1 large avocado, chopped
½ large red onion, chopped
½ cup cilantro, chopped
½ cup crumbled cotija
½ cup red radishes, thinly sliced
2 limes, cut into quarters
2 large jalapeños, chopped
Tortilla chips

Preparation

1. Place chicken pieces in a large pot, cover with about 2 ½ quarts of water, salt, onions, carrot, celery and half of the beer, stir to combine. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until the chicken is tender and cooked through, about 30 minutes.

2. Remove chicken from pot, allow to cool slightly. Using two forks, pull chicken meat away from the bones, shredding into pieces. Reserve the meat, return the bones to the stock pot. Continue to simmer the bones, uncovered, for 45 minutes.

3. In a blender or food processor, add half of the hominy, garlic cloves and 2 cups of the stock from the pot. Blend until smooth.

4. Strain the broth to remove and discard the bones, then add in the pureed hominy. Stir in the chicken meat, cilantro, oregano, cumin, pepper, remaining hominy and beer. Bring to a simmer and cook for an additional 10-15 minutes.

5. Serve the pozole alongside the garnishes, allowing guests to garnish as they choose.

The Chef’s Pairings: Pineapple Beers

Brewers continue to experiment with specialty ingredients, pushing the boundaries of flavor. Since a good beer deserves a good meal, All About Beer Magazine asked Jackie Dodd, founder of TheBeeroness.com, to taste a few beers brewed with pineapple and offer tasting notes and pairing suggestions. Get more pairing ideas and recipes at allaboutbeer.com/food.

The post Flanders Red Chicken Pozole first appeared on All About Beer.

About three miles away from the brewery, and far below the streets of Grand Rapids, 14,000 barrels of beer quietly age.

The barrels are located in former gypsum mines once owned by the Alabastine Mining Company, and now by Michigan Natural Storage. The mines maintain a steady temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, which makes them ideal for storing a number of products—especially beer.

“The level that we’re on, we’re 85 feet below the surface of the earth and it’s about 38 million years old,” says brewery co-founder Dave Engbers. “I asked if they found fossils or stuff like that, and they said where we were predates any living organisms. The ceiling is under an old lake bed.”

The brewery stored its first barrels in the mines around 2004 or 2005, estimates Engbers. Founders had started aging beers in barrels just a few years before, and soon after the barrels were taking up space at the brewery that needed to be used for additional fermentation capacity.

Engbers and co-founder Mike Stevens had a friend at Michigan Natural Storage who proposed aging barrels there, which made a lot of sense given the facility’s proximity to the Grand Rapids brewery. Now, some of the brewery’s most well-known beers—like KBS and Backwoods Bastard—spend time maturing in the mines.

The underground aging program at Founders may be novel, but aging beer underground is nothing new. Whether manmade or natural, more brewers are going underground with their barrel-aging programs.

A Return to Tradition

In the days before refrigeration, brewers—especially those specializing in lagers, which ferment at lower temperatures than ales—sought out underground spaces to age their beers. It was a common practice at breweries across Europe, and when German immigrants built breweries in the United States, many of them looked for underground cellars that could provide the cooler temperatures needed.

August Schell was one such brewer. Schell left Germany for the United States in 1848, and in 1860 built the Schell’s Brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota. Schell had cavernous cellars beneath the brewery dug out, creating a space to store barrels of the brewery’s lager.

Jace Marti remembers cleaning out the caves as a boy—and not fondly.

“I think that was one of those things that my dad did a little as punishment, but also as an initiation thing,” recalls Marti with a laugh. “There was no light down there, it was terrifying as a kid.”

Now, as a sixth-generation brewmaster at August Schell Brewing Co., he uses the caves to age his own beers. In 2015, the brewery reopened the caves, where currently 55-56 bourbon barrels reside.

True to the brewery’s heritage, these barrels almost always contain lagers of some kind—though they are quite different from the styles August Schell brewed so many years before. The base beers, says Marti, sometimes don’t fit neatly into style guidelines, but usually they are a “big, malty lager in the 10 percent range.”

The caves typically stay in the upper 30 degrees in the winter, and can reach 50 degrees in the summer. Marti says that the differences in temperature between the seasons imparts differences in the character of the beers—namely, that in the summer months the warmer temperatures help extract more flavor from the barrels.

“I think what we’re trying to achieve is more than a standard lager beer,” says Marti. “Having some variations in temperature is good for what we’re doing. A lot of the yeast is pretty much gone, and now we’re just trying to pick up residual spirit character and barrel character. It’s very different than what we were trying to accomplish 100 years ago.”

The Challenges of Aging Underground

Having access to a subterranean space, while rare, is just the beginning for breweries wishing to age underground. The unpaved floors, jagged walls and inconsistent dimensions of these spaces often necessitate a more labor-intensive process than simply storing barrels in a warehouse.

Michigan Natural Storage renovated its gypsum mines with elevators and concrete floors, but getting barrels to the facility still requires a lot of work from Founders.

“The barrels are on racks so they get unloaded from our facility, then brought over to their facility,” says Engbers. “And then they’ve got two industrial elevators. All of that adds to the cost and the labor.”

But at least Engbers has forklifts, and racks on which to store the barrels. The caves at August Schell Brewing Co. aren’t as accommodating.

“It’s a monumental pain,” says Marti. “We have to use different sections of the cave. We take half of the barrels in from one entrance, and the other half through another.”

Laborious though that that process is, work was much harder for the generations of brewers that came before Marti. In the late 19th century, teams would cut ice blocks from the nearby Cottonwood River and pull them by horse up the hill and into the cellars, where the ice would help maintain the necessary temperatures to lager the beers through warmer months.

Marti’s brother tried to replicate the experience once, pulling the old ice tong’s right off the wall of the brewery’s museum. He went down to the river with a chainsaw and lugged a block into the cellars, only to see it melt in a matter of days.

“We won’t be doing that again,” says Marti.

And, of course, another challenge when it comes to aging underground is having the space in the first place. Not every brewery is located miles away from mines that go far below the Earth’s surface, or above cavernous cellars.

At Santa Fe Brewing Co., founder Brian Lock decided to make his own underground cellars, though “underground” here is used a little more loosely.

“They’re not very far underground, they’re inside a bermed hill that they’re put up against,” says Lock. “But they do get a lot of the thermal consistency from being underground. The temperatures are pretty stable, which is great for barrel aging beer.”

Lock had six shipping containers leftover after building his taproom in Albuquerque, and wanted to put them to good use at the Santa Fe location. So they dug out the hill and placed the containers on concrete footings, then sprayed insulation and backfilled around the containers.

The brewery is located in the high desert, notes Lock, but with an elevation of 7,000 feet it’s cooler than many people realize. The six 40-feet-long containers stay at a pretty consistent 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. In the winter, the brewery uses space heaters to ensure the containers don’t get too cold.

The underground portion is used to age the brewery’s sour beers, and there’s a small tasting room for sampling. In the future, says Lock, there will be a cave bar that the brewery will open up for special occasions.

The Future is Dark

Despite the challenges that come with aging beers underground, there are breweries eager to carry on the tradition. Earthbound Beer opened last year in St. Louis, Missouri, a city that is no stranger to underground cellars; Anheuser-Busch and Lemp Brewery both were built above the tunnels of a natural cave system. Earthbound inherited cellars of its own, as it now occupies the former Cherokee Brewery space. While the nascent brewery has but a few barrels stowed away at the moment, the owners do have plans to expand their cellars (with the possibility of bringing a foeder and coolship below as well).

Even breweries that don’t have natural caves running below the property are experimenting with underground aging. Brewery Ommegang of Cooperstown, New York, once stowed away Hennepin and other beers in Howe Caverns of upstate New York. Though the brewery no longer ages beer at the caverns, the partnership could serve to inspire other breweries.

Wabasha Brewing Co. is located less than half a mile from the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, Minnesota, and actually produces a beer by the name of Cave Stout, with imperial and bourbon-barrel-aged variants. The plan has always been to age that beer in the nearby the caves, says co-founder and head brewer Brett Erickson. While he has received permission to do so from the caves, Erickson wants to wait until the brewery’s barrel-aging program has grown before moving any production.

And even though Founders has an astonishing 14,000 barrels of beer aging in the former gypsum mines, there may even be room there for a few more players.

“This was kind of our little secret after a while,” says Engbers. “Then the word got out and next thing you know there’s a couple other breweries that store stuff down here.”

For Engbers, it might be easy enough to store thousands of barrels beneath the streets of Grand Rapids. Hiding them is another thing altogether.

Daniel Hartis is the editor of All About Beer Magazine.

The post Keeping Cool: As Barrel-Aging Trends Up, Brewers Go Below first appeared on All About Beer.

Last October, at Jameson Irish Whiskey’s Love Thy Neighbor festival, a small collection of brewers coalesced in the Duggal Greenhouse located on Brooklyn’s waterfront. Outside, Dave Quinn, the head of whiskey science at Jameson, guided patrons through the production (and thematic pairings) of the event’s focus—stout-barrel-aged Jameson Caskmates whiskey. Inside, brewers showcased specialty Jameson barrel-aged beers alongside standard offerings, as drifting patrons snacked on pretzel necklaces, bánh mì-inspired fried chicken sliders and lettuce wraps to the tune of live music and falling jumbo Jenga stacks.

“You’re either going to make some memories or lose some,” says one festival-goer.

As a prominent and popular debut for Jameson’s new Caskmates whiskey, the event spoke to an increasingly intimate relationship between spirits and beer. Coming on the heels of programs from Rogue Ales and Spirits, New Holland Brewing, Anchor Brewing Co., Deschutes Brewery and many others, Jameson’s move to tie its brand to the craft beer industry isn’t novel. It is, however, notable due to the distillery’s status as an international player.

What Jameson’s Caskmates represents, instead, is how much consumer awareness and interest has expanded relating to the coming together of beer and whiskey—an expansion that can be seen, too, in the recent rollout of Goose Island’s collaboration “Bierschnaps” (aged in former Bourbon County Barrels) with Rhine Hall Distillery in Chicago, as well as in the unveiling of Two Lanterns Whiskey, which is distilled from Samuel Adams Boston Lager by Berkshire Mountain Distillers.

“Every whiskey, at its core, is basically distilled beer,” says Alan Dietrich, the chief executive officer of Bendistillery, which partners with Deschutes Brewery to make Black Butte Whiskey from the mash of the brewery’s signature porter. “Just like brandy is distilled wine, and vodka and gin are distilled grains, whiskey is a distilled malt beverage.”

Highlighting the Connection Between Beer and Spirits

New Holland Brewing and Artisan Spirits anticipated consumer interest when it first released its Beer Barrel Bourbon in 2012. Inspired by the flavor variations and nuance of Scotch aged in barrels that formerly held sherry, New Holland president Brett VanderKamp decided to age the distillery’s whiskeys in barrels that once held the brewery’s Dragon’s Milk stout.

“The brand [Beer Barrel Bourbon] came out in 2012,” wrote Layne Keuning, marketing coordinator for New Holland.

“The first year we sold about 500 nine-liter cases [of the Bourbon] and this year we will be closer to 7,500 nine-liter cases.” Next year, she adds, New Holland anticipates sales closer to 10,000 cases.

New Holland’s Beer Barrel Bourbon is intimately related to its frothier brethren in multiple ways. The malt bill has an uncharacteristically high barley content, though it still meets the necessary grain requirements to be legally classified as a bourbon (which is to say corn constitutes at least 51 percent of the mash). And while not all Dragon’s Milk batches are aged in New Holland’s used whiskey barrels due to scale—there are five barrels in the Dragon’s Milk program for every one barrel in the Beer Barrel whiskey program—all Beer Barrel Bourbon is aged in barrels that housed Dragon’s Milk and then blended, like Dragon’s Milk, for consistency.

“It adds a layer of complexity, it adds more mouthfeel, and it kind of just smooths some of the rougher parts of the bourbon off,” explains VanderKamp. Joel Armato, retail beverage specialist at New Holland, adds that subtle notes of vanilla and cocoa and sweetness carry from the stout to the whiskey, too.

Dave Quinn, the head of whiskey science at Jameson, detailed similar effects of the beer barrel-aging process throughout his educational seminars at Love Thy Neighbor.

“The new whiskey combines the triple distilled smoothness of Jameson Original with the richness of stout beer, adding notes of coffee, cocoa and hops for a truly unique finish,” he wrote in an email following the event. Following last year’s stout-barrel-aged whiskey, Jameson also released a Caskmates whiskey aged in barrels that once held IPA.

To both capitalize upon and promote this heightened consumer engagement, New Holland offers and even encourages customers to try Dragon’s Milk and Beer Barrel whiskey side-by-side to discover the products’ singularities and similarities in its taprooms.

At those taprooms, patrons can try the whiskey as samples or small pours alongside beers like Dragon’s Milk, or they can order the spirit on its own, as part of flights, and in cocktails such as The Dude, which combines the Beer Barrel Bourbon with a Dragon’s Milk reduction, chocolate bitters and cream, and the Beer Drinkers’ Old Fashioned, which substitutes that same beer reduction in place of simple syrup and uses chocolate bitters alongside more traditional orange ones.

“For us, it’s taken a minute to really find the ways to highlight the brands like Beer Barrel Bourbon and get them in front of people in a variety of ways that capture their attention,” says Armato. “We realized the value of a sample and how far a sample can go for someone.”

To many, the experience of beer and whiskey together—a shot and a beer, a boilermaker, or “hauf-an-hauf”—has long been associated with an efficient if perhaps lowbrow experience of alcohol delivery. But, similar to the theme of the Jameson event, New Holland’s idea of that experience is something slower, a moment of drawing connections in flavors and processes from one beverage to the next.

“There’s a little bit more thoughtfulness that comes with that order,” says Armato. “And that’s a big reason why it’s a bit of a slower, sip and enjoyment kind of thing, rather than crush a beer and throw the shot back.”

Following Armato’s instruction, I simulated the experience at home using a pour of Beer Barrel Bourbon and a six-ounce pour of Dragon’s Milk. Starting with the beer, then transitioning to sips of the whiskey, I could clearly follow notes of cocoa and vanilla from one beverage to the next, though the other flavors of nuts and dark fruit carried over in a more subtle presence, too, subdued beneath the boozy punch of the whiskey. Texturally, it felt like a layered coating of the tongue in a single palette of flavors that altered in volume and emphasis. And, perhaps dangerously, the alternation made my consumption of each far easier by creating balancing refuges of heat and sweet richness.

“Warming your palate up to all of the flavors that are in that beer are important, and finding all the nuances that are in that bourbon as well,” Armato adds.

The Rise of Beer-Barrel-Aged Whiskies

The economics of shared ingredients and processes fosters a natural relationship between beer and whiskey. It can make it easier to work with local breweries, as it has for Oliver Mulligan, founder of Great Wagon Road Distilling Co. in Charlotte, North Carolina. His neighbors at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery handle his mash production, which saved him from purchasing the necessary equipment. Instead, he lets the brewery handle the mash, which is then trucked just a few hundred feet over to Great Wagon Road to be distilled.

“We do all the mashes for Great Wagon Road, and then we pass them off to them and they ferment everything,” says Jocelyn Ruark, marketing manager for The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery. “They put it into the barrels to age, and once that’s done aging, they give us the barrels back and we age our barrel-aged brews in those barrels.”

Mulligan’s Rua whiskey uses 100 percent malted barley—a principal ingredient in beer. Though it once used an identical mash bill to Olde Meck’s Fat Boy Baltic Porter, Mulligan has since adjusted his recipe to use only pilsner malt. Those early batches made with the Fat Boy mash, according to Ruark, were “deeper […] all the flavors times two.”

“When you taste the Rua you get to taste that beautiful char from the barrels, the caramel that comes out of the oak, that nice little barley note and a light chocolate finish,” Mulligan says. Darker specialty malts, he explains, overpowered those more subtle flavors.

Dietrich, of Bendistillery, sees that kind of evaluation as beside the point, however. When it comes to beer-barrel-aged whiskeys, he sees them rather as an entirely separate and new product, “a uniquely American malt whiskey” with its own characteristics distinct from standard ryes or bourbons.

“I’ll tell you, we did not have any preconceived notions about what we wanted the finished product to be, other than that we wanted it to taste great,” says Dietrich.

“We have numerous plans as the volumes grow to experiment with finishing the product in used barrels, letting the product age longer […] really it’s a making-it-up-as-we-go-situation,” he continues. “We are constantly tasting the product, and discussing with Deschutes what we want to do.”

New Holland recently rolled out a Beer Barrel Rye to expand from its Beer Barrel Bourbon, and Mulligan is currently aging Rua on barrels that previously held barrel-aged Fat Boy. Though the casks were originally going to be converted into furniture, Mulligan says the barrels “smelled so good there was no way I wasn’t putting whiskey in them.”

Bendistillery and Deschutes, in the meanwhile, are aging a collaboration Abyss whiskey, though on a timeline beer drinkers probably aren’t accustomed to.

“I can confidently tell you the Abyss will come out within the next 2-10 years,” says Dietrich with a laugh. “We’re making whiskey man, you don’t know when you’re going to get something until you get it.”

Bo McMillan is the former editorial assistant for All About Beer Magazine, and is currently pursuing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

The post Full Circle: Breweries and Distilleries Share Barrels first appeared on All About Beer.

Words have consequences. Even if those words are as obtuse as “that’s not craft,” they can damage friendships, and that kind of thing is ripping up the American brewing industry. It’s time to consider the potential damage.

I remember a lot of nasty stuff being said about beer over my lifetime. In the early years of the 1980s, much of it centered on comparisons to some breed of animal piss and the inevitable question of, “How do you know what that tastes like?!”

Then small breweries started hitting the market, and mainstream beer drinkers taunted us for drinking “that microbrew shit” or “yuppie beer.” That was all just about being different from the herd, and the herd’s defensiveness. We were beer drinkers, but there was something not right about us.

But it was when the alternative beer market got big enough to divide against itself that things really got ugly. Contract brewing was the first big divide. If you weren’t making the beer yourself, it was no good. Brick-and-mortar brewers hung a lot out there, putting up the money and learning curve. But contract brewers jump-started the category, and they were helping to keep the older regional brewers open. I looked on that as an overall positive, but some folks loudly argued against them.

Closely related were the “fake beer companies.” That was originally leveled against the big brewers, who brewed beers “made” by new companies with different names. They were vilified as lying about their origins. The best-known survivor of that time: Blue Moon, a Coors product, but you’d never find “Coors” on the label at the time.

The practice trickled down to the newer brewers, and things got confused. In late 1994, Boston Beer developed a line called Oregon Ale & Beer, with a somewhat cloudy origin story, and the brewers of the Pacific Northwest were furious. This guy didn’t even have a brewery, and he was using their identity to sell his beer! The Oregon Brewers Guild and the Washington Small Brewers Association paid for an ad that proclaimed “Local Microbrewers Incensed at Imposter.” A lawsuit was brewing when more “pseudo-craft” beers released by Anheuser-Busch brought the small brewers to their senses. And no one seemed to recall that fanciful names like these had been a common practice in American brewing since before Prohibition.

When Blue Moon finally started selling big in the early 2000s, beer aficionados freaked out. They called it fake craft, “crafty” and worse. I just wanted them to try it in a blind tasting and see if they really hated it, or what it stood for. But argue the quality of the beer with a brewer, and it would inevitably come down to, “They’re taking the food out of my family’s mouths!” Really? More than other brewers, more than distillers?

Astonishingly, quality became divisive, notably at a 2014 speech delivered by Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “While the top end of quality continues to improve,” he said, “there are some cracks with new brewers.” That touched off an angry discussion of how sincere the BA was about supporting new, small brewers and whether this represented barrier-building on the part of established brewers.

Then there was the wave of buyouts in 2015-2017. Medium-sized, independent brewers across the country were bought by Anheuser-Busch InBev, by Constellation Brands, by Heineken. Consumers felt betrayed by formerly independent brewers and spurned the beers. Brewers boycotted events run by these brewers.

Was it related when the most ardent of consumers increasingly had no time for large, established alternative brewers? As I write this, Smuttynose is up for auction, Mendocino has closed its taproom, Speakeasy hangs on by a thread, and sales of Boston Beer are down, while there are lines at small breweries, where limited runs of beer sell out in a matter of hours. New breweries can do no wrong; old breweries are ignored.

I think it is related. People want to be different, just as we old-timers did when we stepped away from the Budweiser tap. People want new and fresh. But the market has become confusing. Breweries seem to open and close and change hands daily, ownership is nebulous, and the defense is hyperlocalism. When you walk in a small taproom tucked in the back of an industrial park, with rough furniture and a concrete floor, it’s a pretty sure thing you know who’s brewing the beer.

I’m not angry about that. I’m not actually angry about anything, for a change. I just want good beer, and honestly, I don’t care where it comes from. I like my small, local taproom. I like Sierra Nevada. I like beers from several of the “sellout” breweries.

What I don’t like is the nasty crap we’re slinging about brewers. Don’t like their beer? Then just say that and move on. Don’t insult them, and don’t insult me if we disagree. This is beer, not “death before dishonor”-level stuff. Have a couple, maybe try something old instead of something new. But leave the hate for politics.

Lew Bryson has been writing about beer for more than 25 years and is the author of Tasting Whiskey. On Twitter @LewBryson.

The post Putting an End to Insults and Infighting first appeared on All About Beer.