Tales of ales from the heart of Ohio to the ends of the Earth
In this episode three repeat guests - Dan Eaton, Madeleine Bogard, and Chris Mercehill - compete in a game show based on bizarre beers. The show alternates between rounds of Wait Wait... Don’t Beer Me! and ReinheitsgeWHAT? In the former we share the origin stories of three beers featuring highly unusual ingredients, even by modern... Continue Reading →
In this episode Nick Smith from Steam Machine Brewing in the UK joins us to talk about the rebirth and surge in popularity of IPAs over the past 40 years.
Despite the recent respite from the heat, it has been a long hot summer in more ways than one. When the mercury rises, there’s nothing like a nice cold beer to slake your thirst. Beers that fill this role, sometimes called lawn-mower beers, tend to be light bodied, neither too bitter nor too sweet, with... Continue Reading →
I’m always happy with blind tasting events when the beers that rise above the field are a mix of tried and true favorites and surprising newcomers. That’s exactly what happened a few weeks ago at the King of Ohio IPA competition. Fat Head’s Strange Magic took top honors, while Seventh Son’s Miracle finished in the... Continue Reading →
The taproom is a central focus of most craft breweries these days. The beer is fresher, the connections to the local community stronger, and perhaps most importantly the margins are higher. Ohio has nearly 300 breweries, but the number without a taproom is small enough to count on your fingers. The only two that call... Continue Reading →
A few weeks back I had a chance to attend the Columbus Winter Beer Festival downtown in the convention center. For me big beer festivals are at best a mixed bag. It’s a good chance to sample a wide variety of beers, but the flavors and memories inevitably run together into an indistinct blur. The... Continue Reading →
Last week I attended parts of the Ohio Craft Brewer’s conference, held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Columbus. For me the most interesting aspect of the conference was Tom Shellhammer’s keynote address [1]. Shellhammer, the Norwester Professor of Fermentation Science at Oregon State University, is internationally recognized for his research on hop chemistry. His... Continue Reading →
In a recent post I recapped my visit to Vermont’s most celebrated breweries—Hill Farmstead and The Alchemist. It was a popular post, due in no small part to the current craze for hazy IPAs, but there’s more to the Vermont beer scene than aromatic hop oils and colloidal suspensions of polyphenols and yeast. In this... Continue Reading →
I’ve spent a considerable chunk of my spare time over the past year exploring the roots of historical beer styles ranging from pilsners to Flander’s Reds to Scottish Ales, On returning to the US what better way to reintroduce my palate to home grown brewing than a trip to Vermont, a state that can take... Continue Reading →
When I first moved to the UK it didn’t take long to figure out that Cloudwater Brewing represented something very modern. The visuals—16 oz cans with wrap on labels, ingredients listed on the can for all to see, prodigious hop additions, premium pricing—were immediately familiar to someone from the USA. When I bought a can... Continue Reading →
