Last week, Brian Stillwater Strumke (the gypsy brewer of Stillwater Artisanal Ales) trekked across the country to personally introduce his beers to the Bay Area. Some friends and I caught up with him at City Beer this past Thursday.
The Audition 44 hops remain unnamed, simply a number on a piece of paper somewhere. They are probably from Yakima. They may or may not ever see the light of day again. Bill mentioned that, two years previous, they’d tested a hop variety nicknamed “Teamaker”, which produced a unique, black-tea character. Those hops still haven’t reached the point of commercial production. [...]
I’d originally planned to interview Dan regarding his fruit beers – Apple Ale, Raspberry Tart, and Belgian Red – but the story of how New Glarus came to be so successful while keeping close to home proved more interesting. This is a story of session beer, of how one brewery thrives without being extreme.
The last time we were up at Raccoon Lodge in southwest Portland, home of Cascade Brewing, my wife and I were just about the only two people in their downstairs den. Our traveling habits at the time (a road trip centered around brewpubs and campsites) frequently resulted in our arriving to beer destinations at odd [...]
Russian River Brewing Company has gotten San Francisco Beer Week off to a fast start. While past years of the Pliny the Younger release have tended towards quiet, nonchalant affairs, this annual event seems to have grown in a similar fashion to events like 3 Floyds’s Dark Lord Day and Lost Abbey releases.
The brewery’s first release, Rorie’s Ale Batch 001, received huge numbers and pretty much unanimous praise from reviewers across the country. So what’s next for the guys at Odonata? [...]
Let’s say that Buckbean Brewing is Jupiter and Great Basin (the only brewery in Sparks) is Mars, and that the uncharted BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse twenty million miles south of downtown Reno is that occasional-planet Pluto. This would result in the remaining trio of tightly-packed breweries orbiting Reno’s casinos – Morandi’s Record Street Brewing, Brew [...]
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Before lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon, my ever-forgiving wife and I are already headed south on McCarran Boulevard from northern Sparks. I’m driving a red Jeep Cherokee that we don’t own, following detour signs that originally hinted that anyone hoping to get from McCarran to [...]
