Yearly archive for 2019

Springtime in the Hallertau is beautiful: clean, crisp air, the smell of newly emerging greenery, the trees on the rolling hills coming to life and the sight of people out in the fields. We, members of the North American Brewers Association and the High Desert Brewers Association, recently had the pleasure of visiting the Hallertau as the guest of Anheuser-Busch. The Hallertau region of Bavaria, north and east of Munich, is the largest interconnected hop-growing region of the world. There are approximately 2000 producers on 40,000 acres in the area

Have you ever had one of those special moments when you experience something that makes a lasting impression? Did it seem dream-like or like a scene from a movie? Do you often replay it in your mind? Did a beer ever invoke one of these magical moments? It can happen?!? In the small medieval town of Brugge, Belgium, is a smallish pub with a very large reputation, at least among cerevisaphiles. The t’Brugs Beertje is down a narrow side street in the old part of town. It boasts a beer

‘Ice Cold Beer’ – used in a phrase those three words seem inseparable, but it wasn’t always so. From the perspective of the 20th Century it’s hard to believe, everyone drinks ice cold beer, and in restaurants and barrooms, ball parks, and picnics, beer drinkers mindlessly plunge beer into arctic-like baths of ice with hardly a thought, but why? People drink both hot and ice tea, hot and ice coffee, and hot and cold chocolate milk; why not beer? In beer’s previous 100 centuries of history there was no refrigeration,