Tuesday’s ad is for Mackeson’s Stout, originally brewed by the Hythe Brewery in Kent, which was founded in 1699. The Mackeson family acquired the brewery in 1801 and introduced their most enduring beer, the milk stout, in 1907, before being taken over by Whitbread in the late 1920s. I love the notion that the milk [...]

On Saturday, the 8th annual Hard Liver Barleywine Fest began at Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, Washington. People started queuing in line at 9:00 a.m. for the eleven o’clock opening and the line ran up Phinney almost to 36th Street. There were 50 different barley wines and 12 more different vintages for a total of 62 [...]

The book I contributed to, 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die, comes out today in the U.S. The book is the collaborative effort of 42 beers writers from around the world. We each wrote up beers from our areas of expertise, telling the beer’s story and also including tasting notes. There are 1,001 [...]

Monday’s ad, since it’s the first one I’ve posted since Spring began on Saturday, is all about getting out and working on your lawn and garden … with a beer, of course. A lawnmower beer, perhaps? Though it looks like a pretty old lawnmower. It’s for Burgie, brewed by Burgermeister Brewery of San Francisco, California. [...]

Congratulations to Charlie Papazian, and his wife Sandra, on the birth of their daughter, Carla Vitoria, born March 19. Charlie, of course, is the founder and president of the Brewers Association, and the author of The Joy of Homebrewing. According to a recent tweet, mother and daughter are doing fine. Join me in wishing Charlie [...]

Thanks to my friend Rick for sending this my way. In an editorial in the student newspaper for Temple University, the Temple News Online, student commentator Cary Carr writes about sudents getting drunk in a piece she called When Your BAC Exceeds .31 and the Label Reads Natty Ice, Trouble Brews. It’s mostly an anecdotal [...]

Several sources are pointing out a Reuters interview last week with Peter Swinburn, head of MolsonCoors. In that interview, Swinburn suggests that while he considers his company to be a “buyer,” he doesn’t discount the notion that MolsonCoors could be a takeover target. He further remarked that “SABMiller, Molson’s partner in the MillerCoors joint venture, [...]

Today’s work of art is by Danish artist Erik Ludvig Henningsen, who created the iconic Thirsty Man for Tuborg in 1900. Henningsen, who lived from 1855 to 1930 had a long distinguished career as a fine artist. As you might expect, at least one of his other paintings must have also depicted beer, and I [...]

I woke up again in Seattle, my second day here. Yesterday I helped to choose the winners of the Hard Liver Barleywine Fest at Brouwer’s Cafe. It’s the eighth year of the festival and it’s really grown into an impressive event in the several years I’ve been coming up for it. But the weekend has got [...]

A true brewing legend, who’s treated like a rock star in Belgium where they care about their national beers, Pierre Celis turns 85 today. Celis single-handedly revived the style witbier in the 1960s when he was a brewer at Hoegaarden. He later moved to Texas to start a microbrewery with his daughter Christine, which was [...]

Our tenth Guinness poster by John Gilroy is a variation on the iconic toucan on a weathervane, the difference here is he’s high above a town square on a bright Spring day where, as the tagline suggests, it’s a “Lovely day for a Guinness.” Share and Enjoy:

Here are the results from the 2010 Hard Liver Barleywine Fest in held at Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, Washington: 1st Place: Old Woody ‘09; Glacier Brewhouse 2nd Place: Old Blue Hair ‘08; Big Sky Brewing 3rd Place: Old Sebastes ‘09; Anacortes Brewery Honorable Mention: Abacus; Firestone Walker Brewing Congratulations to all the winners. Share and Enjoy:

Friday’s ad is a strange one, I don’t actually recall where exactly I found the image. I don’t believe it’s actually for a brewery’s beer but instead is a Japanese anime character called TsumugiKotobuki. According to one description, she’s a “high school student who walks in on the ‘light’ music club. She is inspired to [...]

I should confess at the outset that I think astrology is utter nonsense so this person’s attempt to pair with beer the twelve zodiac signs already seems to me to be an exercise in futility, a complete waste of time insofar as I can see no way such a list could ever be remotely useful [...]

When I was searching yesterday for images to use for my post about pull-tabs, I was surprised by how many websites there are devoted to finding other uses for the little aluminum pull-tabs, both the old-style ones and the more modern one-piece tabs. There are so many of these and they’re so inventive I thought [...]

This may well be the most disturbing story about our Nation’s Prohibition ever told, and one that’s certainly been kept fairly secret. While doing research on her book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, author Deborah Blum discovered that anti-alcohol factions of the U.S. government became so fanatical that they poisoned illegal alcohol either directly or indirectly, possibly [...]

Thursday’s ad is for Schlitz, when they introduced their version of the pop top can, which I talked about yesterday in my post John Updike’s Paean to the Beer Can. The ad is also from 1964, when by then nearly 75% of American brewers had some version of the pull-tab. Share and Enjoy:

Recently it was announced that Ken Allen, who founded the brewery in 1987, is selling Anderson Valley Brewing to Trey White, a former USB executive. The response on the series of tubes we all know and love as the internet was swift and surprisingly negative. Also, there was quite a lot of speculation that was [...]

Today is one of my favorite author’s birthdays, John Updike. He grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town that I did — Shillington — and we both escaped to a life of writing. Though I think you’ll agree he did rather better than I did with the writing thing, not that I’m complaining. I [...]

Yesterday Charlie Papazian had an interesting post about recent production numbers of brewers worldwide and how the top Four brewing companies control 50% of the world’s beer. That’s due to the increasing mergermania in the brewing industry, with the recent purchase of Mexico’s FEMSA by Heineken but not including the announced acquisition of Grupo Modelo [...]