Today the Brewers Association released the top 50 U.S. Craft Breweries list of 2012 based on sales volume as well as the overall top 50 list in the country (macro brewers included). What’s cool to see is that craft beer is making a bigger and bigger dent in the overall U.S. beer market. This means more and more people are being turned onto drinking beer from smaller and independent companies. While their list ranks them by size,…
Just a quick update for all you Maine readers out there: while you’re all patiently waiting for the arrival of Baxter Brewing Co. beers this fall, you’ll have some new out-of-state beery arrivals to help tide you over. Three breweries from across the country have started to distribute their beers in the state of Maine this month and their arrivals are absolutely welcome ones! First, a the first of May heralded the long-awaited arrival of…
I’m a sucker for lists. The Top 10 This, the Best 5 That. So I had a bit of fun when I got my hands on the latest issue of Beer Advocate magazine (yes, they have a magazine. And it’s actually pretty good. I’d never pay for a subscription, but if you can find one of their free drop spots, pick it up) a few days ago which includes six “top 25” lists in the “Beer in Review” section. The lists are the “All-Time Top Beers on Planet Earth”; the top 25 “Most-Wanted Beers”; the “Top Beers That Get No Respect” — these are the 25 worst-rated beers on the BeerAdvocate forums and include the likes of Bud Light (1), Natural Ice (15), Icehouse (20) and Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer (7) — the “All-Time Top Brewers” (which should read “breweries” in my opinion and not “brewers”, since they list the breweries themselves and not the names of the people who formulated each recipe, etc.); the top 25 “Places to Have a Pint” (which includes Maine’s own Ebenezer’s Pub (1) in Lovell, and Novare Res Bier Cafe (21) here in Portland); and lastly, the “Alstrom Bros’ Top Beers” which “made us stop, think and drink in 2009”. Six of which were brewed in New England, and two of which here in Maine (Vagabond from Allagash and surprisingly, Local Harvest from Sebago).
Cross-checking the lists with my own drinking experiences, I’ve personally had more than half (14, if my count is right) of the “All-Time Top 24 Beers on Planet Earth” and 8 of the “25 Most-Wanted Beers”, including the top 3. Not bad since probably 80% of the beers and the breweries on all of these lists (except the list of swill) aren’t available in Maine. Here are the All-Time Top 25 and the 25 Most-Wanted (after the jump… just click it). How many have you had?
It really hadn’t hit me that the end of a decade, the first decade of the twenty-first century — one in which I graduated from high school (early in the decade) and college (late in the decade); one in which I turned twenty-one and one in which my love of Better Beer blossomed — is only a few weeks away. It’s really hard to believe. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is…
I just wanted to pass along a neat article from MSN which friend passed to me a few days ago about an extremely microbrewing trend emerging around the country which I had never heard of called “Nanobrewing”. According to MSN, “The nanobrewery concept allows one or a few good craft brewers to spend a few weekends a month brewing batches of beer that can be sold to pubs in their communities,” Hall, a full-time physicist,…
Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Co. — makers of Samuel Adams — announced yesterday that he had a VERY BIG Valentines Day present for small breweries around the country. He told the members of the Brewers Association that Boston Beer will sell 20,000 pounds of hops that otherwise — due to rationing and market share as a result of the shortage — would not be available to said smaller breweries. In addition, the…
The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram has written an awesome article on the fast-growing trend of brewery tours and the tours offered across the state of Maine (from breweries like Shipyard, Allagash, Atlantic Brewing Co., etc.); many of which offer samples!To read the article, complete with tour times & info, click here. [image via Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram]
According to CNN Money this week, while Colorado boasts 44 independent breweries, Georgia, with twice the population, has only three, down from eight a decade ago. And new rules governing brewery tours could reduce that number to zero, says Fred Bensch, owner of Sweetwater Brewing in Atlanta, by driving away thirsty crowds and eliminating the brewers’ best marketing tool.”This would totally cripple us,” Bensch says. The dispute has been fermenting since May, when the Georgia…
Beer is interesting. The more you learn about it, the more strange facts you find out. Here are 10 little-known beer facts, as compiled by Mark Jacob of the Chicago Tribune:
Everywhere you look on the internet, you’ll notice that people absolutely love lists. We are being bombarded with “top 10 of this” and “7 best of that”, and yet they are so dang addicting you want to click to see if you agree. It’s no different in the beer world where you will see lists such as “15 Best IPAs” and “The Worlds 7 Greatest Stouts”. I have nothing against these types of posts at…