Live in Massachusetts? If so, this is the weekend to stock up on your beer. Politicians in the state are giving shoppers a break on August 14-15 by allowing tax free shopping. The big difference between this years holiday and previous years is that alcohol is now included in the list of tax free items.
The exemption will apply to most items that cost less than $2,500 including beer, wine and liquor. With state taxes at 6.25% in the state, this will be a nice little break for shoppers. Although those of us shopping in Oregon get tax free shopping everyday, it is a nice boost to consumers who have to pay sales tax every day of the year.
So if you’re in or near Massachusetts, go get your tax free beer.
Often referred to as Beervana or “Americas Beer Capital”, Portland, Oregon is an amazing place to be if you like good beer. Craft beer culture is everywhere around this great city and I love living here. If you’ve never been, I’d highly suggest adding it to your list of upcoming vacation spots.
After taking over this blog, it has been on my todo list to add a beer guide for Portland. The site already had a great guide to Portland, Maine, but I wanted to add more cities (especially my own). Well today I finally sat down and got a good start at creating the Portland, Oregon beer guide.
While I still have more links to add, it’s a great start.
I do however want to expand the city guides into other beer cities, and could use some help. I realize that living in a city helps a lot to know what’s going on. If you are interested in submitting a guide for your city, please contact me. I’d love to add it to the site.
What’s your favorite brewpub or brewery in Portland, Oregon?
Well, I have officially sold BlogAboutBeer.com and after two years and 10 months of launching and running the site, it’s time for me to step down and let someone else take the reins and guide Blog About Beer into the future and beyond. I’ll let the new owner introduce himself so as not to steal his thunder or misrepresent his intentions with the site.
Rather, I wanted to take a minute and say goodbye and, more importantly, say thank you. Thank you to everyone who has read and followed the site since its inception. After nearly 3 years, it’s absolutely difficult for me to see the site go, but I’m confident that I’m leaving it in good, very capable hands. Thanks to all the readers, thanks to everyone who has commented on a post, everyone who has emailed me, everyone who has come up to me at an event to introduce themselves; thanks to all the breweries and companies who have sent me products to review or given me tickets to their events; thanks to BlueHost.com for being a kick-ass web hosting company with virtually zero downtime and great customer service; thanks to the thousands of you who have visited the site and the hundreds who have subscribed to the RSS feed, despite my often embarrassingly dismal coverage of the craft beer world, over the years; thanks to my friends, family and my girlfriend for putting up with my often obsessive blogging habits; and thanks to everyone for your well-wishes in my next endevor, Baxter Brewing Co. (here’s the announcement I made on the site a few weeks ago, in case you missed it).
If you enjoyed what I had to say and want to continue to follow my progress and updates, I’ll definitely be blogging about Baxter’s progress on BaxterBrewing.com from time-to-time, so check it out. And hopefully I can come back to BlogAboutBeer.com for a guest post or two, every once-in-awhile, too.
The site will be in a state of flux over the next few days as the domain and database transfers happen, but please stick around and please give the new author the same level of attention and respect you always showed me. I have no doubt he’ll continue to show you a good time.
And I guess that’s all I have to say about that. So long, and thanks for all the beers!
la’heim,
Luke Livingston
Author, BlogAboutBeer.com – Aug 2007-June 2010
A bill which had been stuck in the Iowa state legislature for quite some time finally passed late last week and was signed into law by Iowa governor Chet Culver. The bill finally allows for beer with an ABV (Alcohol By Volume) percentage of up to 15% to be both brewed and sold in the state of Iowa.
The legislation allows Iowa breweries to apply for newly created licenses to produce beer containing up 15 percent alcohol by volume. Another section of the bill allows Iowa’s beer wholesalers to apply for licenses to sell beers of similar strength. The measure is set to become law at the time of signing.
Previous Iowa law effectively limited alcohol content for beer produced by Iowa breweries to about 6 percent alcohol by volume.
While this was not the first bill of this nature to go before the Iowa legislature, what finally swung the pendulum in favor of higher gravity beer was the help of the Iowa Wholesale Beer Distributors Association. Prior to the passing of this law, high alcohol beers were able to be sold in Iowa, but not by private beer distributors. Instead, the high ABV beers were distributed throughout the state by the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division, a state-run agency.
“We are very supportive of this legislation because it means Iowa beer distributors will have the opportunity to sell high alcohol beer to consumers and to make available a wide variety of beers.” The IWBDA’s Douglas said. “I’m sure some (distributors) are very happy to be able to distribute brands that they weren’t able to before.”
It’s great to see legislation like this pass across the country, as it is always a win for craft breweries and artisan beers (I don’t believe Anheuser-Busch makes anything with an ABV that high). It is proof that more & more people (and “The Man”) are beginning to realize that there are options out there beyond watered-down, low alcohol boring beer and that many beers are on par with wine, not just in alcohol content but in the amount of respect they demand. Congratulations to the Iowa Brewers Guild for a hard fought battle and cheers to the thirsty people of Iowa – happy drinking!
I always had a sneaking suspicion that drinking moderate amounts of beer was good for me. Turns out I’m right. The presence of the antioxidant Xanthohumol in the oils of hop leaves has been known for awhile (I first wrote about it in December of 2007), but this week even more reports and studies on Xanthohumol and its cancer-fighting agents are surfacing. According to the UK Daily Mail,
Researchers at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg have discovered that beer contains a powerful molecule that helps protect against breast and prostate cancers.
Found in hops, the substance called xanthohumol blocks the excessive action of testosterone and estrogen. It also helps to prevent the release of a protein called PSA which encourages the spread of prostate cancer.
While that isn’t new news, this is apparently the first test on Xanthohumol which indicated that it may block the ‘excessive action of testosterone’; the antioxidant was previously thought to only affect estrogen.
‘Research is still early but in trials we hope to further demonstrate that xanthohumol actively prevents prostate cancer development,’ says Clarissa Gerhauser of the Heidelberg centre. If successful, xanthohumol may one day be developed as a cancer-fighting drug.
As many of you may know, or remember, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I lost my mother to breast cancer. So the continued research of beer’s cancer-fighting abilities — and the positive results of that research — just goes to show how truly great this passion of mine, of ours, really is. Cheers to beer.
Live in Massachusetts? If so, this is the weekend to stock up on your beer. Politicians in the state are giving shoppers a break on August 14-15 by allowing tax free shopping. The big difference between this years holiday and previous years is that alcohol is now included in the list of tax free items.
Hi and welcome to Blog About Beer. My name is Logan and I live just north of Portland, Oregon, a city that has more craft breweries than any other in the US. I'm a full time marketer, blogger, and dad to the most beautiful girl in the world. I'm also a homebrewing and craft beer fanatic.