Golden lagers don’t pounce on you like a needy puppy, humping your leg and looking for approval. You have to come to them, meet them on their own terms, and live with them for a while. Slow down and pay attention. Only then will they reveal their charms.
In Western culture, wheat is more than a foundation of cuisine, frequently chosen to symbolically represent the life-giving power of nature. Its history goes all the way back to the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. For countless generations, wheat was one of the wild grains selected and replanted, eventually nurtured into high-yielding domesticated versions. Its cousin barley was carefully developed into the perfect brewing grain. While much of wheat breeding was aimed at making better bread, evidence shows that some wheat was bred for brewing.
“Tonic” refers to quinine, which is used today as an effective anti-malarial treatment. It’s tightly raspy bitterness is at the heart of this medicine-turned-beverage, and is the reason it works so well to cut the sweetness as used in the famous cocktail. Grocery store brands are pretty one-dimensional, and the specialty brands seem expensive enough to at least investigate a DIY version.
Despite the slow, orderly evolution and subtle trends that beer styles often follow, there are many cases where something new—or obscure, or even dead—will suddenly catch fire and fit the moment perfectly. This is the case for gose, which disappeared in the 1960s from its home in Northeastern Germany after a couple of centuries or more. I’ve been writing about this fascinating style since the 1990s; for a while, gose got only sporadic love from craft breweries, mostly as an exercise in curiosity. At some point about ten years ago, this reclusive style bounded onto the American craft scene, ready to rock.
Sublime juice. Yeasty swill. The apex of 15,000 years of brewing art. Why can’t these lazy brewers clarify their beers? Deeply held opinions swirl around these controversial beers. Whatever your feeling, there’s no denying that these aromatic, fruit-tinged IPAs have upset the norms around IPA, including the level of passionate devotion to them.
While sour beers are unlikely to ever dominate our beer landscape, they’ve emerged from the shadowy backwaters and taken their rightful place on the shelves alongside so-called “normal” beers.
In the last few years, a cluster of new beer styles has been creating a lot of excitement: sour IPAs and/or milkshake IPAs. They really are quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
In the last couple of years, this loosely defined style has turned into a feeding frenzy driven by craft beer’s hyper-enthusiastic core. These are the beers that devotees will wait in line for, hoard, covet, trade and generally lust after.
Trip was organized by Diego Masiero, my Brazilian publisher of Radical Brewing, in coordination with Mondiale de la Bière and BrasilBrau (local equivalent to Craft Brewers Conference) in São Paulo. In addition to helping judge Mondiale, we had a Radical Brewing booth at BrasilBrau, and I gave a speech.
I had been researching and recreating antique vermouth recipes for some time before I was Invited to Northern Spain by Los Cerverceros Caseros, the Spanish homebrewers’ association. I was excited to see vermouth everywhere in Bilbao, Barcelona and Madrid, and fascinated to see how the locals enjoyed it.