Randy Mosher, Author at Randy Mosher

The HyperFlavors of Seltzers

Love them or hate the very idea, hard seltzers are here to stay—at least until the Next Big Thing comes along. They’re here for several reasons. First, they were consciously created to suit a general trend towards more healthful alcoholic beverages. With their transparent spritziness and lightness in alcohol and calories, seltzers deliver on this request. Second, they’re “my own” drink for a chunk of the younger drinking generation. Additionally, there has been a decades-long trend in candy, snacks and other products for ever more explosive, “hyper” flavors, delivering more intensity than conventional ingredients can.

Stout: Rich and creamy stout with chocolate and coffee undertones.Photo for menu

Beyond ‘Roasty’: Widen Your Stout Vocabulary

Rich, dark, deeply flavored and sometimes beastly, stouts are a style that people don’t like, they love. Or hate. There’s no “meh” in stout-land. The near-universal rap from the haters is that “it’s heavy” or strong, or filling, and sometimes they are, just like any style. But one of the world’s most popular stouts isn’t even as strong, or rich, or filling as your average mass-market lager—it’s as light on its feet as a ballerina—and you can dance with her all night long.

Healthy food. Assortment of dried fruits and nuts on a wooden table

More of the Flavors We Love: Fruits and Spices in IPAs

No question, people love IPAs. A prime reason is that they are supreme showcases for the heady aromatics of hops: resin, pine, herbs, citrus, stonefruit, tropical fruit and more. As most of these vocabulary terms describe foods, this suggests a question: If these food flavors are so delicious in IPAs, why don’t we just add them directly? Despite some purists out there, we’ve done exactly that.

Wassailing: Carol singers rewarded with the wassail bowl.. Date: 16th/17th century

Wassailing Through the Holidays

Wassailing conjures up images of scarf-draped, rosy-cheeked carolers singing to orphans and shut-ins in their snow-globe village, Hallmark card style. You can think whatever nostalgic thing you like, but the fact is, “wassail” is a noun, not a verb, and the custom is about drinking, not singing.

Beer. Glass of cold craft beer with water drops

Lager: The Surprisingly Complex Flavor of Beery Beers

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.

Wit, Weizen & Weisse

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.

A Tonic for Our Times

“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.

beer, gose, stange, glass, wheat, grain, salt, gold, amber, white, bead board

The Tightrope of Gose

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.

Beer glass with Raw material hops and pineapple for beer fermentation. Concept beer craft. beer homemade.

Seeing Through the Haze: Double & Triple “Juicy” IPAs

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.

Flavor Assault: Sour-Sweet-Bitter-Fruity-Hazy-Funky 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.