Le château des Princes de Chimay profile

Belgian “Normale”

The mysteries and uniqueness of Belgian beer are what drew me into the world of beer and brewing, and I still find them delicious and captivating. However, this tiny country’s beers cover so much territory, it seems wise to limit the scope here. So, let’s put all of Belgium’s tart and funky lambics, oaky oud bruins and creamy witbiers off to the side for the future. That still leaves us with a treasure-box of conventionally fermented beers in a variety of strengths, colors and personalities. 

Prepare craft beer and enjoying aroma of fresh grains

The Heady Aromas of IPA

IPAs currently accounts for about half of all craft beers sold in the US. Their bold flavors and shape-shifting characters, plus the fun of terroir and varietal characteristics make them endlessly fascinating. Like most beers, they’re mostly malt, hops, water and yeast, but obviously the hops are the starring attraction.

A full glass of cold lager beer with frothy foam.

The Limits of Lager

When beer culture was a shiny new thing decades ago, experts often divided the world into lagers on one side and ales on the other. Some even equated lagers with white wines and ales with reds. The idea was that ales were bolder, stronger and more bitter than lagers. Assuming that lager meant only pale, pilsner-like beers, maybe there’s some logic to it.

fizz bubble soda drink tropical

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. 

Two mugs of beer

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.

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. 

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