Southern States

Costco Beers

January 29, 2008

In related Costco news, Miller’s Brew Blog is reporting that the big box store chain will be creating three private label beer brands under the Kirkland name: a hefeweizen, amber ale and pale ale. The Gordon Biersch production brewery in San Jose, California — who also makes competitor Trader Joe’s private label beers — will [...]

Keep Reading →

Free As In Freedom

January 27, 2008

While searching for a generic beer label for my previous post, I stumbled upon the Free Beer organization, a Danish art project applying the open source or Creative Commons idea to beer. The Creative Commons is a more open approach to copyright law, created by people who think copyright law as it exists today does [...]

Keep Reading →

Boscos Opens Production Brewery

January 25, 2008

Boscos, the small brewpub chain with locations in Tennessee and Arkansas, has completed work on their new production brewery in Memphis. The first batch of beer was brewed December 31 of last year by my friend Chuck Skypeck, who also sent along a few photos of the new facility. If you’re like me, you can’t [...]

Keep Reading →

Mississippi’s First Bottles of Beer

January 20, 2008

If you’re a beer lover, I imagine Mississippi must not be the best place to live. During the last thirty years, while most of the rest of the country was discovering craft beer with wild abandon, less than a half-dozen microbreweries or brewpubs have opened. Of those, only two are left. And one of those, [...]

Keep Reading →

Baptists Live in Parallel Universe

January 15, 2008

The only explanation I can come up with for this is that Baptists must live in some kind of parallel universe. According to today’s Baptist Press, Baptists in Texas, and presumably everywhere else, are mobilizing their forces to protest a grave new threat to their youth. What horror could possibly be the cause of this [...]

Keep Reading →

Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished

December 21, 2007

I confess at the outset that this story has nothing to do with beer, but is about bourbon … sort of. But it is also about the assault on alcohol — and to some extent civil liberty — a subject I find myself writing about more and more these days, so that’s why I decided [...]

Keep Reading →

North Carolina Targets Parents

December 12, 2007

One of my favorite things about the internet, is how cyclical and serpentine it can be. You can start out somewhere and if you follow enough tangents — something I can’t frankly help — you end up in new and wonderful places or, at a minimum, at a place you either didn’t expect to find [...]

Keep Reading →

MADD Takes On Gladys Kravitz Role

October 4, 2007

The Florida chapter of the neo-prohibitionist group MADD is trying a novel approach to keep everyone but the teetotalers off the street: become Gladys Kravitz. If that doesn’t ring a bell, she was the very nosy neighbor on the 60′s-era television show Bewitched. Not only did she watch through the curtains from across the street, [...]

Keep Reading →

Alabama Loses One to Fire

July 5, 2007

There are already painfully few craft brewers in Alabama and yesterday another one — Olde Towne Brewing — was lost, destroyed by fire. It had been Huntsville, Alabama’s only brewery since Prohibition ended, opening in 2004. According to the Huntsville Times, the fire began in the middle of the night — around 2:30 a.m. — [...]

Keep Reading →

Miami’s New Vices

June 29, 2007

A south Florida distributor friendly to craft beer, Fresh Beer Inc., sent in the following article that ran in Thursday’s Miami Herald, entitled “Microbrewers push the envelope with extreme beer” (thanks Adam). It’s a nice overview of the recent spate of big beers with some history and examples, perfect for the uninitiated and enthusiast alike. [...]

Keep Reading →

Tennessee Scopes Out the Future

June 25, 2007

When I turned 21, oh so many years ago, the state I grew up in — Pennsylvania — still didn’t have pictures on their driver’s licenses. As a result, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board had their own method for insuring that no one under the age of 21 could get served. It was called a [...]

Keep Reading →

Georgia Action Alert

June 17, 2007

I almost missed posting this before it’s too late. According to the new grassroots organization, Support Your Local Brewery, there’s legislation in Georgia that will be bad for small brewers and their ability to offer samples of their beer at their brewery during tours. The vote is on Tuesday, June 19 so if you’re in [...]

Keep Reading →

More CBC Photos

May 11, 2007

As my grandfather was fond of saying, “the faster I go, the behinder I get.” I’ve only now gotten around to going through the rest of the photos that I took in Austin, Texas while attending the 2007 Craft Brewers Conference. They’re all pretty random, but they’re now posted at the photo gallery if you’re [...]

Keep Reading →

Celis’ Return to Texas Doubtful

May 9, 2007

In his regular column, The Beer Sphere, in the Dallas/Forth Worth Star-Telegram, Barry Shlachter reports that the “long-anticipated collaboration between Belgian brewing legend Pierre Celis and Texas’ Real Ale Brewing Co. has fallen through.” From Shlachter’s column: “Just too many obstacles,” said Brad Farbstein, president of the Blanco-based micro-brewery. Real Ale’s proposed “Brussels” line of [...]

Keep Reading →

Vinnie Cilurzo’s Keynote Address

April 24, 2007

Vinnie Cilurzo gave the keynote address at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference in Austin, Texas. Hoping to spark a new tradition, like Sam Calagione last year, he served some of his own beer so everyone assembled could drink a toast to craft beer’s success and to everyone’s efforts that led to that success. He set [...]

Keep Reading →

CBC Brewers Reception

April 19, 2007

The BA hosted a Brewers Reception at Stubbs Bar-B-Que in downtown Austin Wednesday night before the official start to the annual Craft Brewers Conference. There was great food and beer from local breweries. Some highlights were the Rye Pale Ale from the Real Ale Brewery here in Austin and a nice barleywine, though I can’t [...]

Keep Reading →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →