The issue of exploding fruited beers was back in the spotlight after reports of Trillium Daily Serving cans exploding when warmed. Jim Vorel at Paste had some thoughts on this phenomenon and Trillium’s response. My thoughts were pretty blunt, if a beer explodes it is the brewers fault, and it is ridiculous to blame the […]
My first real apartment in the Boston area (outside of a couple months in a summer sublet in Harvard Square) was near Davis Square in Somerville. It was a fun place to live, especially in my early 20’s, sharing a place with some college buddies, and having a bit of money and minimal responsibility for […]
In a “normal” year, one where we aren’t dealing with a pandemic, I probably make it to almost as many breweries in Maine as I do in Massachusetts. I usually take 4-5 trips to Maine in a year and every one of them involves multiple brewery stops. Despite that there are still many breweries in […]
I made an explosive beer once. I was homebrewing a dry-hopped saison at my old apartment in Watertown. I pitched the yeast, got a nice strong fermentation, transferred to the secondary for the dry-hopping when it slowed to a crawl, then bottled it a week later. After waiting the nominal 2 weeks for the bottling […]
As we hit the four month mark of social distancing/shut-down I am evaluating what has changed for me, especially because it seems like it will be a long time until life gets back anywhere towards “normal”. I miss restaurants even though they were an occasional treat for me, and my bar visits were even more […]
When a new local brewery is trying to fund-raise in an effort to get off the ground I usually try to throw in a few bucks, I am fortunate enough to be able to afford it and I am always on board with more local beers. I am especially interested in supporting new breweries with […]
Craft brewers have been dealing with the business changes caused by COVID in all sorts of creative ways, from new beers and artwork to an increased and improved social media and marketing presence to different ways of getting their creations into the hands of their customers. Aeronaut Brewing in Somerville has started posting a whole […]
Quick programming note before I get started. I am doing a family trip up to Maine later this week, so this will be my last Hoppy Boston post until at least next Thursday. It will be weird doing the Maine trip without all of the brewery stops, but I will still get some excellent beer […]
At the beginning of the month I wrote an article about how it’s tough to get fired up to write about beer with everything going on in the country/world right now. This is still a struggle for me, but it was cathartic to put some of my feeling about all of these topics down in […]
I had an interesting back-and-forth with a national beer writer on Twitter recently. He wrote an article about being burned out on trying NEIPAs, saying that he has tried so many poorly made versions of the style that it has killed all enthusiasm to keep sampling more. As a New England-centric beer writer I actually […]
Hoppy Boston 