When you bring up beer styles that are perfect for cold winter weather the most obvious styles people will point to are rich, dark and malty beers like porter and stout. There are a number of other heavy and boozy beers like barleywine, tripel and quadruple that many also use to keep warm in the coldest part of the […]
Breweries can find themselves in a tough position when they brew a “flagship” beer for a while and then decide to change the recipe. The need to change the recipe can happen for a number of reasons, a new brewer who wants to make a mark, changing tastes of a customer base, issues with availability of […]
Recently many breweries are launching with very hop-heavy lineups, some brewing IPAs and other hop forward styles almost exclusively. I’ve visited a few breweries with 4-5 IPAs or pale ales available and nothing else. While I understand the reasons for this, IPAs pay the bills, it’s hard to completely judge a brewery until they branch out into […]
It has been a rough couple of years for the Sam Adams brand. While their parent company Boston Beer has had some success with their hard cider, tea and seltzer business their share of the beer market has slipped. As big beer buys out craft brands and takes them national and the explosion of small local breweries continues the […]
I hear a lot of complaining about the prices of beer, and only some of it is justified. It does feel like some places intentionally inflate their prices, I am amazed how many 4 packs of local IPA break the $20 mark. In fairness, a lot of popular breweries could pump up their prices even […]
My beer review articles are never just tasting notes, I always try to start each article with some information about the style, the brewery, relevant news, an opinion, or a personal story. This is always the more challenging part of the article (it’s easy to write out the tasting notes), so when I am shopping for […]
This spring my I made a friendly wager with my good friend Ari on the winner of American League East (baseball for the non-sports fans). While I am a lifelong New Englander and huge Red Sox fan he lives in Long Island and roots for the Yankees. The bet was for a twelve pack of […]
I’ve mentioned numerous times that I love blind beer tastings. We all have inherent bias for/against certain breweries and beers based on our previous experience tasting their beers (or even positive and negative experiences at the breweries), and sampling the beers blind removes any of these biases. While my favorite set of blind tastings are the ones […]
New Hampshire beer has a tendency to get overlooked due to the crazy beer scenes in the surrounding states. Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont each have a number of the most sought-after breweries in the world, featuring beers that frequent the tops of many crowd-sourced and critic generated best beer lists. New Hampshire also has a slew of well respected […]
Last Thursday I started a 12 day vacation, the first long vacation I’ve taken since last Christmas. Most of my vacation is devoted to family time, but I’ve had a few chances to do things for myself, including a trip to Trillium Brewing Company in Canton on the first day. Always nice to stock up the […]
Hoppy Boston 