I do love that there are so many beers out there with their own little story to tell. Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues is one such beer in that it kick-started the use of cans in craft brewing when it was released back in 2002. That sounds pretty cool right - but then you remember that misspent youth swilling Hoffmiester out of a can in the early 90s and you think… “Wait a minute - wasn’t beer always available in a can?”For anyone alive today (that includes you even though the pandemic has sucked the will to live from us...

You may have seen in our Wednesday mailer the sad news that the Spencer Brewery in Massachusetts has decided to close up shop. If you haven’t heard much about this producer, it was the only US Trappist certified brewery and one of the most recent additions to the very minimal and select club of only 14 breweries worldwide.Many of the Trappist breweries have been around for hundreds of years and if there were one business model you’d bet on for longevity, it's the self sustainable ethos of the monks - so the closure is somewhat of a surprise. Is it...

In last week’s blog we talked about innovation in beer some 200 years ago with the infamous Kwak glass. Today I thought we should look to more recent times and a canny piece of kit developed in 2009 at Sierra Nevada called the Hop Torpedo. Ken Grossman, owner of Sierra Nevada, really is one of the pioneers of the US craft scene with a brewing history that begins way back in the 1960s. The first few Sierra Nevada releases back in the early 80s were a hop-forward pale ale, a fresh hop IPA and a malt and hop heavy barley...

The early 1800s was a good time to be a mail delivery person in Belgium. If you were canny and got your routes to pass through the town of Dendermonde, when in need of thirst quenching sustenance, you could pull up at the De Hoorn Inn and have a decent beer poured into a special glass that would fit neatly onto a holder on the side of your carriage. There would be no need to leave the precious mail cargo stored in the carriage and you could quaff away to your heart's content. Ingenious.This beer was, of course, Kwak, its...

It’s always nice to actually read up on a brewery whose beers you’ve been drinking for a while but basically know nothing about other than that you enjoy said beers.Thornbridge is one such brewery for me. I’ve always been a fan of the Jaipur IPA and always thought that the brewery was steeped in history like so many other British breweries but, in truth, they’ve only been established since 2005. In craft beer years this arguably makes the brewery quite old (craft beer years are a bit like cat years I think) but, in the context of historical brewing, it has...