Taplines by VinePair

05.21.2024

The Inside Story of "Black Is Beautiful" Stout, One of the Biggest Cause Beers Ever Brewed

In the early months of the pandemic, Marcus Baskerville was working as the head brewer at Weathered Souls Brewing Company, the brewery he co-founded in San Antonio, when a police officer five states away murdered George Floyd. Marcus, who would...

05.07.2024

How Budweiser's Iconic 'Whassup!' Ad Went Down

In 1999, Vinny Warren was working at Chicago ad firm DDB and on the hunt for a hit idea for a Super Bowl spot for his client, Budweiser. The King of Beers was still selling better than Bud Light at...

04.23.2024

Angry Orchard and the Fight for Hard Cider's Soul

Joining Taplines today is Ryan Burk, the former head cider maker of Angry Orchard Hard Cider. These days, he’s making cider under his own label in upstate New York, working as a co-founder of the beverage innovation firm Feel Goods...

04.09.2024

How Beer Boosted the First Wine Cooler Boom

Nothing exists in a vacuum, Taplines listener, and beer certainly doesn’t. When Stuart Bewley and his cofounder dreamed up the idea for California Cooler, single-serve fermented-fruit-based ready-to-drink in the mid-70s, they couldn't have known that it would inspire knockoffs from...

03.26.2024

Craft Brewing's "White Dudes with Beards" Dilemma

In the mid-2010s, J Jackson-Beckham, PhD was an academic with a homebrewing habit, blogging incisively about what she called “the unbearable whiteness of brewing.” Her deep expertise and singular voice eventually caught the eye of the Brewers Association, which tapped...

03.12.2024

The Beginning of Goose Island’s Game-Changing Barrel-Aging Program

Joining Taplines today is Seth Gross, a former Goose Island Brewing Co. brewer who was at the meeting where Goose Island then-brewmaster Greg Hall and the late, legendary master distiller Booker Noe, of the Beam bourbon dynasty, first came up...

02.27.2024

Wolfgang Puck and the Brewpub Conundrum

Today on Taplines, we’re joined by none other than Wolfgang Puck for a candid, clear-eyed look at how his Eureka brewpub — “one of the loudest salvos in elevating the role of craft beer in dining,” as Tom Acitelli put...

02.13.2024

The Rise and Fall of the Beloved Beer Ball

In the mid-’70s, as the Light Beer Wars were starting to heat up, a family-run brewery in central New York called F.X. Matt — one of the nation’s oldest, and still running to this very day — came up with...

01.30.2024

Remembering Ice Cube’s Iconic, Infamous St. Ides Rhymes

Joining Taplines today is Jacinta Howard, a veteran culture and music writer and editor in Atlanta, to talk about a very specific, very special, and very star-studded "sponsored content" series that hit the airwaves back in the late ‘80s and...

01.16.2024

How Left Hand Bottled America's First Nitro Stout

When Left Hand Brewing opened for business outside of Denver in the early '90s, the plan wasn’t to become known nationwide as “the milk stout brewery” or “the nitro brewery,” and certainly not “the nitro milk stout brewery.” But when...

12.12.2023

How Non-Alcoholic Beer Got Cool

Athletic Brewing Company wasn’t the first non-alcoholic beer brand, not by a long shot. But it was the first to successfully cross the flavors and aesthetics of the craft beer segment consistently, and at scale. Its considerable success since first...

12.05.2023

How Coors Capitalized on Craft Brewing's Boom

Returning to Taplines today for the second installment of our two-part episode about Blue Moon's historic, controversial rise is Keith Villa, the former Coors brewer who created the iconic, top-selling Belgian-style witbier in the mid-'90s. We discuss the brand’s soaring...

11.28.2023

Blue Moon Rising

Joining Taplines today to talk about Blue Moon’s historic, controversial rise, is Keith Villa, the brewer who created the original recipe for the Belgian-style beer at Coors after earning his PhD in brewing from the University of Brussels. From the...

11.21.2023

How Finance Bros Discovered Hazy IPAs

Joining Taplines today is longtime beverage-alcohol journalist, VinePair writer at large, and author of the hotly anticipated forthcoming book "Dusty Booze," Aaron Goldfarb, to discuss Other Half Brewing Company's meteoric rise from humble beginnings to coveted hype brewery. Having found...

11.14.2023

The Modern Beer Business’s First Black Business League

Not to get all political on here, but historically speaking, Black people have not exactly been welcomed into the halls of power in the American beer industry. There are a dozen well-documented reasons for that, many of which stem less...

11.07.2023

Schlitz's Epic Self-Inflicted Downfall

In the early '60s, a fellow named Bob Uihlein took the reins at what was then a brewery second only to the mighty Anheuser-Busch in the American beer business pantheon—the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schlitz was known...

10.31.2023

How Brewer-Activists Popped One of the South's Worst ABV Caps

Idiosyncrasies abound in this country's state-by-state approach to booze regulation, and South Carolina is home to plenty of 'em. Which is why, in 2005, Jaime Tenny — who would go on to open North Charleston’s COAST Brewing Company with her...

10.24.2023

Behind the Scenes with Budweiser's Famous Frogs

In 1994, the mighty pre-InBev Anheuser-Busch made a somewhat shocking decision to do a comedic ad for its flagship brand. This was a big deal — up until then, Budweiser’s ads hewed to the heartland with sincere, wholesome, Americana themes...

10.17.2023

Who Invented Pumpkin Beer?

If you didn’t know any better, you might assume that the whole pumpkin beer “thing” was an offshoot of Starbucks’ pumpkin-spiced-latte phenomenon. But it most certainly is not. The PSL only hit the American drinking public in 2003. Pumpkin beers,...

10.10.2023

When America's Biggest Import Went Dutch

Heineken's longstanding dominance as the top-selling import in post-Prohibition America was thanks in large part to the efforts of an American importer, New York's Van Munching and Company. But by the end of the 80s, the Dutch brewer had decided...

10.03.2023

The Yuppie-fication of Heineken

For most of the 20th century, Heineken was the country's top imported beer by far, and by the 80s, thanks to decades of empire-building effort by its third-party American importer, New York's Leo Van Munching and Company, the Dutch brand...

09.26.2023

The New Yorker's Gift to Craft Brewing

The year: 2008. The magazine: The New Yorker. The story: “A Better Brew: The Rise of Extreme Beer.” Was it the most important magazine piece ever written about craft brewing? Those who know of what they speak, like Tom Acitelli,...

09.19.2023

Writing the PBR Brand Bible

This is the second installment of a Taplines two-parter about the early days of PBR’s cultural and commercial renaissance after the turn of the 21st century. Our guest for these back-to-back episodes is Neal Stewart, a former Pabst Brewing Company...

09.12.2023

How Hipsters First Found PBR

Diehard Taplines listeners already know we're fascinated by Pabst Blue Ribbon's ascendance last decade as the ultimate insider beer for the United States' various outsiders' scenes, thanks to our earlier episode with Steve "Stix" Nilsen, who worked on the Blue...

09.05.2023

The Road Trip That Changed Craft Beer Forever

In 2007, after two decades of professional brewing, Teri Fahrendorf hit the road as an itinerant brewer for an odyssey spanning thousands of miles, dozens of brewery visits and collaborations, and a third of a calendar year. Along the way,...

08.29.2023

Budweiser's Infamous Craft-Beer Smear

The dust had hardly settled on Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2015 acquisition of Elysian Brewing Company when Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad, “Brewed the Hard Way,” poured salt in the wound by punching down at the entire craft brewing industry on the biggest...

08.22.2023

Anheuser-Busch's Corona Killer That Wasn't

Corona enjoyed rip-roaring stateside success in the '90s, and the mighty Anheuser-Busch eventually realized it would need an answer. In hopes of blunting the runaway success of the Mexican lager, the King of Beers launched its own beer that came...

08.15.2023

Who Would Actually Acquire Shock Top?!

As you may have heard, one of the world’s biggest cannabis companies, Tilray, just last week acquired a whole bunch of craft breweries and brands from the world’s biggest macrobrewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. It’s an $85 million dollar deal with bold,...

08.08.2023

How New Glarus Got Big by Staying Small

In 2002, Wisconsin’s New Glarus Brewing Company, makers of the beloved Spotted Cow farmhouse ale, announced it’d be pulling out of the Illinois market next door. Six months later, it was gone. The decision shocked and even angered some folks...

08.01.2023

At Dogfish Head, the Imperial IPA Is Born

Imagine a world before IPAs. Can’t do it, can you, Taplines listener? But it’s true: around the turn of this century, the American craft brewing landscape was awash in ambers, brown ales, lagers, and precious few versions of the hop-forward...

07.25.2023

How Hard Tea First Went Viral

“Tea Partay,” a 2006 spoof-rap spot from Smirnoff to roll out its new hard tea flavored malt beverage, so perfectly met that moment in the American zeitgeist that it went viral before anybody really understood what “going viral” even was....

07.18.2023

When the Empire State Bet Big on Craft Brewing

In 2012, New York State had just 95 breweries — dramatically fewer than its fourth-in-the-nation population suggested it should. Five years later, that number had doubled, and the Empire State was well on its way to becoming the craft-beverage hotbed...

07.11.2023

Who Killed Four Loko?

When Four Loko mania reached mainstream fever pitch in 2010, Doctor Joshua Sharfstein was the principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He joins Taplines today to tell a side of the story that got lost in the...

07.04.2023

Anheuser-Busch's AmeriCan Crisis

Fourth of July is traditionally one of the biggest beer-selling holidays on the calendar, and for the past decade-ish, Anheuser-Busch InBev has capitalized on the holiday by remaking Budweiser with a Stars-and-Stripes label and a jingoistic name. Known colloquially as...

06.27.2023

The Most Important Craft Brewery You've Never Heard Of

There must have been something in the water in Northern California in the late '70s, because the region produced craft brewing legends in scads. Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman joins Taplines today to bring us back to that heady milieu...

06.20.2023

When Goose Island "Sold Out"

In 2011, Chicago's Goose Island Brewing Co. sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev, kicking off a decade-long acquisition spree by the macro brewer... AND a snarling debate over the ethics of individual firms "selling out" the craft brewing "movement." John Laffler would...

06.13.2023

The End of the Light Beer Wars

Don’t call it a comeback, listener, but today Maureen Ogle is making her triumphant Taplines return to take us back to the frontlines of the Light Beer Wars, that ferocious 20th-century struggle for swill-based supremacy between America’s emerging macrobrewers. After...

06.06.2023

How America’s First Craft Brewery Was (Re)Born

The year was 1965 when a young Fritz Maytag acquired 51% of a failing San Francisco concern known as "The Steam Beer Brewing Company." The success the industrial scion had transforming what we now know as Anchor Brewing Co. is...

05.30.2023

Solving the PBR Paradox

Pabst Blue Ribbon has been sold in these United States since the late 1800s. It's fine, nothing special. But around the turn of the 21st century, something... changed. People started drinking PBR. Like, cool people, and a lot of PBR....

05.23.2023

The Ice Age: Bros, Blogs, and Smirnoff Malt Beverages

The gag, codified as it was on slapdash websites like Bros Icing Bros, was simple: hide a Smirnoff Ice for your bro to find, and he’d have to get down on one knee and chug it. But even at the...

05.16.2023

How Coors Busted Its Union and Boosted Its Boycott

Conventional business-school wisdom is that most consumer boycotts won't work, because it's almost impossible to put organize a big enough group of customers to make a difference in a big company's bottom line. But starting in 1957 a coalition of...

05.09.2023

When Anheuser-Busch Went "Craft"

In the early Aughts, as the craft brewing industry recovered from its slump the prior decade, macrobrewers started to realize that they couldn't just ignore the beardos and their bizarre "microbrews" anymore. But as they say, if you can't beat...

05.02.2023

Craft Beer's Oval Office Origin Story

A lot of people know that in 1978, the Carter administration loosened federal laws about homebrewing with a stroke of the executive pen that has been partially credited with launching the craft brewing industry. But far fewer know what that...

04.25.2023

The Birth of Line Culture

Throughout the Aughts, craft beer's popularity rose roughly in tandem with social media, and in 2010, the two would collide at Northern California's Russian River Brewing Co. Husband-and-wife team Vince and Natalie Cilurzo opened the taproom one wintry Saturday expecting...

04.18.2023

How the Light Beer Wars Began

The Original Lite Beer from Miller hit American supermarket shelves in 1975 — and from then on, nothing was the same. To learn how the beer that we'd come to know simply as Miller Lite lit the fuse on the...

04.11.2023

Introducing Taplines

Introducing Taplines, a brand-spankin’-new podcast about the modern history of American beer, only on the VinePair Podcast Network. Each week, contributing editor and columnist Dave Infante will interview a different guest about a triumph, tribulation, or turning point in the...