Beervana Podcast

Today I offer three beers that really impressed me. But they also made me aware of the trajectory their breweries are traveling. With Squeezy Rider, Neon Lights, and Bird-Day #1, we have liquid metaphors for where Deschutes, Ommegang, and Pelican are heading.

Guinness is treated as a beer as often as a brewery, as if it is a single, immutable force. Like Pacifico or Heineken, naming the company names the beer. Yet the beer we think of when we name the brewery doesn't date to 1759, but two hundred years later.

Brief Podcast/Show Programing Note by Jeff Alworth & Patrick Emerson

They’re fruity, expressive, and fun to drink, yet thanks to poor style-branding, people avoid them. A modest proposal: just call saisons IPAs. Okay, maybe “farmhouse” IPAs.

With the release of two new stouts, Breakside debuts a new approach to barrel-aging. Borrowing a page from the wild ale playbook, they blend not just different vintages, but different beers to create more integrated, subtle beers than the standard approach of single-batch blends.

We learned over the weekend that the proposed beer tax hike in Oregon, the one that would have given us a tax twice as expensive as any other state’s, has been pulled. Now backers want to set up a task force, but there are many reasons to think they’re not acting in good faith.

Today we speak to David Walker of Firestone Walker. The California brewery turns 25 this year, and its own evolution, from a brewery specializing in an English pale ale made on a modified Burton union system, to one purchased by a multinational brewery in the great consolidation phase of the middle-teens now featuring multiple product lines and locations, closely mirrors that of craft brewing itself. In our conversation, we use Firestone Walker’s experience to refract the lessons of the past 25 years of American brewing.

Oh my, do we have some fun for you today. We’re breathless with excitement over today’s topic: taxes. A new bill arrived in the Oregon legislature to tax breweries at twice the level of the next highest state, and we thought it was a good moment to step back and look at taxes and the way they function in our economy as well as the way they’ve helped shape and guide the development of beer. Despite the dry subject, stick with us—this should actually be an entertaining hour.

Every now and again, an explorer will follow a path deep into a thicket before finally tracing their way back out. The Sherpa has lately been following American-brewed Czech tmavés deep into the underbrush, and today’s edition reveals what he found.

Following last week's discussion about the way craft beer has changed since the first major acquisition, of Goose Island in 2011, we started thinking about the grander scope of craft brewing. How did we go from brewpubs serving amber ales and porters to milkshake IPAs. As two old guys who saw most of it, we spend the show charting that dizzying course.