This week Doug and Tony talk Porters season, craft beer independence and exporting the brewpub idea for breweries big and small. In the Home Brew FAQ we talk about finding the right balance during fermentation. The stories that inspired our conversation are below. Feel free to reach out to us with questions or suggestions.

Russo: Fall is brown beer season; here's why that's a good thing

In really broad terms, beer follows the season. Prevailing temperatures notwithstanding, if you think of spring beers as a little more yellow, summer as a little more golden, fall as a little more amber and winter as black, we're pushing through the end of the amber and moving toward black.

Bitter rivalry: conflict brews as craft beer makers take on big firms

A civil war is brewing in the normally convivial craft beer fraternity, as anxiety grows about the threat posed by multinational companies' insatiable thirst for every last drop of the market. Heineken and Molson Coors are both "associate members" of the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba), a situation that rankles with some of its members.

Why big breweries want to go local

We don't have to travel far back in our beer time machine to revisit the year when Goose Island Beer Co. still had only one brewpub, its venerable but not exactly cutting-edge Clybourn Street location. That was 2014, three years after Goose Island's sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev.

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