Best in Beer 2025 issue drop! This is kinda like our Christmas. Go dive in over at beerandbrewing.com.

House just passed the bill, which as expected still contains the de facto ban on THC, to take place 365 days from enactment. Government is soon to reopen; the $28-billion hemp-derived THC business is on the clock and fighting for its life.

Granted, lots going on in the news. But the deal to end the shutdown includes a provision that would ban (close the loophole on) hemp-derived THC—a rather popular $30 billion industry—and the mainstream news outlets have barely caught a whiff of it.

Irish whiskey is in a weird place — and new US tariffs sure don’t help. For @vinepair.com, I talked to distillers, fans & insiders about Irish whiskey’s path forward. That includes growing sales in places like Poland, now the #2 market for Irish whiskey after the US. vinepair.com/articles/iri...

One of the very few times I look down my beer-dude nose at wine people is when they're trying to pair it with spicy wings.

Fellas, seems like a good day to remind y'all to NOT burn any witches. Magic's not real. Those are just ladies!

all this for gold-plated shitters, wild

What are the names of the U.S. Navy officers carrying out these orders to serially bomb civilian boats that pose no threat to their own vessels, killing everyone aboard? Surely they’ll want to take personal credit for this honorable service and perhaps wear a little campaign medal on their chest.

Lush export India porter, on cask, at Machine House in Seattle

This is a fantastic beer with a mental yeast blend. So, definitely check it out if you’re into stuff like fantastic beers and mental yeast blends. beerandbrewing.com/recipe-halfw...

Constitutional amendment to require all states to adopt data-driven, nonpartisan redistricting process. AI spits out maps; technocrats and/or judges narrow it down to maybe 5. Each political party rank-orders their preferences, high score wins. In a tie, flip a coin. Stuck with it for a decade.

Beer in Art #1614 The Guitarist, by Hermann Kern, c. late 19th century (Austria, Slovakia)

TIL that Korean has its own portmanteau for the combo of fried chicken and beer—chimaek (치맥), for chikin + maekju. Now ready to die for these people.

Interesting tidbit from Gallup (via Mark Brown newsletter) on the drop in self-reported alcohol consumption.

🎶 won't you take me to ...

Will the hotel industry speak out on this one? Restaurants? Bars? www.cnn.com/2025/08/04/p...

Yesterday was an absolute bucket list day, when I got to visit Brauerei Zehendner in Mönchsambach 30 min south-west from Bamberg together with @louisekrennmair.bsky.social, @johnzee7.bsky.social, @silentdan.bsky.social, @thirstypilgrim.bsky.social and the rest of our Stammtisch crew.

Why should I trust AI with anything when autocorrect continues to insert apostrophes into my possessive “its”?

If I try to look something up on Instagram—like, actually try to find a specific photo or piece of information from there—there’s maybe a 90% chance I'll completely forget what I was looking for.

I like to see craft beer as a global conversation—vectors of influence shooting everywhere, like a mess o’ spaghetti. Anyway, please enjoy this article by Lucy Corne on how Ghana’s brewers are using local starches and winning international medals for their beers: beerandbrewing.com/grown-in-gha...

Longtime pet peeve: Wikipedia redirecting “radler” to “shandy.” I don’t live in England. Most people don’t.

Greenstar Bateman Bier. GABF gold for American amber lager last year, and the nearest brewery to Wrigley. But you know I'm going michelada next.

My father-in-law’s favorite beer is La Chouffe, and he’ll be delighted to hear that it’s currently a local Missouri craft beer: www.brusselstimes.com/1632421/duve...

Rice in beer is flavorless and kind of a PITA to brew with, right? WRONG, NO, and the answer is always NO when people pose dumb questions like that. Fun going down this rabbit hole for our Spring 2025 issue, and I'll have more reporting on this topic pretty soon. beerandbrewing.com/brewing-ingr...

This feels like the right place to announce to the world that I ate my first peanut butter–pickle sandwich yesterday, and it will not be my last. I'll be carefully tweaking each variable, one at a time. Wheels are turning.

Congrats to Nick & team at Soul Barrel! They just won Best Beer in Africa for the third time in four years, each time with a different mixed-culture beer. This year’s top beer is Wild African Soul... and guess what? We’ve already got the recipe: beerandbrewing.com/recipe-soul-...

I subscribe to news and Games and the Athletic—yet I'm still paywalled out of a damn peanut butter–pickle sandwich recipe. Somehow, though, I think I may be able to figure it out.

There's a new yeast paper out with @briangibsontub.bsky.social and @suregork.bsky.social among the authors. They've looked at farmhouse yeast from South American chicha brewers, and the paper has a number of cool results I want to dive into in a thread here.

Really excited to see this one out! I was involved in this joint study with @briangibsontub.bsky.social, Nubia G-V, Mathias H, helping with sequencing and genomics. We characterize strains isolated from Ecuadorian maize chicha, and found many diastatic strains carrying STA1! doi.org/10.1016/j.fm...

Hey nerds! These tips are usually a few minutes long, but fuck it, here’s a whole 15-minute chapter from Bret Kollman Baker’s course on fruit beer. A pretty peek at what you can find among the 100+ deep-dive brewing courses available to our All Access subscribers. beerandbrewing.com/urban-artifa...

Oh, hey, our new issue is out! It’s lovely, aromatic, and not too bitter. beerandbrewing.com/showtime-ipa...

If I were one of the many brewers out there brewing West Coast IPA with lager yeast, I'd be very tempted to also brew a little inside joke called Chico IPL.

“Take and eat; this is my body.” - The Ueckarist

Fun fact: Middle High German had separate words for quiet and loud farts: "fist" and "vurz". From the latter, the New High German word is derived, while the former still exists in some local dialects, also to describe both kinds of farts. #shitposting

Walz: If you say you love freedom but you don't believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love is not freedom, it is privilege.

While we’re (I’m) on this topic, maybe all the cloying overripe sweaty tropical fruit flavors that got us here aren’t the way to growth, even in a “West Coast” IPA, just spitballin’.

I totally get why breweries stopped telling us the IBUs on hazy IPAs. If all your hot-side hops are whirlpool, honestly, those IBUs are squishy—they barely even count. But West Coast is back, bitches, and some of y’all still aren’t telling us. Maybe because your IPAs are too soft?

In 2017, Senator Rubio blasted Rex Tillerson for not presenting the State Department human rights reports with a press conference. What Secretary Rubio is doing is far worse, systematically editing out descriptions of human rights abuses and corruption. www.npr.org/2025/04/18/n...

I'm at a place near me where you can drink all the Asahi you can drink in an hour for the equivalent of $4.74, while eating very good yakitori and garlic rice, and I've decided this should be a basic human right.

I've officially been priced out of international grain as a home brewer with the last three 25kg bags of grain all being Australian Joe White 'Devil Pilsner' of 'Traditional Ale' (AUD$70 & $65 respectively). As someone with limited funds for brewing == crazy international shipping costs.

perfectly hot-smoked salmon enjoyed off the smoker is going to beat the cured and cold-smoked any day of the week, there's a true take that randomly popped into my brain, clearly placed there by the gods of truth

oh, just reflecting on the incredible mental, emotional, professional bandwidth this asshole destroys, via problems of his own creation, for people around the world who would otherwise be focusing on solving real ones

US politics right now is like that episode of Oprah where she gave away all the cars, but instead she kept giving cars and taking cars away and setting cars on fire and making people beg for cars and also didn't understand what cars actually were

Quick take: Missourians usually go for the more libertarian option IF it’s spelled out for them. GOP has been moving away from this since at least 2016, but voters and Dems haven’t put that 2 + 2 together. Easier to run on liberty than democracy in rural America. One is much easier to grasp.

Among the fun things I’m editing today: The Hércules Pueblito export stout that won World Beer Cup gold last year was bottle conditioned, because they wanted it to taste as much as possible like their cask version. They add fresh wort (speise) and yeast at packaging. The old ways win again.

"What if the president simply decides to do whatever he wants?" "There is no way congress would allow that!" "Touché, my fellow slave-owning good man!"

Completely agree with you Joe 💯. Taras Boulba is a modern classic, a fantastic beer. Wore my T-shirt the other day and then thought maybe I'll find one in Bierkiste, München as they have a small but decent selection of Belgian beers. Sadly not so we shared a large can of a much stronger Torpedo.

I’d never promise that a beer like this would sell. But if the craft lager trend has taught us anything, I’d hope it's that it’s possible to market and sell the beers that the brewers are making for themselves—which is kinda what this whole “craft” thing was supposed to be about in the first place.

For breweries looking for lower-ABV beers to take for a spin, I submit to you... the modern Belgian-style pale ale. Not De Koninck—lovely but not not going to excite anyone—but Taras Boulba as the archetype. Below 5% ABV & packed with the Noble hops that you're probably under-using in your lagers.