Saturday was the first ever St. Cloud Craft Beer Expo. St. Cloud, Minnesota is a medium-sized city about an hour-and-a-quarter northwest of the Twin Cities. While the Minneapolis and St. Paul see a number of great beer fests through the year, this was one of the first to take place in St. Cloud. No one [...]
On Sunday, Twin Cities sour beer fans fêted the funk at the third annual Where the Wild Beers Are event. Organized by Jeff Halverson and Tim Stendahl, this acid-drenched celebration of wild beers happens every fall in Minneapolis and Brooklyn. The Minneapolis fest happens on the deck of Stub & Herb’s, a Dinkytown neighborhood beer [...]
My life has been excessively crazy since the GABF. I have been in “just in time” mode for pretty much the last six weeks. Anything non-essential fell by the wayside. That included posting on the Hoppress…or my own Perfect Pint blog…or anyplace else for that matter. Things have slowed a bit. I’m back. I intended [...]
I am headed to Denver for the Great American Beer Festival on Friday. I was all geared up to write a list of survival tips when fellow Hoppress writer PJ Hoberman beat me to it. But the wheels in my head were already turning and as I sit at my computer this morning I have [...]
Where to begin? Between the National Homebrewers Conference and the St. Paul Summer Beer Fest, the last five days have been a whirlwind of beer in the Twin Cities. It began on Wednesday with the pre-conference events. While I only participated in the Nightcrawler Pub Crawl, there were many on the bus that I chaperoned [...]
The thirty-second annual National Homebrewers Conference, Chillin’ in Minnesota, takes place this week in my hometown of Minneapolis. Well nearly in my hometown. Bloomington, Minnesota is properly the place, a metro-area suburb about fifteen miles south of the Twin Cities. The actual conference runs from Thursday to Saturday. But there are plenty of activities both [...]
In the 19th century, before the advent of refrigeration, one of the first tasks of starting a new brewery was digging caves for cold-storage. And so when the Casanova Beverage Company started operations in Hudson, Wisconsin in 1896, they burrowed 150 feet into the limestone cliffs overlooking the St. Croix River. The brewery continued to [...]
While at the CBC I was interested in exploring what the industry thinks its future holds. It struck me that one of the best places to look for indications of that future is the many new and start-up breweries around the country. I talked to several newly minted and would-be professionals about their experience of [...]
Where to begin? Spending two days at the Craft Brewers Conference was exhilarating. While my long drive home from Chicago gave me an extended meditative moment to decompress and process what I saw/tasted/experienced, I’m still jazzed-up. The sycophant beer nerd part of me was giddy with excitement at shaking hands and exchanging words and ideas [...]
I have been thinking lately about the future of craft beer. As I am attending the Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) in Chicago this weekend, it seems like a good time to examine this question. I feel like the industry has reached some kind of tipping point. Well…maybe not a tipping point, that sounds so final [...]
