Good Beer Festival candids and snapshots

We had a blast covering the Good Beer Festival this year and can't wait to see you all again next year. Feel free to download and share the photos, if you'd like to give us a shoutout when you do, that would be cool and fair. GBF blogs to follow.

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Searching Philadelphia for Maryland Beer

The Van Pelt library at the University of Pennsylvania truly is the type you can get lost in. I know 'cause I did. Early in my research I discovered that there was a person named John Beale Bordley, who was a colonial hotshot and one of the first production-scale brewers in Maryland. Bordley was friendly with Thomas Jefferson and as concerned as he was about what we now call sustainable living. Part of that, for Bordley, was not having to rely upon the British for ale. After reading his book online and fumbling across some of his papers, it became clear to me that it might just be possible to find his recipe. Finding the first Eastern Shore beer recipe and including it in my book , would be a massive coup. I had to head to Philly to have my computer repaired. The best way to have your Mac die, it turns out, is to get behind on your writing schedule and then engage on a wild goose chase. The Apple people took it from me and sent it off to have the hard drive replaced. I thanked ...

Fan Fiction

Groupo Modelo write-offs cost AbInBev $6 billion this year. It lost another $1 billion anyway, even with the Word Cup. This is a tinfoil hat observation, but one that's fun to make. Like all kooky theories, it begins with demonstrable facts and descends into the gap between madness and unlikelihood. Craft beer now has 8 percent of the market and think they can make it to 20 over the next decade. Budweiser's parent company, even bolstered by the World Cup, reported losses of more than $1 billion already this year even though revenue increased. Much of that has to do with them purchasing companies that don't run at the famous AbInBev margins, but, to be fair, the revenue boost was because of Brazil. There won't be a World Cup next year, but there also is no craft beer revolution in South America. Or in Africa. Or Russia. There also is no NFL advertising expense in those countries. Last week, Budweiser made an uncharacteristically frank indictment of the NFL. It w...

Homebrewers getting younger, girlier

Young women have really only stopped brewing for the last 200 years or so. Homebrewing news stories (most recently, " Not Every Homebrewer Has a Beard ") increasingly emphasize the fact that women are brewing, which is funny because it highlights a generational, rather than a gender gap. Stereotypically, the oldsters who assign trend stories in newspapers truly are locked into a perception of gender roles that has only barely been true for the last 200(ish) years, especially when it comes to beer. Women brewed until industrialization made it too profitable a potential business for men to ignore. They ladies returned to homebrewing throughout Prohibition, making beer (and liquor and wine) at home to keep the family wet. The real newsflash is, stories about women crossing gender lines are more about establishment bias than about the real world. Women 'Discover' Brewing Expertise is about knowledge and passion. It's not so much that women continue to ...

The State of the Beer

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