German beer purity law be-damned, modern brewers can’t be confined by the basic four ingredients of beer (water, barley, hops and yeast). Our creative beer-makers are visionaries, creative thinkers who want to put weird stuff in their beer and see what happens. And I’m not just talking about cocoa nibs and jalapeno peppers here, people. I’m talking about poisonous arachnids and beard yeast. Yes, beard yeast. We found eight beers with really off the wall ingredients. Read this

The History Brad Webb had landed the dream job. It was 1956, and he’d just been appointed winemaker at a new winery, Hanzell, founded by James D. Zellerbach, the wealthy US ambassador to Italy. Zellerbach had spared no expense in pursuing his dream of making classically styled Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to rival the wines of Burgundy. Webb had at his disposal an array of shiny new tanks, casks, and barrels. But there was a problem. The early Pinot Noir that he made in the new

There was a serious lack of information on reviewing beers—especially for the average beer drinking consumer—when I first wrote "How to Review a Beer" back in 2005. A decade or so later, I felt the topic needed to be revisited given the rise of casual raters, tickers and our recent refocusing on our roots: reviewing beers. The Goal BeerAdvocate is a consumer-based website; as such, subjectivity comes into play. With that in mind, the following aims to bring some objectivit

Boulder, CO - July 1, 2013—Today, homebrewers can legally brew in every state in the country, as recently passed homebrewing legislation takes effect in Mississippi, according to the American Homebrewers Association (AHA). Homebrewing was federally legalized in 1978 for the first time since Prohibition made it illegal in 1919. However, regulation of alcohol is predominantly left to the states. In 2013, Mississippi and Alabama—the last two states remaining with laws against ho