Tis the season for great beer and in the homebrew community we have packed every weekend full of festivals in which we get to taste each others brews. For a few of us there are opportunities to show off exactly what we have been tinkering with in our respective home brew places. But where does Oktoberfest actually come from. Obviously it came from Munich, where it is considered the world's largest festival of any kind, but what is the history of this glorious event? Oktober

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

It’s no secret that many craft beer enthusiasts have a deep appreciation—bordering on cult-like obsession—for the India pale ale. In honor of #IPAday 2014 (August 7), we’re taking a look at Community Beer Works‘ Dan Conley’s attempt to crack the code of the IPA’s commercial success. Conley’s recent post on the Buffalo, N.Y. brewers’ blog entitled “The IPA Hegemony,” really caught my attention, so after a quick Google of hegemony, I dove into the piece. “The IPA is our best se

Wine is not the only drink that can be aged for maturation. Many beers benefit from extended aging. We're not talking about your average beer with a mere shelf life of 3-6 months, tops -- before quality begins to degrade. We're talking about beers that beg for maturation and strict storage like vintage beers, barleywines, imperial stouts, Belgian strong ales, lambics, old ales and so on. Ideally, any type of beer that can be laid-down for a year or two, or even more, in order

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