Intellectual Ferment of a Different Kind
Imbibing Culture
Bamberg’s one of those places that you immediately sense is a beer town. The moment you step off the train on any given day, you’re greeted with the sweet aromas of malt from the Weyermann facility just north of the train station. And oh, the …
American-style IPA, that beloved child of the craft beer renaissance, has left the building. In recent years, IPA has become detached from its local context on the West Coast of the United States to emerge as a globalized signifier of everything exciting and novel about …
The holiday season is in full swing, and if you’re like me, you’ve woken up and realized that this whole gift thing is going to go down at the last minute. Again. Plus ça change. No worries, though. You’ll find something quite easily, given the …
“A pocketful of money, and a cellar full of beer / We wish you merrie and a happy new year.” “Enter Wassel, like a neat sempeter and songster, her page bearing a brown bowl, dressed with ribbons and rosemary, before her” (Ben Jonson). …
Greetings, all you fine readers of A Tempest in a Tankard! This post has nothing to do with beer and everything to do with beer. I’ve been meaning to update the layout of the site ever since, oh, 2013 when I started the blog. But …
Part II of “Warming Beers for Cold Nights” “Stepping from behind the bar, the tavern keeper walked over to the flickering hearth. […] Bending over, he picked up the jug he had placed on the brick floor close to the bed of coals. Inside the …
~ “The past is a foreign country.” ~ You might have ended up here thinking this post was going to be about barley wines, Belgian quads, barrel-aged imperial stouts, or winter warmers. It’s not, much as I enjoy those typically malty styles. My apologies. Blame …
So here we are again. One more turn around this mortal coil, drinking to forget the follies of an old year and toasting the auspiciousness of the new. For me 2017 has been extremely enjoyable, uncanny parallels between the 1930s and the present notwithstanding. I …
Just a little over a year ago, the internet was abuzz with news that the Smithsonian was in the market for a beer historian. That the venerable Smithsonian Institution would be looking to collect, document, and display the history of brewing in the United States …
The shadows are getting longer on this late afternoon in early autumn as I pull in from a long bike ride. I need a beer. Like most of us in North America these days, I’ll probably head down the road to the local brewery to …