Picturing Beer
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 …
Intellectual Ferment of a Different Kind
Zymurgical Musings
Imbibing Culture
Of Hearths and Heated Ales: A Taste of Drinking History
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 …
Warming Beers for Cold Nights
~ “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 …
Reflections and Resolutions
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. …
Beer Goes to the Museum
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 …
What does it mean to “drink locally”?
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 …
Beer Flights: The Smart Way to Drink
5300-plus breweries in the United States and counting. Another 775 in Canada as of 2016 (and counting). A veritable explosion of new and innovative breweries in Europe’s strongholds of brewing tradition: Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Judges at the 2016 …
Tankards Everywhere: Tempest’s Beerscapes of 2016
I was at Schloss Belvedere a few days back, the famous Viennese museum that houses the even more famous Kiss by Gustav Klimt. Alongside some of his other iconic works such as Judith und Holofernes hung several paintings dating from the year of Klimt’s death …
Tempest’s Beer and Travel Highlights from 2015-2016
So much to do, so little time. With all those beers I’m sure you’ve been searching out and drinking over the course of the year, one or two Tempest articles may have slipped you by. Not to worry! On the occasion of Tempest’s third year …
Where Did All the Märzen Go? Provisioning Oktoberfest Imbibers over the Centuries
Nearly 40,000 people headed out to the horse race just beyond the Munich gates on that first Oktoberfest day in 1810. Families and groups of friends staked out places to sit on the meadowland heights surrounding the track and began tucking into their bread, sausage, …