Image credits: Facebook Check with any group of two or more craft beer fans, gathered online or in-person, and the chatter will likely be about the same thing: new breweries that have opened, new beers that are being brewed, and old favorites of both that have closed or been discontinued. Craft beer fans tend to follow breweries like sports teams, participating in the subculture spectator drama as much as they enjoy their wares. No doubt, when a local and beloved craft brewery is forced to close, this is felt as a loss for those commercially or emotionally vested in that business, as local bre ..read more

This is an introduction to one of the most unique brewers and brewery owners in Texas craft brewing today, and whose name you likely have never heard. For context, modern craft brewing tends to be a slightly younger man’s profession, with the average age of brewers and brewery owners hovering just below age 40. The traditional craft brewer progression is from amateur homebrewer to professional brewer or brewery owner, which usually coincides with early disenchantment of that first professional job out of college. Thus, brewers tend to enter the business sometime in their 30s, and those that ar ..read more

American craft breweries seem to have a minor obsession with numbers. Not the kind of numbers that matter, not real data like sales or profits or production totals, but in the completely irrelevant topic of what they choose to name their breweries. Let’s run the so-called numbers. Obviously, 903 Brewers in Sherman looked to the local area code to identify their craft brewery, which has the advantage (or disadvantage) of forever tying it to a specific locale. This naming scheme would seem a natural default for at least one craft brewery in every area code, but in practice such brewery names are ..read more

Once upon a time (also known as the late 1990s to early 2000s), the Texas craft beer industry lived on an economic bubble. Commercial growth outstripped the market and that bubble tragically burst, and many good breweries closed. Craft beer fans were very sad, and have since cried Bubble! every time a craft brewery experiences trouble or is forced to close. This idea happened once. There is no more “bubble,” nor is another one likely. The past four to six weeks have been rough for some breweries and craft beer consumers in North Texas. At least four local breweries have been forced to close en ..read more

Standing: Dave Trosko (left) and Seth Morgan (right). The 2020 pandemic and related preventative shutdowns changed a lot about our commercial landscape, both consumer and retail behavior alike. The effects were possibly felt harder by the alcoholic beverage industry because of its reliance on site-specific (bars, pubs, restaurants) and event-specific (festivals, concerts, sports) sales which, of course, just weren’t available. One casualty of the pandemic restrictions was the beer dinner (or beer-pairing dinner, to be more precise). For the unfamiliar, a beer dinner is a specific one-time even ..read more

The focus of this online space is generally topics specific to North Texas brewing, but every so often events on the national stage touch our region. Despite the specific characteristics of our market area and its players, the Texas’ craft beer market and industry is by no means a closed or isolated system. This week, we saw an event of seismic proportion in the craft beer world: San Francisco’s revered Anchor Brewing closed for good after 127 years in business. Some trace the very origin of American craft beer directly to Fritz Maytag, who purchased a foundering Anchor in 1965 and made it the ..read more

Proper pub crawls have almost infinite variation in their execution and specialty themes. The art form of a good craft beer pub crawl has been covered from many different views, but one of the most popular subsets is that of the microbrewery crawl pair. But given the sprawling nature of our urban environment in North Texas (which sprawls even farther apart by the day), identifying two brewers within a stone’s throw of each other presents its own difficulties. A string of stops along any planned pub crawl usually consists of breweries, bars and local pubs with at least a passing focus on craft ..read more

Everyone knows the mantra: malt, hops, yeast, water. These are the four essential ingredients of all beer, codified into law by the Germans centuries ago (since repealed, but still culturally relevant). Brewing with anything beyond these four items, with very few exceptions, is viewed as suspect by traditionalists. The term for ingredients outside the fab four is adjunct. A formal definition for adjunct varies, with some including anything beyond the given four categories whereas others restrict it to additional sources of fermentable sugars. At its core, the meaning of adjunct is generally ta ..read more

One could make a strong argument that the most American of modern craft beer styles is the India pale ale (IPA). Unbound by centuries of brewing tradition and despite its historical origin overseas, our nation has embraced and celebrated the classic IPA style and its derivatives like no other. Through sheer commercial force, we have made it our own. Several reasons exist for the American penchant for those bitter, juicy flavor-bombs known as IPAs, not the least of which is the amazing success of the domestic hops market. With the vast majority of hops grown in the Pacific Northwest (specifical ..read more

North Texas Brewers, A to Z It was not the inaugural North Texas Fresh Hops Fest last October that makes Windmills different. Many local brewpubs create and host their own local craft beer events as welcome self-promotion. Nor is it the comparatively high-end (at least for craft beer) dining environment. A few local brewers, both current and long closed, have skewed toward finer dining trends over the industrial warehouse-and-burgers theme more common in modern craft brewing. Instead, it was Austrian David Helbock and his jazz trio Random/Control (piano, trumpet, saxophone) providing backgroun ..read more