Issue #39: Hop burn / 🦟+🍺 = ouch! / 16 Brewers' weirdest beers / Craft beer diplomacy

This spring, my fiance and I took a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, a beer destination we’ve visited numerous times in the past.

Have a question? Email advice@vinepair.com. I’ve heard that if I drink beer I am more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes. Is that true?

No idea or ingredient is off limits in today’s brewing world. There are beers made with Maine lobsters and Mangalitsa pigs, candied ginger and gingerbread cookies, human urine, Norwegian money, and yeast harvested from beard hairs (no, seriously).

Bottles, cans, crowlers, growlers or kegs, craft beer comes in a variety of containers for you to enjoy outside of the brewery taproom. While each beer vessel fulfills the same purpose, each requires some different approaches to storing.

Craft beer has long been a white male pursuit, but amid a slow push toward diversity, Chicago’s Englewood Brews will be among the rare breweries opened in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Kyle Harrop, founder of Horus Aged Ales in Oceanside, California, has been brewing since he was 21. However, it wasn’t until a health scare that he turned pro. Shortly after his daughter was born, he went in for a physical and the doctor discovered lumps in his neck.

Craft beermakers go to extraordinary lengths to brew up the perfect pint—and lately, that attention to detail has shifted to what’s on the outside as well. The number of craft breweries nationwide has more than tripled in the past ten years.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Norwegian farmhouse ale is not going to displace hazy IPA as the next big thing in American beer.

American craft beer was born with an anti-establishment pedigree. Battling against well-established national brands of gargantuan scale, early U.S. craft brewers often portrayed themselves as upstarts, rebels, or the smaller guy in the David and Goliath story.

Not for the first time, Louisville’s Against the Grain is well, going against the grain of craft beer. Instead of catering to an existing fan base of hop-loving, Untappd-updating brewery regulars, Against the Grain wants to reach a new audience.