Elspeth Payne on…

This woman’s first real Irish Guinness is imminent, be prepared for the ground to shake. I’m going to Ireland for a week, my first time there, and then off to Scotland for another longish week, ending at the European Beer Bloggers Conference in Edinburgh.  We’ll be there the same time that the Scottish […]

 While my personal jury is still out on putting actual cacao in beer, still…is putting chocolate in beer a viable way to encourage more women to drink and buy it?  Will women like chocolate beer? In a world where beer can come in pink cans and be flavored as Crisp […]

In my last two posts:  the Anglo-Saxon words beor, ealu, medu and wyn may not be what they seem.  British beer blogger Martyn Cornell takes a crack at sorting out the word histories and what we actually know about any of them. I am reprinting this with Mr. Cornell’s permission.  his Zythophile blog […]

As I started to say in my last post, the Anglo-Saxon words beor, ealu, medu and wyn may not be what they seem.  It may be that we’ve been telling the wrong story about Anglo-Saxon feasts for long time.  Martyn Cornell takes a crack at sorting out the word histories and what we actually […]

Beowulf, Bede, Aelfric’s Colloquy – in Anglo-Saxon, there are four words for fermented beverages, and lots and lots of descriptions of what happens when one drinks too much.  The four words look so much like modern English that they’ve been translated into the apparently parallel words for over a hundred […]

I will not lie: every time I see a reference to Michael Jackson, I think of the King of Pop.  This is ridiculous.  Michael Jackson – journalist, book author, holder of prestigious awards for his service in the field, star of The Beerhunter on the Real Beer Network, and first […]

 JoAnna Carrozzino asked me to write a post about the kinds of period beer.  Historical fermented beverage types…funny you should ask…I just whipped off a couple of very quick paper topics to the AHA for their grand convocation next summer.  I am torn between thinking I had to get my ideas in soonest and […]

If you’re interested, the first documented instance of hop cultivation is in 736 in the Hallertau region of modern Germany.  The first mention of using hops in brewing in Germany is 1079.   I ended yesterday’s post thus.  Now, about that… The Oregon Hop Commission says:  “The hop plant is native […]

According to The Timetables of History (almost as good as the Guinness Book for leafing through), hops were introduced to England from Artois in 1526.  There’s a story there – ! Beeton’s Date-book: An English Chronology from the Earliest Periods to the Current Period (1896) (boy was I surprised to […]

It’s Baltimore Beer Week!  And there is some homebrewing action, boy howdy! Maryland Homebrew sent out an email with so many events on it that I’m not going to post them on FB.  Instead I’m breaking my rule about putting event calendars on my website, since MDHB hasn’t got this […]

The Great American Beer Festival held its awards ceremony today.  DelMarVa-DC was well represented.  Congratulations to our local breweries-done-good!  For those of you who don’t know GABF, it is the pre-eminent craft beer event in the U. S. every year.  It’s an intense week of classes, meet ‘n’ greets, tasting sessions, master […]

It’s a pretty well known phenomenon.  There is far more out there asking whether women can like beer than there is about beer for women.  There are more women who brew beer and blog about beer than ever before, and we get a lot of attention from beer-loving men (there’s […]