Last year was my first Great American Beer Festival. What’s the most important thing I learned? Get yourself a strategy.
I THOUGHT I had a strategy last year – “Yea I’ll check out Dogfish, maybe see what Pizza Port is serving, yada yada yada….”
Didn’t work. After a few beers and being caught up in the excitement, my plan went down the shitter and I was playing GABF whack a mole.
This year will be different.
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Mutualism: The way two organisms biologically interact where each individual derives a fitness benefit (i.e. increased survivorship). Source: Wikipedia
The oxpecker bird eats parasites from a zebra. The zebra stays healthy and the oxpecker gets a meal. Win-win.
Does mutualism exist in the beer world? I believe it does.
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Important September events:
- The Great American Beer Festival
- The arrival of wet hop beers
- My 27th birthday
We’ll focus on #1 today, talk about #2 later this month, and totally forget about #3 because honestly who cares after you turn 21.
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725 – that is the number of new breweries in planning according to a recent Brewers Association press release.
It’s an 86% increase over last year’s figure. All of this growth in craft brewing begs the question – how will these breweries compete for the same craft beer drinker’s dollar?
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A few months ago I mentioned my new found love for chocolate and beer.
In that post, I explained how a gift of gourmet chocolate to my girlfriend woke me up to a world not too different from the beer world: mainstream crappy products sprinked with delicious gems.
I entered this unexplored world excited but a total noob, so I asked my chocolatier friend Jenny to help me out:
“Jenny”, I said, “What is some chocolate that isn’t hard to find, not too expensive, but is a good introduction to gourmet chocolate?”
“Chocolove”, she replied.
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When you hear talks about the best beer cities in America, the same names always come up: Denver (represent!), Portland, Philly, Asheville, and San Diego.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the last one as my girlfriend and I took a much needed vacation to Southern California. It was our first time there, and I wanted to see what all the beer talk was about.
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A Brew on Premise is an interesting business model. It’s essentially homebrewing away from home.

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I haven’t mentioned The Homebrew Academy in a while and we have a bunch of new BillyBrew readers so I thought it was a good time to tell everyone what’s been going on with this project. The Academy is something I launched late last year as an online training program that teaches people how to homebrew.
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Craft beer is about the experience. The occasional beer alone in front of the TV is fine, but it’s much more fun to combine your drinking experience with a fun outing.
Now, maybe you’d like to drink craft beer outside the house more often, but the venues you visit only serve BMC beer. I know how you feel…
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TV is big letdown these days. The abundance of reality shows has killed quality programming, with a few exceptions and of course HBO.
So thank God for movies.
My Netflix queue is backed up like D.C. traffic. Even if there are no good new movies out, I can go back and watch a classic. Movies don’t let me down.
So forget Kim Kardashian, here are real entertainers. These are the top 5 movie characters I want to drink a beer with.
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