Get Your Drink On At This New Brewery In The Valley

If you’ve been to a beer shop lately, you may have noticed the shelves are getting more crowded these days. All you have to do is sign up! That is especially true during Asheville Beer Week, which is held in May with special tappings, beer dinners and more. Lost Province Brewing, downtown, offers a beer selection nearly as diverse as its menu of wood-fired pizzas.

A 30-litre keg of Marlborough craft beer will soon be jetting across the ditch for a New Zealand versus Australia craft beer contest. This rise in popularity is not without cost however. Come learn from the experts about D.C.’s brewing past and present, prohibition, and President Wilson’s legacy from Peter Jones and Mike Stein of Lost Lagers; Capital Beer author Garrett Peck; and Woodrow Wilson House executive director Bob Enholm.

Join a number of top tier breweries and High Velocity at the Washington Marriott Marquis for a tap takeover featuring Atlas Brew Works, Heavy Seas, Hardywood, Sam Adams, 21st Amendment, Schlafly, and more. Advance tickets are highly recommended and available for $45 here. Taste them for a Texas vs. U.S. blind tasting contest. Mosher attributes this to the innovation that sprung up in the brewing and drinking culture vacuum left by Prohibition. Most of us beer nerds who spend our time constantly trolling the beer news sites and Twitter feeds have a hard time keeping up with all the growth, so it is great to have a week that focuses solidly on the local beer scene. Unlike German, Belgian, and English brewers, American brewers are not bound by reverence for long-standing national traditions or embedded consumer expectations.

Evidence of brewing goes back about 5,000 years.

Innovation in brewing has spilled over into other industries, too. (Tip: E9’s sour beer festival will be at the brewery August 15-16).

These changes have happened relatively quickly. That law, which banned the sale and production of alcoholic beverages nationwide from 1920-1933, drove all the Elm City’s breweries out of business, except for Hull’s; it rode out those years by making non-alcoholic malt beverages. “And in the late ’70s and ’80s when the craft movement started off it adopted IPA as a new rebirth of IPA”.

But what exactly is craft beer? You’d see things like Brewery X “Hop Dominator IPA” or “Barrel Breaker Stout”.

The strategies employed by big multinational beer corporations, such as Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), to maintain market share are largely unavailable to craft breweries. Budweiser recently ran a widely mocked ad, replete with foolish looking mustachioed hipsters, branding itself as the anti-craft beer. Of course, the Ninkasi parody ad was posted on YouTube – not exactly Super Bowl halftime.

Long-time Portland beer writer and Beervana blogger Jeff Alworth has just finished the book that’s going to become the standard by which all other beer books are judged, and most will fall short.