Taplines

When Left Hand Brewing opened for business outside of Denver in the early '90s, the plan wasn’t to become known nationwide as “the milk stout brewery” or “the nitro brewery,” and certainly not “the nitro milk stout brewery.” But when it introduced its chocolatey, none-too-heavy milk stout in the Aughts, people loved it, and especially the silky smooth nitro draft pour. Co-founder / CEO Eric Wallac...

Athletic Brewing Company wasn’t the first non-alcoholic beer brand, not by a long shot. But it was the first to successfully cross the flavors and aesthetics of the craft beer segment consistently, and at scale. Its considerable success since first hitting the market in mid-2018 has helped open up horizons for millions of drinkers — and today, co-founders Bill Shufelt and John Walker are here to t...

Returning to Taplines today for the second installment of our two-part episode about Blue Moon's historic, controversial rise is Keith Villa, the former Coors brewer who created the iconic, top-selling Belgian-style witbier in the mid-'90s. We discuss the brand’s soaring success after its rocky first few years in the Rocky Mountains — and how once Blue Moon found its footing in Coors' portfolio, i...

Joining Taplines today to talk about Blue Moon’s historic, controversial rise, is Keith Villa, the brewer who created the original recipe for the Belgian-style beer at Coors after earning his PhD in brewing from the University of Brussels. From the corporate offices in Golden, Colorado, to the ballpark brewhouse where he perfected the brand’s soon-to-be-smash hit recipe, to the bars nationwide whe...

Joining Taplines today is longtime beverage-alcohol journalist, VinePair writer at large, and author of the hotly anticipated forthcoming book "Dusty Booze," Aaron Goldfarb, to discuss Other Half Brewing Company's meteoric rise from humble beginnings to coveted hype brewery. Having found himself a few times in the line that formed outside the brewery on release days, Aaron witnessed firsthand a sh...

Not to get all political on here, but historically speaking, Black people have not exactly been welcomed into the halls of power in the American beer industry. There are a dozen well-documented reasons for that, many of which stem less from endemic characteristics of beer or brewing than from the systemic racism baked into this country’s laws and institutions. But to this day, less than 1 percent...

In the early '60s, a fellow named Bob Uihlein took the reins at what was then a brewery second only to the mighty Anheuser-Busch in the American beer business pantheon—the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schlitz was known nationwide as “the beer that made Milwaukee famous,” and an absolute heavyweight of the day. But under Uihlein’s hackneyed, hamfisted, and otherwise ill-a...

Idiosyncrasies abound in this country's state-by-state approach to booze regulation, and South Carolina is home to plenty of 'em. Which is why, in 2005, Jaime Tenny — who would go on to open North Charleston’s COAST Brewing Company with her husband, David Merritt — took a cue from craft brewing colleagues in North Carolina and started Pop the Cap SC, a grassroots organization bent on increasing th...

In 1994, the mighty pre-InBev Anheuser-Busch made a somewhat shocking decision to do a comedic ad for its flagship brand. This was a big deal — up until then, Budweiser’s ads hewed to the heartland with sincere, wholesome, Americana themes and tunes. But when the firm’s longtime hometown ad agency came up with an idea for Bud's 1995 Super Bowl spot that called for animatronic frogs, August Busch I...

If you didn’t know any better, you might assume that the whole pumpkin beer “thing” was an offshoot of Starbucks’ pumpkin-spiced-latte phenomenon. But it most certainly is not. The PSL only hit the American drinking public in 2003. Pumpkin beers, on the other hand, are typically dated to 1983 or thereabouts, shortly after one Bill Owens opened Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward California. It was t...

Heineken's longstanding dominance as the top-selling import in post-Prohibition America was thanks in large part to the efforts of an American importer, New York's Van Munching and Company. But by the end of the 80s, the Dutch brewer had decided it wanted to bring its stateside operations in-house, which gave third-generation Philip Van Munching front-row seats to the Heineken brand's corporate ha...

For most of the 20th century, Heineken was the country's top imported beer by far, and by the 80s, thanks to decades of empire-building effort by its third-party American importer, New York's Leo Van Munching and Company, the Dutch brand commanded prestige and premium pricing Stateside. When Philip Van Munching joined the family firm in the 80s, his challenge was figuring out a way to market Heine...

The year: 2008. The magazine: The New Yorker. The story: “A Better Brew: The Rise of Extreme Beer.” Was it the most important magazine piece ever written about craft brewing? Those who know of what they speak, like Tom Acitelli, author of 2013's The Audacity of Hops, certainly thought so. Today we're joined by the author of that seminal New Yorker feature, Burkhard Bilger, to discuss the the idea,...

This is the second installment of a Taplines two-parter about the early days of PBR’s cultural and commercial renaissance after the turn of the 21st century. Our guest for these back-to-back episodes is Neal Stewart, a former Pabst Brewing Company marketer who spent the first half of the Aughts working on the firm’s flagship beer. In this episode, we'll discuss how early signs of life for the near...

Diehard Taplines listeners already know we're fascinated by Pabst Blue Ribbon's ascendance last decade as the ultimate insider beer for the United States' various outsiders' scenes, thanks to our earlier episode with Steve "Stix" Nilsen, who worked on the Blue Ribbon brand throughout the 2010s. But today, we kick off part one of a Taplines two-parter with former Pabst marketer Neal Stewart that’ll...

In 2007, after two decades of professional brewing, Teri Fahrendorf hit the road as an itinerant brewer for an odyssey spanning thousands of miles, dozens of brewery visits and collaborations, and a third of a calendar year. Along the way, she met with other female brewers like her, and they all wanted a way to connect with their colleagues, to find community as women working in a male-dominated i...

The dust had hardly settled on Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2015 acquisition of Elysian Brewing Company when Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad, “Brewed the Hard Way,” poured salt in the wound by punching down at the entire craft brewing industry on the biggest stage imaginable. Today on Taplines, we’re joined by Elysian cofounder Dick Cantwell for a look back at that pivotal moment, when ABI did a little mask-o...

Corona enjoyed rip-roaring stateside success in the '90s, and the mighty Anheuser-Busch eventually realized it would need an answer. In hopes of blunting the runaway success of the Mexican lager, the King of Beers launched its own beer that came in clear bottles and had a Mexican-sounding name: Tequiza. Rolled out nationally in 1999, Tequiza burned bright for a hot minute before flaming out a few...

As you may have heard, one of the world’s biggest cannabis companies, Tilray, just last week acquired a whole bunch of craft breweries and brands from the world’s biggest macrobrewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. It’s an $85 million dollar deal with bold, potentially bizarre implications for both firms, not to mention the American craft beer industry writ large. Also, it includes Shock Top, which — ...

In 2002, Wisconsin’s New Glarus Brewing Company, makers of the beloved Spotted Cow farmhouse ale, announced it’d be pulling out of the Illinois market next door. Six months later, it was gone. The decision shocked and even angered some folks on the wrong side of the Cheddar Curtain, and flew in the face of the contemporary expansionist wisdom of that era in the industry. But brewmaster Daniel Care...

Imagine a world before IPAs. Can’t do it, can you, Taplines listener? But it’s true: around the turn of this century, the American craft brewing landscape was awash in ambers, brown ales, lagers, and precious few versions of the hop-forward India pale ales that would come to dominate the category a decade later. The ones you could get ahold of in 1999 were mostly well-balanced West Coast-style IPA...

“Tea Partay,” a 2006 spoof-rap spot from Smirnoff to roll out its new hard tea flavored malt beverage, so perfectly met that moment in the American zeitgeist that it went viral before anybody really understood what “going viral” even was. Today on Taplines, Andy Nathan, the founder and CEO of Fortnight Collective, joins us to take us inside the development of the instant-classic ad. Don't forget t...

In 2012, New York State had just 95 breweries — dramatically fewer than its fourth-in-the-nation population suggested it should. Five years later, that number had doubled, and the Empire State was well on its way to becoming the craft-beverage hotbed it is today. What happened? Today on Taplines, we've got Chris O'Leary, founder and editor of the venerable Brew York blog and a longtime observer of...

When Four Loko mania reached mainstream fever pitch in 2010, Doctor Joshua Sharfstein was the principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He joins Taplines today to tell a side of the story that got lost in the sauce as the chaotic, cash-rich, caffeinated first act of Four Loko came to a close: how the agency gathered the facts, determined its jurisdiction, and weighed its r...

Fourth of July is traditionally one of the biggest beer-selling holidays on the calendar, and for the past decade-ish, Anheuser-Busch InBev has capitalized on the holiday by remaking Budweiser with a Stars-and-Stripes label and a jingoistic name. Known colloquially as AmeriCans, these seasonal rebrands present a vision of the United States that simply doesn't exist in reality—a lesson ABI is learn...