#beer-origins

#beer-origins

A beer trap is another brilliant way to protect your plants. It may not completely rid your garden of these pests, but it does have benefits. For one, the beer trap traps and drowns slugs. The other is that, in the process, you are enticing them away from crops you want to protect.

Tattoos and fermentation rarely appear in the same conversation, yet across the world, they share a quiet kinship. Both are practices of transformation, crafts that reshape raw material over time through care and relationships to the land, the spiritual, and the community. Tattooing inscribes identity and ancestry onto skin, while fermentation preserves, nourishes, and binds communities through shared taste and ritual. Both create change, brewing something more than themselves through embodied knowledge passed between generations.

In 2014, Leon opened his brewery's first location inside a tiny warehouse space in the city's north-east. It was good timing. All over North America, millennials were going crazy for craft beer, and in Alberta, the government had recently changed rules to help microbreweries get their product to market. "There was a huge thirst in Alberta for craft beer," said Leon, who recalls getting emails about new breweries opening nearly every week. "It was a pretty wild time."

New American Light Lager (think: Budweiser) just doesn't stand up to the chilies in chili. As its name implies, a light lager is a type of beer with the mildest, most delicate flavor. While they're refreshing on a hot day, they certainly don't have a robust profile, nor the depth that's necessary to bring any nuanced tasting notes to chili, even after reducing with a simmer.

No trip to the brewery is complete without sampling the wares. Even if it's a place you visit regularly, you'll likely want to sample most of what it has to offer at least once. But while a greater variety may seem more enticing, it can also signal a potential red flag. Every kind of beer they have on tap means another tap that needs to be maintained. The more tap lines they have, the more likely it is that maintenance or cleaning gets neglected.

Beer has been brewed at Weltenburg Abbey, a stunning, still active monastery on the banks of the Danube in Bavaria, for nearly 1,000 years.

The "Silver Bullet" (as it's known to fans) first hit shelves in 1978 as part of the "light beer wars" of the era, when competitors like Miller Lite and Natty Light also broke onto the scene. But, inventor Bill Coors was workshopping what would become Coors Light as early as 1941. It was honed for decades before its debut, and today, Coors Light boasts an Instagram profile with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Bell's, famous for its Two Hearted IPA and summer-coded Oberon, was founded in 1985 as Kalamazoo Brewing Co. in Michigan. In that first year, it brewed 135 barrels. Today, it brews nearly 500,000 barrels annually. A barrel is roughly 31 gallons, or about two kegs' worth of beer. So the brewery's production went from around 270 kegs in 1986 to around 934,000 kegs today.