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1 day agoWhy the Craft Beer Scene Is Better Now Than Ever | PUNCH
Craft beer culture is evolving, with a return to its roots despite recent industry challenges and declining trends.
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."
Chris Buck isn't your typical home brewer - he's a virologist at the National Cancer Institute, known for discovering several human polyomaviruses, a family of viruses linked to cancers and serious infections in people with weakened immune systems. Buck's day job involves developing vaccines against these viruses, but he took things in an unexpected direction: using yeast engineered to produce viral proteins, he brewed a beer that delivered those proteins orally.
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.
Ninja vs. Unicorn is classified as a double IPA and offers a generous 8% ABV. "A golden haze speaks to the unfiltered, grapefruit-noted, balanced IPA's character with a shockingly low bitterness, considering how much hops go into the brewing," Horan says about what makes the brew so special. More than five pounds of hops are included in each barrel used to brew this crowd pleaser.