
Geaux? Gone: A Cautionary Rant and Tale
If we value Small Businesses, as we all SAY we do in all our drippy Lip Service to Small Business Saturday, then that Saturday really HAS TO be every day.
If we value Small Businesses, as we all SAY we do in all our drippy Lip Service to Small Business Saturday, then that Saturday really HAS TO be every day.
An unabashed revision of a post that first appeared back in 2017, in response to a list from Paste Magazine. I thought it deserved an update, as the beer landscape, battered by Covid and economic upheaval, has changed radically.
It is categorically NOT impossible for an American brewery to flourish, expand, and PAY PEOPLE, including the owners, and not sell out to some mega-corp or brewing conglomerate. It is NOT the inevitable end-game of being a successful business.
Are these really, actually, LITERALLY the Best Beers being made in the US? NO, they are NOT. But they are EXCELLENT beers; ones that you SHOULD try if you profess to like beers at all.
This is such a pleasure to drink. It’s one of those extremely rare things you find usually only after a LONG search through the marketplace: Something For Everybody.
IMO, this is one of at least the top ten IPAs I have EVER tasted from WA state. It us STUPIDLY fine: lovely subtle fruit flavors, dazzling, fine-grained, prettily BITTER Chinook hops, great, satisfying body, pleasing finish…a bona fide masterpiece
Hair of The Dog occupies a category of One. It’s remained the very definition of what “small independent craft brewery” means and SHOULD mean.
This future is something not that we have to create, it is something we get to create; a wonderful, limitless challenge and can be enormous fun and a good living, IF we have the guts and don’t let the knee-jerk naysayers drag us off the path, into their weeds.