Julie Johnson

Once upon a time, beer was sorry-looking stuff, cloudy and dark. Fortunately, our ancestors drank their brew from heavy ceramic vessels in ill-lit taverns, so it didn’t matter much that beer looked like old dishwater. But two technological innovations worked in synergy to change what we expect of beer. Brewers discovered how to control the […]

When the 28th Great American Beer Festival came to its noisy close last month in Denver, the granddaddy of American beer events had chalked up another set of records. By the time the downtown Denver Convention Center emptied for the fourth time in three days of packed sessions, more than 49,000 guests had roamed the […]

The most popular beer style purchased by American craft beer consumers used to be pale ale. It is now “seasonal,” which is not a style but had to be counted somehow by the people who measure such things. The most popular package purchased by the same group used to be the six-pack. It is now […]

“Brewed according to the Beer Purity Laws”when American beer drinkers see this as part of a beer promotion, they might wonder: Whose laws? And how pure? U.S. breweries that invoke this standard are linking their beer to a set of Bavarian food regulations, a tradition of quality that is nearly five centuries old. In this […]

Summer is the most beer-friendly time of the year. Never mind that there are fall beers, winter beers and spring beers matched to their own seasons: The beverage most people think of when they think beer is pale, straw-colored and fizzy, with nothing that lingers except a sense of refreshment. For the steamy days ahead, […]

A formal beer tasting (if that’s not an oxymoron) should be an experience that broadens and then focuses the tasters’ perspectives. Exposure to a wide range of styles or interpretations expands beer drinkers’ understanding of the diversity of the world of beer. At the end of a good tasting, however, guests should have a much […]

My German-descended grandmother was wary of Greek cooking. She warned my mother to stay away from food cooked in “that funny-smelling oil,” with the result that my mother was in her 30s before she discovered the joys of olive oil. Similar suspicionturned against the Germans this timemust be behind the myth that German brewers made […]

When did the Irishone of the most despised groups of immigrants ever to land on our shoresbecome the club we all wanted to join? Long before Michael Flatley, surely; before The Chieftains, before bucolic Irish Spring commercials, our attitude to the Emerald Isle switched from haughty contempt to misty-eyed sentimentality. Now, we’re winding up for […]