Wild Leap Brew Co. in LaGrange, Georgia has announced that its popular Wild Leap Vodka is now available in handles of 1.75L volume. Full details are below.

Introducing Handles of Wild Leap Vodka

We're thrilled to announce Wild Leap Vodka is now available in 1.75L handles!

Wild Leap Vodka is the ultimate balance of crisp and silky smooth. Distilled from 100% yellow corn and naturally gluten-free, Wild Leap Vodka is the key to creating next level cocktails.

1.75L handles of Wild Leap Vodka will be available at your favorite retailers throughout Georgia this week! Click below to find it near you.

Halyard Brewing Co.'s alcoholic ginger beer has announced the addition of 42 states to its distribution footprint. Full details from the brewery are below.

Pewaukee, Wis. – Brew Pipeline, a direct-access platform between craft brewers and new markets, announced today it’s partnering with Halyard Brewing Company to bring its alcoholic ginger beers to 42 additional states outside existing New England distribution. Halyard’s alcoholic ginger beer will be added to Brew Pipeline’s PORTFOLIO program, available for long-term, year-round distribution. Using organic and fair trade ingredients, Nicole’s Extra, Volcano Juice and The Breeze will be the focus brands in these markets. 

“We’re excited to welcome Halyard Brewing Company to the Brew Pipeline family,” says Steve Kwapil, CEO and co-founder of Brew Pipeline. “Until now, we’ve focused solely on the best craft breweries in the country. But Halyard is such a great addition to our portfolio. And their alcoholic ginger beers will immediately become the domestic best-selling entries in the category dominated but just a few imported brands.”  

Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City, Missouri has announced a new line of hard seltzers called Quirk Spiked and Sparkling. Full details from the brewery are below.

Kansas City – The taste of summer just got a little sweeter. Boulevard Beverage Co., a “side hustle” from Boulevard Brewing focusing on projects outside its traditional beer homeland, today announced a luscious new line:  Quirk Spiked & Sparkling. Quirk offers a fresh take on hard seltzers, with bold ingredient combinations and real fruit juice yielding subtle but spectacular flavor.

Boulevard has long been obsessed with details, and Quirk is no exception—it’s a celebration of little differences that make all the difference. The bright, all-natural, ingredient-driven flavors – Strawberry Lemon & Basil, Blackberry Sage, and Pear Yuzu – take the category to a whole new level, while offering the attributes that seltzer fans seek. At just 90 calories, with fewer than five grams of carbohydrates and less than one gram of sugar, Quirk is 100% delicious, and 100% guilt-free.

“Quirk is not your typical hard seltzer,” said Boulevard brewmaster Steven Pauwels. “Even the name tells the tale. We don’t do ‘just another.’ We’re always striving to move beer forward, and believe Quirk can do the same for seltzers.

Quirk Spiked & Sparkling consists of three flavors:

With the entire world being ravaged by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the beer world has been severely hamstrung by this highly contagious disease. The situation seems dire, but there is always hope.

Many breweries, distilleries and other related industries have come together to help make hand sanitizer or donate funds to various charitable causes as this horrid virus continues to spread throughout the world – leaving behind pain and suffering in its wake.

Though the news is seemingly all bad – in the beer industry and beyond – we hope that the shining beacon of beer is keeping you and your loved ones engaged (and sane) during these trying times.

With that in mind, our May/June Issue 2020, Issue 48 is out now with all the brew that’s fit to drink.

What is Lupulin Threshold Shift, does it change your palate preferences, and can the phenomenon be reversed?

In 2005, legendary Russian River brewer and proprietor of a face that does not age, Vinnie Cilurzo, coined the term “Lupulin Threshold Shift” (LTS). The term describes how a person’s exposure to hoppy beers increases their tolerance of bitter flavors over time – increasing the threshold of what they find too bitter to enjoy. This in turn changes their perceptions and expectations of beers they may have previously revered.

Interestingly, Cilurzo presented the concept many years prior to keyboard heroes declaring that, “Pliny is overrated.” Was this premonition a fortunate happenstance or a pre-emptive rebuttal to these remarks? We may never know. However, it was a time when double IPAs and other aggressively hoppy and bitter beers were far from the mainstream craft that they are today, so it was certainly a perceptive call.

There is no city in North America that loves its colors of black and gold more than the Steel City. The city of Pittsburgh is home to many great points of interest: the historic Duquesne Incline, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Mattress Factory Museum, the Senator John Heinz History Center and the Bicycle Heaven Museum.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg! Pittsburgh is a blue-collar, beer drinker’s destination, and the blue-collar lifestyle embodies Pittsburgh’s rich traditions. There are 15 great places in the city where the love of beer is incredibly deep. These are breweries where tradition flows like molten steel. They are pioneers continuously casting new traditions, and revolutionizing Pittsburgh’s tourism industry.

Beer foam is extremely important to a perfect pint, but what exactly is its scientific genesis?

As babies, we blow snot bubbles. As toddlers, we blow soap bubbles on a sunny day, and splish-splash in bubble baths. Naturally, as adults, the joy of bubbles transfers to the most adult of all joys – beer. Magical as those bubbles may seem, they don’t just pop out of thin air. There’s hard science backing up how beer foam forms. So what exactly is the business behind the fizziness?

What’s In a Bubble?
Step one to bringing bubbles into adult comprehension is understanding the process. Beer contains gas – usually carbon dioxide, but sometimes nitrogen, which remains under a stable amount of pressure in a closed container like a bottle or can. The magic of the bubbling process, or “nucleation” process, begins when you open your beer.

Opening a beer causes a rapid drop in pressure, which encourages carbon dioxide dissolved within the beer to make its escape. The bubbles are encouraged by microscopic cheerleaders known as nucleation points – imperfections in the bottom and sides of the beer container where CO2 gathers – until they reach a critical volume and detach, rising to the top of the container. If you’ve ever seen a star or logo etched in the bottom of a glass, they are there to serve as nucleation sites for the beer.

Editor's Note: Dixie Beer was renamed Faubourg Brewing Co. in 2021 as a "tribute to the diverse neighborhoods of New Orleans," per brewery owner Gayle Benson.

Faubourg Brewing Co. was founded in 1907, and the classic New Orleans institution has experienced a multitude of highs and lows throughout its colorful history.

Through out-of-state contract brewing, Faubourg returned to New Orleans following the brewery's 2005 destruction due to Hurricane Katrina. Thanks to the late Tom Benson and his wife Gayle, owners of the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans, Faubourg now has a sparkling new brewery located just outside of downtown New Orleans. The current owners wish to make the brewery a family-friendly tourist attraction and bring Faubourg into the modern age of craft beer.

If you have spent any time recently in a brewery taproom or any number of beer destinations throughout the country, you may have noticed three little letters next to more and more offerings: DDH.

Those three letters stand for “Double Dry Hopped” and have become affixed to styles across the board, but most notable is the domination of DDH IPAs increasingly being poured. These days breweries are building their brands on the uber-hype that comes along with nearly anything they release labeled as Double Dry Hopped. Some breweries have built their business on eager lines of customers extending around the building filled with beer lovers clamoring for a one-off release that received the briefest mention on social media with that attractive term DDH. Sometimes, these fans willingly hand over $20 to $30 for a single four-pack! With all of this demand, and the constant brewery one-upmanship taking place throughout the beer industry, the question arises: is Double Dry Hopped an organic marketing term or a truly new dominant style?

COVID-19 has dramatically reduced beer production and consumption around the world, hitting craft and independent brewers extremely hard. Almost everywhere, taprooms and pubs that provided a base of support for the majority of smaller businesses have been shuttered or reduced to carry-out and delivery operations only.

Even a bump in “to-go” sales will not make up for the loss of revenue from taproom and retail sales, said Mary Macdonald, executive director of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association.

“No one is in an appreciatively better situation based upon their size or age when a significant portion of their sales opportunities, via their own taproom, bars or other retailers, are either closed or have extremely restricted sales opportunities right now,” added Macdonald in a late March interview with Rick Armon of the Akron Beacon Journal.