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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.
Walking through the narrow bylanes of Mylapore neighbourhood at dusk is like watching a sepia-tinted postcard of Madras coming to life and gently reasserting itself over the Chennai of today. The 7th-century Kapaleeshwarar Temple, the fulcrum of commerce and culture, draws the devout into its timeless force field, and on nearby Pitchu Pillai Lane, a small crowd gathers around the Raghul Kuzhi Paniyaram street stall to buy kuzhi paniyarams: spongy orbs of pan-fried batter speckled with mustard seeds.
When Ceylon India Inn opened near Times Square in the early 1900s, the city's first South Asian restaurant quickly became a hub for New York's burgeoning community of desi (a term used to describe people of South Asian descent) dock workers, and students. More than a century later, there are more than 400 such restaurants across the five boroughs, enticing a far more diverse array of diners.
This booming teahouse chain specializes in Chinese flower and fruit teas, particularly jasmine teas. The brand is growing rapidly around the world—after launching its first location in 2021 in Shenzhen, China, it has grown to more than 2,000 worldwide locations. The soft opening for Molly Tea started at the end of October, and has been a popular addition to San Mateo's B Street promenade, drawing long lines.
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."
The U.S. version lists 73 grams of sugar per 20-ounce bottle. The U.K. version lists 4.5 grams of sugar per 100 milliliters. Crunch the numbers, and you'll find the American Fanta has nearly three times the sugar as its counterpart across the pond - 12.4 grams per 100 milliliters versus 4.5. The thing is, the British version doesn't taste like it's missing anything.
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.
India is a country with countless regional specialties, each with its own history, culture, and unique use of spices. I wanted our guests to experience that variety and feel as though they were traveling across India one meal at a time.
Kolamba showcases Sri Lankan home cooking as it's eaten across the island. Bold spices, deeply layered curries, fragrant rice and freshly made roti, all designed to be shared. Hoppers (also known as appa/appam) are a Sri Lankan staple: thin and lacy at the edges, soft and slightly spongy in the middle, and just as good at breakfast as they are at dinner.
Khan started Darjeeling Express as a pop-up at Soho pub The Sun & 13 Cantons in 2014 before taking on a permanent site in Kingly Court. She decided not to reopen there post-lockdown and chose instead to move the restaurant to a bigger site in Covent Garden, where she stayed until the summer of 2022. Following another pop-up stint, this time in west London, Khan moved Darjeeling Express back to Kingly Court at the beginning of 2023.
Low Key represents a deliberate innovation play for Harpoon based on emerging cultural trends toward moderation over abstention, the company notes. Rather than simply diluting an existing popular recipe, the team applied new techniques to preserve flavor, aroma, and craft quality, just at a lower ABV.
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.
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.
Fish and chips is about as iconic as you can get for pub fare. It's a perfect harmony of tender, subtly sweet and briny cod with a crisp, buttery coating; plus, salty, starchy fries. The only thing a classic fish and chips meal is missing is a good beer. After all, it's a standard order in pubs, where many guests are already enjoying pints - and that's not to mention that many chefs actually batter the fish in beer.