Beer
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19 hours 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.
A lot of things come together for the perfect pour, including temperature and the cleanliness of lines. Bottom line? Yes, it's all better in Ireland. However, that's not to say there aren't some outstanding Irish pubs in the U.S., because there are.
In 2025, Cider sales performed well at plus 2%, led by top brand Angry Orchard (plus 3.6%). For the 52 weeks ending Dec. 28. 2025, hard cider sales reached $502 million in total U.S. multi-outlets, grocery, drug, mass merchandisers, convenience, military, and select club and dollar retailers, according to Circana data. Of the brands, eight of the Top 10 showcased growth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Budweiser is turning 150 and to celebrate, the beer brand is introducing a yearlong campaign that honors its rich history and American heritage. To kick off an exciting year of celebration, Budweiser debuts brand-new, limited-edition Heritage Can Series 12-pack designed to take fans on a visual journey through the brand's 150-year history. And answers the call of consumers begging Budweiser to bring back vintage can designs.
Bell's, famous for its Two Hearted IPA and summer-coded Oberon, was founded in 1985 as Kalamazoo Brewing Co. in Michigan. In that first year, it brewed 135 barrels. Today, it brews nearly 500,000 barrels annually. A barrel is roughly 31 gallons, or about two kegs' worth of beer. So the brewery's production went from around 270 kegs in 1986 to around 934,000 kegs today.
The "Silver Bullet" (as it's known to fans) first hit shelves in 1978 as part of the "light beer wars" of the era, when competitors like Miller Lite and Natty Light also broke onto the scene. But, inventor Bill Coors was workshopping what would become Coors Light as early as 1941. It was honed for decades before its debut, and today, Coors Light boasts an Instagram profile with hundreds of thousands of followers.