BEER TRAVELERS

Hooters comes to Germany. Spiegel Online asks: “Can a fast food restaurant that counts on cheery and scantily clad waitresses make it in a country known as an emancipated service wasteland?”

Notice how 10 or so years ago that every time a small brewery or brewpub opened it merited a story in the local paper – and then we went years without reading much about craft beer? Eventually craft/specialty-whatever-you-want-to-call-it was declared “dead.”
With craft sales up 7% in 2004 and growing at a similar rate in 2005 [...]

Put this one on your schedule if you are in the Northwest: The Washington Brewers Guild’s 1st annual Winter Beer Festival. Sessions are noon-4 p.m. and 6-10 p.m. Dec. 3 at Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle.
The event will also feature a unique Holiday Gift Shop with various brewery merchandise, cheese tasting by Beecher’s Handmade Cheese and [...]

Boston Beer Co. toasted the renovation of The Samuel Adams Brewery in Cincinnati this past weekend.
Founder Jim Koch gave names to two new copper brew kettles – for his father, Charles Koch, and for his great-great grandfather, Louis Koch. In addition, the newly expanded cellar was named for Dr. Joseph Owades, a brewing consultant [...]

The Austin-Statesman reports Lovejoy’s Bar and Taproom – a decidely funky bar and occasional brewpub – will close in March.
“This has been coming for quite a while, but it came to a head through October,” owner Joseph Tait said. “It’s not just the numbers thing,” he said blaming the smoking ban for driving the final [...]

Two disclaimers:
This list features bars that are long gone, and the emphasis isn’t on beer. But OnMilwaukee.com remembers the days when “Old-school Milwaukeeans drank Schlitz or Pabst (and we weren’t doing it because it was retro). And we went out to bars that are now long-gone.”
Makes you wish you could have been there. An [...]

Here’s a good reason to be in upstate New York Dec. 10.
Sint Niklaas and his sidekick Zwarte Piet will visit Ommegang Brewery outside of Cooperstown, arriving on a horse-drawn sleigh and bearing gifts for children. They’ll bring traditional Belgian holiday foods, tell Belgian Christmas tales, and lead a sing-a-long of Christmas carols.
Inside the brewery’s Brouwerzaal [...]