Beer Brewing

Beer is the world’s most consumed alcoholic beverage by volume, and the global consumption landscape in 2025 reflected both the continued dominance of major markets and significant shifts in where growth was coming from.

The craft beer industry in 2025 looked meaningfully different from the explosive growth years of the early 2010s.

Sour beer went from a niche curiosity to one of the most significant growth categories in craft brewing over the past two decades.

The connection between monasteries and brewing stretches back over a thousand years and represents one of the most sustained traditions of craft production in Western history.

The word “artisanal” gets applied to everything from craft beer to supermarket bread, to the point where it means almost nothing in marketing contexts.

Fermentation temperature is the single most influential variable a homebrewer controls after pitching yeast — more than water chemistry, grain bill adjustments, or hop timing.

Formulating your own brewing recipes starts with understanding three things: style guidelines (target gravity, color, bitterness, and character), ingredient function (what each malt, hop, and yeast contributes), and the math that connects them (how t

Barrel aging imparts flavors that no other technique can replicate — vanilla, coconut, caramel, and toasted oak from the wood itself, plus residual spirit character from whatever previously lived in the barrel.

Brewing sanitation has two steps that most guides conflate: cleaning (removing organic residue) and sanitizing (killing microorganisms). Sanitizer applied to a dirty surface doesn’t work — residue physically shields bacteria from chemical contact.

Kingfisher is India’s best-known beer internationally, and one of the most common questions I get from homebrewers interested in brewing Indian-style lagers is about Kingfisher’s alcohol content — and how it varies across the brand’s product lineup.