Best in Beer 2016

We’ve heard it many times: Store your beer in a dark, cool place. Brad Smith explains what damage light and heat can do to finished beer.

Since opening NoDa Brewing Company five years ago, Brewmaster Chad Henderson has expanded the brewery not only in size, but in the number of unforgettable beers he brews.

Getting great results brewing a New England–style IPA requires more focus on process than recipe alone. Ryan Brooks, formerly of Coronado Brewing in San Diego, shared their process of developing a New England–style IPA in the West Coast IPA heartland.

Look for a bold, spicy stout (an imperial stout or an espresso stout) to stand up to the hoisin in this recipe.

Brad Smith explains why many beers brewed with extract come out darker than you might expect.

New England–style IPA is a perfect example of how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Neil Fisher, head brewer at WeldWerks Brewing Co. in Greeley, Colorado, shares some tips on brewing one.

The Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co. tastes more like Munich than Austin with its award-winning lineup of hoppy American and traditional German beer styles that add to the breadth of the city’s already robust beer scene.

Breakside Brewery in Portland, Oregon, is well known for its IPAs—but that wasn’t really the plan. At least it wasn’t the whole plan.

The “Love Handles” department in Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® is devoted to great beer bars. Here are the three beer bars that we explored in Issue 16 (December 2016/January 2017).

In this recipe excerpted from Jackie Dodd’s The Craft Beer Bites Cookbook, a fruity, peppery Belgian ale combines with caramelized apples and onions for a delightfully tasty tidbit.

Here is a simple and simply delicious recipe scaled to homebrew volume from The Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co.’s Brewer Brian Peters.

Phil Leinhart, brewmaster for Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, New York, loves a simple recipe produced with attention to detail.

Breakside adjusts the hops bill in their American IPAs regularly, depending on the changes in varieties between harvests and hops lots over the course of the year. This combo of Columbus, Citra, Centennial, and Chinook is one of their favored combos.

With endless blue skies, one of the winningest collections of IPAs in the world, and a rapidly growing roster of beer festivals, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is staking its claim as one of America’s best brew destinations.

Juicy Bits from WeldWerks Brewing Co. in Greeley, Colorado, is a New England–style IPA that has quickly garnered both regional and national attention for the brewery. Brewer Neil Fisher scaled this recipe to homebrew size.

Here’s a super-hoppy, super-fun, clean New England-style IPA with no haze from NoDa Brewing Company’s Brewmaster, Chad Henderson.

For our first-annual Best in Beer issue, we asked you about your favorite beer writers and glassware, trends you think will last, how you drink, and how much you drink.

The results are in! We have the results of The Best in Beer 2016: Homebrewers' Picks, where you can check out hombrewing trends, favorite gear, and more!

We asked some of our most trusted beer critics for their favorite beers, breweries, trends, and more for 2016.

From your reader picks to our tightly curated (and much argued-over) editors’ picks for the year, we’ve left no stone unturned in bringing you the absolute best in the world of beer this year.

This issue, we celebrate two things: the forward-thinking brewers of New England–style IPAs and what’s great in the world of brewing with our first annual “Best Of” issue.