Welcome to Early Draught, a weekly newsletter by Kurt Reckziegel about enjoying, selling, and making good craft beer. If you haven’t subscribed, please do!
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🍺 Beer
40 Women-led breweries to support right now. Need I say more? Well, I will anyway. You should also check out Pink Boots Society, and if you’re out in Africa, look up Kweza Craft Brewery in Rwanda and Brewsters Craft in South Africa.
Making hoppy hops-free beer (yes, you read that right 🤯) using machine learning.
BrewDog and Schorschbrau came together to brew this 57.8% ABV monster of a beer, Strength In Numbers.
Brewing Funds the Cure is in its second year of enlisting at least one brewery per state to brew a signature IPA to raise funds for the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation. 👏👏
Buffalo Wangz is “literally a buffalo wing sauce sour beer.” I’m not complaining.
🗣️ Marketing Beer
I don’t think this is an official partnership with Pantone, but Spanish graphic designer, Txaber Mentxaka, imagined what beer packaging might look like if it emulated the color of the liquid inside.
BUD X Eleme Super Brand Day was a collab in Shanghai that featured digital and physical slot machines that doled out different Bud meal combos.
If you’ve ever felt like sharing a cold one with your pup, there’s a variety of brewery merch to bring your furry ones in on the fun. Singlecut has turned their Psychedelic! can into a plush dog toy, BrewDog has a hop-shaped toy, and Chewy makes a squeaky IPA.
Speaking of our furry friends, it seems that beer cans are the new milk cartons. BrewDog is using their cans to connect pups with new families, and they’ve called the limited run Street Dog.
Spanish beer, Estrella Galicia, tried their hand at being memelords, hopping on the How It Started/How It’s Going meme train here, here, and here.
🍻 Drinking Beer
Yeah, we’re all trying to get our unique check-ins on Untappd up, but André Marques is taking things to a whole other level. This 50-something Brazilian man is striving to collect beer cans from every country in the world. 🌎
Also, how do people decide on their beer ratings? Mike has an idea:
Feeling Halloween-y? Head out to Grand Rapids, MI, and drink beer with ghosts at The Mitten Brewing Co. Prep yourself by listening to their ghost files, and read this piece from a couple years ago to understand what you’re getting yourself into.
This guy from London, Ontario 🇨🇦 wants to tell you how COVID has improved beer drinking in his province.
😝 Stuff almost beer-related (like if you squint a little)
Being good at beer inevitably also means having to be good at supply chain. Odeko AI helps out with that—or at least that’s what they’re doing for coffee… for now.
Next Glass (Untappd’s parent company) just dropped some cash to acquire bevtech company, Oznr.
📲 Follow of the Week
If you’re a fan of beer AND gundam but you don’t follow @colvinology, then what are you even doing?
📸 Can of the Week
yellowferrari from The Veil Brewing Co in Richmond, VA