She's with her | The Spectator

Craft brewing’s Midwest comeback

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘No food or drink has evolved as much as beer in the past 15 years,’ says J. Ryan Stradal when we meet for a drink at the Beer Grotto, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author of the New York Times bestselling debut Kitchens of the Great Midwest is in the middle of his Midwest book tour. His latest novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, is a multi-generational saga that starts with two sisters, a stolen inheritance and a dream of making the best beer in Minnesota. It’s a family story told through beer goggles, which charts the evolution of Midwestern brewing from the 1960s to the present day.

Roger Kimball

California drinking: forgive them their granola

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Cyril Connolly famously opined that every young man of spirit wants to do two things: start a magazine and start a chicken farm. That’s about half right, I think. It would have been more accurate if he had included a true, if often unspoken, heart’s desire: to be a wine critic. Do you know anyone — anyone you still speak to, I mean — who hasn’t wanted to be one? Every Sunday, my family and I participate in an august ceremony that extols a beneficent God through whose ministrations we accept the gift of vinum...fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum: ‘wine… fruit of the vine and the work of human hands’.

Jane Stannus

Everyone’s climbing aboard the Beyond Meat gravy train

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. It’s summer in Wokeville, California, and the denizens congregate in their backyards, popping open craft beers and passing around kelp-flavored rice chips as the Beyond Meat burgers sizzle on the solar-powered grill. As Brad Paisley would say, it’s just another American Saturday night. Er. Wait. Not sure I caught that right. Backyards, yes. Craft beer, yes. Rice chips, well, OK. But did you say Beyond Meat? I am sorry to report this, dear residents of Everywhere Else, but yes, that’s what’s cooking in Wokeville these days.

Food & Drink