Beer Notes from Late April

Busy week, so I'm trying to pull together some reading/viewing from the previous week that you may have missed. Beware, link overload.

• Great news (potentially) for craft brewers in Ohio. The state house passed a law lowering the small brewer license from roughly $3,900 to $1,000 annually. This applies to breweries with less than 31 million gallons of output annually. ABInBev was not pleased with the legislation, largely due to a prohibition against breweries owning distributors, and was meeting was the governor yesterday to voice their protest. A grassroots campaign on Facebook led to calls flooding the governor's office yesterday. Rick Armon, beer writer for the Akron Beacon Journal, was reporting late yesterday that Kasich is likely to sign the bill. Let's hope he does. The lower license fee doesn't dip as low as some of our neighboring states, but it's a great start. 
• Interesting article circulating around Facebook today about 15 things craft brewers think but don't talk about. Some really good points here, especially the tendency for beer geeks to chase white whales while forgetting the solid, well made beers closer to home. This ties into another point--the drive for breweries to stretch themselves too thin with weird and unusual styles, often at the expense of core craft offerings. Also, the truth about beer festivals and craft beer drinking habits--that too many of beer geeks go to festivals just to get wasted, and too many beer geeks simply drink too much. Interesting points about the lack of solid beer writing in mainstream media. 
• Finally, I spent a lovely evening with Gus and Rachel filming a video review for Central Waters Bourbon Barrel Stout. See it below, and I claim no responsibility to the "subliminal" images.