A note from the cartographer.
I’m an ale drinker. That’s probably the most honest place to start.
American craft beer mostly — I love a good NEIPA, a double-hopped IPA with that hazy, tropical thing going on. I’ve got a soft spot for British Best Bitter too, the kind of unpretentious pint that rewards you for paying attention. But for a long time, that was more or less where my world ended.
Then I tried a Sierra Nevada Gose. This was years ago, back when the style was still a novelty outside Germany. It was salty, sour, slightly spritzy — and I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. Not bad exactly, just genuinely strange. It stuck with me.
That one beer got me curious about sour styles. Which led me to Berliner Weisse. Which led me further and further into corners of the beer world I hadn’t known existed.
When I moved to Europe in 2018, that curiosity had somewhere to go. Living here makes it easier to stumble across things — a Flanders Red on a bar menu in Ghent, something unfamiliar on the menu at a Stockholm restaurant, a style on a label that you’ve never heard of and have to look up. I travel a lot for work and I’ve got into the habit of picking up something local wherever I end up. Most trips teach me something.
That’s more or less how this site came together. Not from obsession — I’m not someone with a cellar full of vintage lambics and a spreadsheet — but from straightforward curiosity. New place, new beer, new question: where does this come from, and why does it taste like this?
Turns out that second question has some genuinely good answers. The Gose, for instance, is a wheat beer from Goslar in central Germany, so tied to its hometown that brewing it elsewhere was once effectively banned. The style nearly died out in the 20th century, kept alive by a handful of Leipzig pubs before craft beer rediscovered it. Knowing that story didn’t change what was in my glass. But it changed how I felt about it. Context is flavor — that’s the closest thing this site has to a mission statement.
That historical thread runs through everything on this site. The Style Expeditions are where the context lives — the geography, the near-extinctions, the reasons a style tastes the way it does. But they connect directly to the Brew Guides, because understanding where a style comes from changes how you approach brewing it. And to the Pairing Table, because regional food and regional beer tend to have developed alongside each other for good reasons. The three pieces are meant to be read together.
That’s what I’m building here. A guide to the parts of the beer world that don’t get written about properly — rare styles, old traditions, the breweries still doing interesting things, the bars worth going out of your way for. There are already articles up on Gose, Berliner Weisse, Rauchbier, Happoshu, Kentucky Common, and more coming. The order is roughly whatever I’ve been most curious about lately.
If there’s something you think deserves an expedition — a style you’ve encountered and couldn’t find decent information about, a bar worth documenting, a brewery doing something interesting — I’d like to hear about it.
The best beer is the one in your hand. But the most intriguing beer is the one you haven’t heard of yet.
— Mitch
