Over at the Advocate newspaper, hardworking big man Ian McNulty has penned a decent guide to New Orleans taprooms. The scene down here in New Orleans is slowly growing and as we’ve said before, give us 10 years and we just may have something to brag about. Link Oh, and Dixie Beer is on the precipice of opening right here in the glorious 9th Ward.

Free range journalist and hard-drinker, Eric Puga put together a top 20 Austin, Texas-area brewery power ranking. There are now 87 breweries in the Austin metropolitan area. Fawk. We’ve got our standby taprooms that we visit every time we go home but apparently there is some serious exploring that needs to be done. link

We’re trying to remember the last time we bought a beer from the folks at New Belgium. It’s not that they’re awful but if we’re going to spend our hard-earned money on craft beer it’s going to be on Great Raft or Live Oak or some other small-time brewer where our money makes an impact on the company’s bottom line. So we shrugged when New Belgium sold itself to Kirin. Who cares? But there were plenty, other compelling tales from the Colorado beer scene last year and Westword encapsulated them here.

For the past 20 some odd years we’ve been taking an annual vacation to Noord Holland, specifically Amsterdam. There are now 399 breweries in the Netherlands and you could spend a lifetime exploring them in spite of the fact that the entire country’s landmass is only one third the size of Kentucky. If you want a concise tour of what’s happening in the Dutch craft beer scene the conversation begins at Proeflokaal Arendsnest, a tap beer bar on Herengracht in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. Link.