Will Hawkes

The passenger in the seat next to me on the 12 p.m. flight to Rome keeps laughing, loudly. I’d be annoyed, but it’s my 7-year-old son, Fraser, and it’s my fault. I’ve given him “Asterix the Gladiator,” a comic book I loved when I was his age, to read during the flight. After the umpteenth guffaw, I ask what’s so funny: “The gladiators are refusing to fight!”
Fraser has autism spectrum disorder. His condition once would have been described as Asperger’s syndrome, and he is “high-functioning,” ...

It’s the sort of boast that starts bar fights. A vegan hot dog, launched in London on May 10, “is identical to its pork counterpart in taste, smell and texture,” its creators claim. But does it live up the billing?
Well, as I learned when I tried the hot dog at the launch, with that classic red-brown sheen, and an appealingly authentic smokiness, it certainly looks right and it smells right. And the flavor? Put it this way: If you didn’t know this was a meat-free product, you probably wouldn’...

A few years back, Karl Cooney served vegan food at a beer festival. It didn't go well.
"It was a bit of a chore," says the founder and owner of Yulli's Brews in Alexandria, NSW. "We tried to do all these very beery things – we used our red ale to make a gravy, we caramelised onions in our English IPA, we pickled cucumbers in our Pale Ale – but the fact that there was no smoked brisket meant that people weren't really interested."
Smoked brisket, hamburgers, pork knuckle: these are the foods t...

Magic Rock is the latest British craft brewery to fall to the multinationals after the Australian group Lion completed a deal to acquire 100% of the Yorkshire company for an undisclosed fee today.
Managing director Richard Burhouse, who founded Magic Rock in 2011 alongside brewer Stuart Ross, says that Lion’s desire to grow the business in a sustainable way appealed to him, and that their approach – in August last year – came at the perfect time. 'What they wanted to do was a really good fit ...

Dry January might be over, but the thirst for low-abv beer is certainly not. The go-to low-alcohol beer was once the now unpopular 'mild'; Will Hawkes explains how the new, emerging 'table beer' category might be its fashionable progeny
Plenty of Britain’s historic beer styles have been re-made and re-modelled of late. IPA is now all things to all people: hazy or bright, strong or session, always involving fistfuls of New World hops. Porter is the same as stout, except when the latter is barr...

Speaking on the day that Heineken bought Fischer-Adelshoffen in 1996, the manager of the Fischerstub restaurant lamented the impending takeover of one of Alsace’s most famous brewing names.
Our brewing tradition is going to disappear,” Bruno Fischer told France 2’s news program that evening, February 13 from behind the bar at the bierstub that stands in the shadow of the Fischer brewery. “It’s a family, a soul that will no longer be there. Once it’s gone it will be...

Frank Dobson Square is no place to linger, even on a warm October day. This brick-paved chunk of East London has seen better days, not least because its centerpiece, Dobson’s 1951 sculpture “Woman With Fish,” was vandalized beyond repair and removed in 2002. Those sitting on the benches around the square — who number three, including me, this Thursday morning — have only its former home, a forlorn metal plinth, to look at now.
I haven’t come to see the sculpture, though, or its plinth. I’m se...

With Goose Island’s new London brewpub soon to be followed by openings from Little Creatures, Panhead and, possibly, Sierra Nevada, Will Hawkes asks if ‘big craft’ is staking its claim on the capital ...

"It's really crazy," says Kim Sturdavant, speaking down the line from the Social Kitchen and Brewery in San Francisco. "I just had no idea it would really gather traction and take off as quickly as it has, and as widely as it has."
Sturdavant is the inventor of Brut IPA, the latest iteration in the seemingly endless evolution of modern India Pale Ale, the hop-driven brew that has driven the craft-beer boom. Except that Brut IPA, which Sturdavant first made in September last year, has all the ...

The front door at Gaststätte Lommerzheim, Cologne’s most charismatic pub, has barely shut before it swings open again. A middle-aged couple hurry in, share a joke with the blue-shirted bartender and weave their way between tightly packed tables in search of seats. They’ll be lucky. It’s just gone 6pm on a Wednesday but the place is full of customers contemplating fist-thick pork chops and slim, cylindrical glasses of Kölsch, the pale, delicately floral beer that is native to this Rhineland ci...

One of Stu McKinley's most cherished moments as a brewer came on a dark night at a Wellington pub. "It was the second time we'd made Pot Kettle Black, our porter, and we were releasing it alongside another dark beer [that had been] made by the New Zealand homebrew champion," the co-owner of Yeastie Boys says. "At one point I looked around and everyone in the place was drinking porter, and I thought: 'I'll probably never see this again'."
He's almost certainly right. Walk into a modern beer ba...

Self-taught brewers have transformed British beer over the past decade, but times are changing again. A new industry-wide apprenticeship scheme is expected to get the final sign-off from the Institute for Apprenticeships next month. Will Hawkes reports

Alex Troncoso got an email from home last month. "I'm drinking your Pilsner in the Welcome Hotel in Sydney, and it's right up there with the finest I've ever tasted – and, believe me, I've tasted a sh–tload of them," it read. "It's coming to the end of the keg and I don't know what I'm going to do when it's gone. Please send more!"
It's a sentiment many British drinkers will understand. Troncoso and partner Annie Clements are the team behind Lost and Grounded, a brewery that stands out in an ...

What sort of beer is most likely to impress Melburnians? For Dennis De Boer, head brewer at Modus Operandi Brewing in Sydney's Northern Beaches, the answer is obvious: one with coffee in it. "You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a city more obsessed and innovative with coffee than Melbourne," he says, which is why he's brewed a Vanilla Mocha Stout for this week's Good Beer Week Gala Showcase.