The author of For the Love of Hops and the recently released Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer offers his personal list of 2016 bests.
Top New Breweries (less than 3 years old)
Right Proper Brewing (Washington, D.C.): Your choice: the brewpub or the production brewery that opened two years later. If an American Primitive beer is on, drink that. And as Brewer Nathan Zeender says, “Ornithology teaches us that beer can have a soulfulness.”
Creature Comforts Brewing (Athens, Georgia): I discovered this brewery from a distance, one beer at a time. If Athena (a Berliner weisse) on a hot day in Yakima, Washington, hadn’t already convinced me how much I wanted to visit the brewery, then more recently Athena Paradiso with passion fruit and guava certainly did.