August 2007

The Bronze Age of Irish Brewing

August 19, 2007

With at least 4,500 small breweries dotting the Irish landscape, you might be tempted to call this the Golden Age of Irish Brewing, but all this brewing was taking place around 2500 BCE, in the Bronze Age. At least that’s a new theory being proposed by the Moore Group, whose ideas will be published next [...]

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Putting On Airs

August 19, 2007

A friend sent me this link (thanks Steve) to a Wall Street Journal article entitled When Beer Takes On Vintners’ Airs, about craft brewers making beer with more complex flavors. There’s a lot of good in the article, but I can’t help but feel like it’s dripping with a certain condescension. I don’t know if [...]

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The 86 Rules

August 18, 2007

A friend sent me this link to a list of “The 86 Rules of Boozing” from Modern Drunkard Magazine — which by the way is Fal Allen’s favorite magazine. Most are essentially good bar etiquette and I’d say agree with the vast majority of them. See what you think.  

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Drinking Slows Dementia

August 17, 2007

There was an item in the “Raw Data” section of my newly arrived September issue of Playboy magazine (yes, I read the articles, too) about the moderate drinking of alcohol helping to stave off or slow the onset of dementia. Here it is in its entirety: For people suffering from cognitive decline, having up to [...]

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Northern England’s 1st Female Brewer

August 17, 2007

The term “brewster,” which means female brewer has fallen largely out of fashion, though I know a number of brewsters who do actually like the word. I’ve always liked the sound of it, myself, and it evokes a time when it was not only common for brewers to be female, but it was it was [...]

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Steve Harrison’s Body Found

August 16, 2007

The body of Sierra Nevada Brewing Vice-President Steve Harrison was found earlier today, around 4:15 p.m., in the Sacramento River, by a local resident who has helping been with the search on his Wave Runner since last week. Roughly two hours later, the local sheriff’s deputies recovered Harrison’s body, which had been caught on a [...]

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MADD Hopping Mad Over Movement to Lower Drinking Age

August 16, 2007

On the heels of a growing debate and movement to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18, MADD has issued an “Action Alert” to its members and affiliate neo-prohibitionist groups asking them to let their friends, family and legislators know the “facts.” Though in reality what they’re hoping to do is reinvigorate the moral [...]

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Kirin Discovers Anti-Oxidizing Yeast

August 16, 2007

Kirin Brewery, along with the Keio University Institute of Advanced Biosciences have announced the discovery of new yeast strain found by analyzing the metabolic byproducts that brewer’s yeast synthesizes. What they found was that brewer’s yeast creates large quantities of “hydrogen sulfide when processing a tiny number of metabolites of the amino acid asparagine.” The [...]

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World’s Rarest Bottle of Beer Sold on eBay

August 16, 2007

A full bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale, brewed and bottled in 1852, sold recently on eBay for a record $503,300. The eBay listing gives a great deal of historical information about the Arctic expedition, as well as the bottle itself: Until the 1850s Allsopp’s Brewery was most notable for brewing some of the first India [...]

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Craft Beer Growth Continues Double-Digit Growth in First Half of 2007

August 15, 2007

The Brewers Association just released the sales numbers for craft beer covering the first half of 2007. It’s all good news and craft beer is again showing double-digit growth at approximately 11%, which is the same percentage growth rate it sustained in 2006. From the press release: The Brewers Association, the trade association that tabulates [...]

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Collaborating With the Collaborators

August 15, 2007

Without diminishing all of the great beer dinners I’ve attended this year, I think I’m anticipating this one more keenly than any dinner all year. I’ll have returned home the following day from “Hop School” and will be fairly itching for hoppy beers. How could I do better than this? Beer Chef Bruce Paton’s next [...]

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MSNBC On the Drinking Age

August 14, 2007

MSNBC had a very interesting article about the recent surge in support for lowering the drinking age to from twenty-one to eighteen again. Apart from nations that don’t permit alcohol at all — usually for religious reasons — we have the highest age for allowing drinking of any country in the world. For the vast [...]

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California Redefines Distilled Spirits

August 14, 2007

California’s Board of Equalization took the surprising move today (by a one vote margin) of redefining distilled spirits using some very odd language. The new definition, which takes effect in July 2008, was re-written in an effort by neo-prohibitionist groups to tax FMB’s (flavored malt beverages, a.k.a. alcopops or malternatives) at a higher rate under [...]

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Toronado 20th Anniversary Celebration Concludes

August 13, 2007

After the 21st Amendment beer dinner, I hightailed it back to the Toronado where the party had kicked into high gear. It was this kind of night, with all manner of wonderful beers, many of them — at least 22 — had been made especially for the Toronado and that evening. Many special bottles were [...]

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Funkmaster Sully Rocks the House

August 13, 2007

In the middle of the Toronado party Saturday night, across town, a beer dinner took place at the Cathedral Hill Hotel with the beers of 21st Amendment and brewmaster Shaun O’Sullivan. Bruce put on his usual excellent panoply of flavors, paired to perfection with 21st Amendment’s flavorful beers. Brewmaster Shaun O’Sullivan, in great spirits after [...]

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Toronado 20th Anniversary Celebration Begins

August 13, 2007

My friend Dave Keene bought the Toronado bar on lower Haight in 1989, transforming it — and much of the Bay Area’s drinkers along with it — into the premiere beer bar in the city and one of the top beer bars in the country. That’s not so much opinion as fact, confirmed by the [...]

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