Last year, Brewmaster Mark Carpenter celebrated his 40th anniversary with Anchor Brewery. According to my notes, he started on September 30, 1971. During GABF, a film crew interviewed a number of us during some side events, and they put together this video that includes some luminaries from the craft beer industry. Congratulations Mark.
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Matt Sweeny, from Simple Earth Hops of Dodgeville, Wisconsin, announced today that he’ll be hosting 2-hour educational “Brewing Up a Community Hops Webinars” in March, April and May of this year, on the third Saturday of each month with a morning (10 a.m. CST) and evening (9 p.b. CST) session on each day.
Accroding to the press release, “commercial hopics to be covered include marketing local hops, establishing a commercial hopyard, processing hops, how to use earth-friendly growing practices and lots of time for questions and answers. The cost for each webinar is $20, tickets are available at Eventbrite” and a full schedule is available online.
So that’s “2 Hops Webinars offered per day on Sat. 3/17, Sat., 4/21 and Sat., 5/19 for American Craft Brew Week! Morning Hops Webinar @ 10am to 12pm CST and a late night Hops Webinar @ 9pm to 11pm CST.” If you’ve ever thought about growing hops, either commercially or just for fun, this looks like it could be a great way to find out more about how to go about it and what’s really involved.
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The Distilled Spirits Council, a trade organization for producers of distilled spirits, just released their annual report on how spirits are doing relative to the other alcoholic beverages. Vodka continues to lead the spirits parade, with rum in second and tequila in third.
While beer continues to be the most popular adult beverage, spirits once again took market share from beer, which was up 4% by sales in 2011 over 2010. According to their figures, beer currently enjoys 49.3% of the alcohol market, with spirits having 33.6% and wine 17.1%. [Note: I can't account for the 0.1% difference in the two charts. They're supposedly taken from the same source, though the one below is directly from the Distilled Spirits Council.]
While 49.3% sounds pretty good, the year before it was 49.8%
And in 2000, only 11 years ago, it was 55.5%, meaning beer has lost 6.2% marketshare in just over a decade. Hey, beer people; you’re just not pulling your weight. Drink a few more beers tonight. A can (or bottle or pint) a day, that’s all we ask.
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Here’s an odd, but interesting article (especially if you’re a comic book geek — which I am) on comic books and beer. The author makes suggestions of beers to pair with your favorite comic book characters. Weird, but why not? We’ve tried pairing beer with everything else at this point, so why not comic books.
The article, A Guide To Pairing Your Comics & Beer was published yesterday on Quirk Books. The suggestions, a dozen in all, range from obvious to clever to head-scratching.
Here’s the list, though I’d encourage to check out author Thom Dunn’s reasons for each pairing.
The two that seem most wrong to me are Batman and Wolverine’s choices. Batman wouldn’t drink something sweet, he’d have an imperial stout, something bigger and rougher like Three Floyd’s Dark Lord. And a better Canadian choice for Wolverine would be Unibroue’s Maudite, which is based on a legend of eight lumberjacks, a pact with the devil and a flying canoe.
And here’s a couple more I came up with. What comic book and beer pairing would you suggest to add to the list?
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Here’s a fun one for the DIY crowd, from the June 1938 issue of Popular Science.
The two-page instructions explained to readers how to build their very own Beer-Keg Radio. It was for your, you know, “game room.” Who doesn’t have one of those?
It seems DIY was a lot less spoon-fed with detailed instructions back in the 1930s. There were only vague directions, giving a lot of flexibility to the project. Here’s the parts list you’ll need to build the radio:
And here’s the schematic you’re meant to follow and duplicate:
The introduction is priceless, here’s how they start out:
Curiously, they actually tell readers to get a wine barrel and that they can later turn it into a beer keg. By 1938 were wooden beer barrels already that scarce? I honestly don’t know, obviously, but that seems like strange advice.
Here’s what it would look like, before closing the top of the keg.
After closing, the radio works with two knobs on top.
After it’s done, “‘you’ll get a barrel of fun’ from this novel radio.”
If you want to see the pages full size and build one yourself, here’s Page 1 and Page 2.
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In honor of today being “Beer Can Day,” the anniversary of the first beer can’s introduction by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey on January 24, 1935, here’s an amazing use of a beer can. Now this is recycling, or perhaps more correctly repurposing.
For many years, people having been making what are called “pinhole cameras” out of a variety of materials, really anything that keeps out light can be used. Essentially, they’re a very simple, homemade camera. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. “A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.” But they’ve become very popular again in the last ten or so years, a kind of backlash as a result of the rise of digital photography. There’s as simple and low-tech as possible, yet still create interesting images.
At least two photographers have been in the news lately, making time-lapse photographs with pinhole cameras made from beer cans. The first, a student at the University of Hertfordshire — Regina Valkenborgh — put her beer can camera “next to the university’s radio telescope at its Bayfordbury Observatory.” According to the Daily Mail, the pinhole camera recorded the sun’s movements over a six-month period of time, “[f]rom solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view.” How cool is that?
The second, photographer Justin Quinnell, was featured on the Discovery Channel’s website. He’s captured a variety of time-lapse pinhole images using “emptied beer cans and about 50 cents worth of other supplies, such as duct tape and regular photography paper. While the cameras only took about five minutes to build, they had to withstand six months of ‘wind, rain, hail, and being thrown in the trash.’”
When asked which beer cans he preferred, Quinnell responded. “My choice would be lager or Guinness although often, when I teach larger groups, I have to rely on what is left in my neighbors recycling boxes.”
This photo is of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, England, from December, 19 2007 to June 21, 2008.
This one is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, also in Bristol, from December 17, 2007 through June 21, 2008.
And this last one was taken by the gravestones of Blance, Grace and Dorcus, over three months in the spring 2008 in the Eastville Cemetery, Bristol, England.
You can many more of Justin Quinnell’s work at his website, pinholephotography.org, including a galley of more from the Slow Light Collection, which is where the above photos came from.
Now that’s a pretty cool use of beer cans. Happy Beer Can Day!
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For more of my past columns, see Brooks On Beer
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