Food & Beer

Beer In Ads #364: Nobel’s Appetizers Are Just An Excuse

May 6, 2011

Friday’s ads are for a Brazilian beer (where I’m heading next week) from Primo Schincariol. The brand of beer is Nobel and this series of ads is from 2008 and uses the slogan “Appetizers Are Just An Excuse.” Each ad shows a beer glass filled not with beer, but two appetizers that, from a distance, [...]

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Session #51: The Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off

May 5, 2011

It’s my great pleasure to host our 51st Session, my second time playing host over the four years we’ve been doing them. I chose a frightfully complicated topic which I’ve taken to calling by an overly grand name: The Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off. You can go back and read the long, original version of [...]

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Beer In Ads #363: Carling Black Label & Cheese

May 5, 2011

Thursday’s ads are for Carling Black Label, both featuring beer and cheese. The first, which appeared in Life magazine in April of 1963. Nice to see even that far back someone was putting cheese and beer together. The second appeared in a June 1962 issue of Life, and featured a different cheese. Both are part [...]

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Cheese & Beer Pairing Session Next Friday

May 1, 2011

A gentle reminder that the first Friday in May is less than a week away, and that means it will be time for the next Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday. I’ll be your host for the 51st Session, and I’m making it as difficult as possible, though not on purpose, I assure you. I thought [...]

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No Beer At Royal Wedding?

April 25, 2011

Another royal wedding’s coming up this Friday. I care about it as much as the last one in 1981 — not one whit. In deference to my British colleagues and friends who cling to the notion that the royal family matters, I’ll spare you my usual diatribe. But it was announced recently that no beer [...]

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Toronado Blunch 2011 Recap

April 16, 2011

Last Sunday, the annual Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch took place, with the food again being done by Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef. The Belgian lunch — or Blunch, as I’ve taken to calling it — began promptly at 11:30 a.m. and went until nearly 5:30 p.m. Now that’s slow food, but really with twelve courses [...]

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Beer In Ads #347: Our Third President Was Our First Spaghetti Maker

April 13, 2011

Wednesday’s ad is a 1948 ad for Budweiser featuring our third President, Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday is also today. He was born April 13, 1743. According to the Bud ad, he also introduced spaghetti to America. Let’s say I’m skeptical. Here’s the text: From Naples he got a mould to form spaghetti and introduced what [...]

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Announcing Session #51: The Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off

April 8, 2011

Our 51st Session is the third of our run at nostalgia, albeit a mere four years worth of it. Stan Hieronymus first proposed the Session four years ago, and was the first host, too, followed by Alan (from A Good Beer Blog) and then I hosted the third outing. So here I am venturing into [...]

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Specialty Foods Trending Up, Paralleling Craft Beer

April 7, 2011

Seems like it’s a food sort of day. There was an interesting press release from the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (or NASFT) — the folks that put on the various Fancy Food Shows — entitled Specialty Food Industry Shows Renewed Strength. It’s a teaser for the actual report, The State of the [...]

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Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch This Sunday

April 7, 2011

I just learned that there are a few seats left for the annual Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch taking place this Sunday, April 10. For the third year — or is that fourth? — the food is being done by Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef. If you love Belgian beer, good food and especially pairing the [...]

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The Calorie Mix From The 1970s To Today

April 7, 2011

This is not a beer post, but we gotta eat, too. Tom Philpott, at Grist, details an interesting interactive chart created by Andrea Jezovit at Civil Eats. Using USDA data for “average daily calories available per capita, adjusted for spoilage and waste,” it tracks our eating habits since 1970, separating our foodstuffs into basic categories: [...]

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Drunken Carrot

April 5, 2011

On Sunday, my wife and I indulged our inner geeks by attending WonderCon at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s an orgy of comic books, cartoons, science fiction and fantasy, art, toys, film, television and all manner of mainstream and non-mainstream entertainment. It was a fun day, and we picked up some cool stuff for [...]

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Food & Drink’s 50 Most Important Discoveries & Inventions

March 17, 2011

The Daily Meal, a food-oriented website, has come up with a list of The 50 Most Important Inventions (and Discoveries) in Food and Drink. It’s a pretty interesting list, and at the very least got me thinking about how much we take for granted and how important so many of those simple items are to [...]

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Guinness Chocolate Cheesecake

March 13, 2011

My sister-in-law sent me this delicious looking recipe for a chocolate cheesecake made with Guinness, though I suspect any Irish dry stout would work. The recipe comes from Closet Cooking, a food blog by a man named Kevin in Ontario, Canada. This recipe for the Guinness chocolate cheesecake is a pretty basic chocolate cheesecake recipe [...]

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Celebrate Triple Rock’s 25th Anniversary Monday

March 11, 2011

Geez has time flown. Twenty-five plus years ago you weren’t even allowed to operate a brewpub in the State of California. Finally in 1983 that finally changed, thanks to some hard work and a lot of meetings. Shortly thereafter, the first two brewpubs in California opened, Mendocino Brewing and Buffalo Bill’s. The third opened 25 [...]

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The Impact Of Texture On Taste Perception

March 8, 2011

On Food Navigator, there was an interesting short interview with Matthew Patrick, VP of R&D for TIC Gums where he suggests that “food and beverage product developers spend a shockingly low amount of time examining how texture may impact a finished product.” In beer, of course, texture is more often referred to as “mouthfeel.” And [...]

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