Editorial

Beer Sales By Style Through Thanksgiving

December 11, 2011

MC Basset, publishers of the Beer Bible — better known by its official title, “The Essential Reference of Domestic Brewers and Their Bottled Brands” — in their monthly e-mail blast, Style Trends, “provided a snapshot of (YTD) beer sales by beer style.” The data they use was compiled by the Symphony IRI Group (IRI), using [...]

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St. Nicholas: Patron Saint of Brewers

December 6, 2011

While St. Nicholas is best known — in America, at least — for wearing red and white and giving presents to Children each December 25, he’s actually the patron saint for a number of professions, places and afflictions. His feast day is not actually Christmas Day, but almost three weeks earlier on December 6. That’s [...]

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eBuzzing (Formerly Wikio) Beer Blog Rankings For December 2011

December 5, 2011

The December 2011 standings may have been updated for December, though since there’s no North American presence or website, it’s hard to be sure. For those of you who still have a widget on your blog’s homepage, you may have noticed that the name has changed from Wikio to eBuzzing. As the so-called “consultant,” they [...]

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Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia

November 28, 2011

Peter Damerow, from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, has published online a lengthy paper about the origins of Sumerian brewing. Entitled Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia, it’s part of The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). The opening sentence gives a flavor of its purpose. [...]

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Top 8 Beer Sales Days

November 26, 2011

This two-year old SlashFood article showed up in my Paper.li today, retweeted by a brewery I follow. The article, Super Bowl Sunday — The 8th Biggest Beer Day of the Year? questions the list of the top eight “Holidays/Events for Beer.” The list was complied by Nielsen, and as he points out is “combined beer [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving From The Brookston Beer Bulletin

November 24, 2011

I just finished my family’s Thanksgiving feast, enjoyed with a 2000 magnum of Our Special Ale from Anchor Brewing that I found nestled in the back of one of our refrigerators. Boy am I stuffed. Before the tryptophan kicks in and I’m found drooling on the sofa, I wanted to take a moment to wish [...]

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Updates On The Vodka & Tampon Hoax

November 21, 2011

You may recall my skeptical take on the Vodka and Tampon story two weeks ago. Since then, I got an e-mail from a friend with a link to a Tiny Cat Pants post In Which I Debunk the Vodka-Soaked Tampon Myth. Today, I learned from the Missus that Danielle Crittenden, Managing Editor, Blogs, for the [...]

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Declines Of The British Pub Slowing?

November 20, 2011

In September, the British Beer & Pub Association released information regarding pub closures in the UK. Back in the 1970s more than 90% of all beer consumed in Britain was bought from the “on trade” — pubs and clubs. According to the British Beer & Pub Association this ratio had fallen to 51% from pubs [...]

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MADD Rates The States

November 17, 2011

According to a press release sent out by the neo-prohibitionist organization MADD yesterday, it’s the five-year anniversary of the launching of their Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving® program, which you can tell is all about the results since they went to the trouble to get a “registered trademark” on the name. I also find it [...]

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Fomenting Female Fear

November 16, 2011

The purported scientific journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research has just published another doozy, this one entitled The Legacy of Minimum Legal Drinking Age Law Changes: Long-Term Effects on Suicide and Homicide Deaths Among Women. The idea was to compare people drinking before the age was raised to 21 with when 18-year olds could still [...]

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Belgium’s Liquid Communication

November 12, 2011

The NPR program PRI’s The World had an interesting piece yesterday by a Clark Boyd entitled In Belgium, It’s Not Just Beer. It’s ‘Liquid Communication.’ I like that turn of phrase, “Liquid Communication,” though the gist of the article is that the author, understandably, worries that ABI might start capitalizing on the romance of Belgian [...]

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Drunk Off … Er, In Your Ass?

November 11, 2011

A mix of thanks and “how could you” to Stephen Beaumont for tweeting this story, because now that I know it, I can’t unknow it. According to Digital Journal, a growing trend among Phoenix, Arizona, area youths — disturbingly both girls and boys — is to get drunk by soaking a tampon in vodka and [...]

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Pink Beer … You Know, For The Girls

November 8, 2011

Apparently there’s yet another misguided attempt to reach women with the aim of tempting them to try beer by making the color of the beer pink. This time it’s a group of young South African women attending Durban University of Technology who came up with the idea for the beer, which they’re calling Pink Fantasy, [...]

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Societal Costs vs. Personal Costs For Alcohol

November 3, 2011

At first glance I thought my pals at Alcohol Justice (AJ) got their hooks in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), because I don’t know anyone better at making up behaviors that cry out for personal responsibility that are ascribed to society (for the cost) and business (for the fault). Their absurd “charge [...]

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Drinking & Cultural Anthropology

October 28, 2011

BBC Magazine published online a couple of weeks ago an interesting piece on cultural anthropology as it relates to drinking patterns, entitled Viewpoint: Is the Alcohol Message All Wrong?. While the article itself I found compelling on its on, the way in which it was attacked in the voluminous number of comments is at least [...]

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Stop A Mate Driving Drunk: Legend

October 27, 2011

Monday, I posted some PSA’s aiming to prevent drunk driving in rural Australia — Prevent Mate Morphosis. They used something we’re not used to seeing here in the U.S.: humor. Now here’s another great PSA, this time from New Zealand, that uses a sense of humor to get its message across without pandering or using [...]

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