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Boozin’

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pint
There seem to be so many of these colorful infographics around these days that I could post one almost every day and not run out for a while. So here’s today’s, Boozin’ A Colorful Look at the U.S.’s Drinking Habits and How We Stack Up. One curious figure I noticed, especially given the whining of the neo-prohibitionists. We have one of the highest teetotaler percentages, WTF? That’s disappointing. Another factoid that stood out was that the heaviest drinking day of the year was the day before Thanksgiving, what they referred to as “Black Out Wednesday” — do I hear a new holiday being created? That surprised me, though while they do list sources at the bottom of the chart, it’s not clear where that one came from. I would have thought Halloween, or one of the summer big picnic holidays.

boozin

Beer In The Pacific Northwest

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gigantic-brewing
My buddy Ben Love, who last year opened his own brewery in Portland, Gigantic Brewing, just sent me this cool video featuring his “master brewer,” Van Havig, who joined him at Gigantic, after many years at the Rock Bottom in Portland. The short film, entitled Victory, was created by Jerry Makare as a project for the University of Oregon Multi-Media Journalism Program Foundations class (J610) in Fall 2012. Havig makes some great points. Portland is an amazing place to drink beer, and what he’s saying, I think, holds true for a few other pockets of the country, but as far as I know, the market penetration of specialty beer there is second to none. It’s certainly one of my favorite places to enjoy a beer.

Farmville Hop Farming

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farmville-hops
I know next to nothing about Farmville, the popular farm simulation game played on Facebook, apart from the fact that it appears to be a time suck of epic proportions, with something on the order of 76 million active users every month. I know the company that created the game, Zynga, is in San Francisco. I remember passing by their offices with a huge screen outside the building on the way to the annual Christmas party at Anchor Brewing last month.

So maybe this is old hat, but here’s something I didn’t now. Searching for a graphic of hops yesterday, I discovered that in 2011, FarmVille added hop farming to their English Countryside Farm module, and it’s apparently available beginning with level 20, whatever that means. According to the wonderfully geeky FarmViller:

The Hops is a seed on the English Countryside Farm, available from level 20. It became available with the introduction of the English Countryside Farm beginning March 22, 2011.

It is available from the Market for 150 coins after reaching level 20. When bought and placed on the farm, the player receives 2 XP. It can be harvested every ten hours for 220 coins. The seed itself can be sold for 8 coins.

Here are the stages of growing hops in FarmVille:

Freshly Planted Hops

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Hops at 33% Growth

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Hops at 66% Growth

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Hops Ready to Be Harvested

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Hops Treated with Crop Fertilizer

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Hops After Having Withered

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A quick search reveals that you can also grow barley, but there appears to be no way to malt it or put all the ingredients together to brew beer. Oh, well, just when it was starting to look interesting. Perhaps I dodged a bullet there, after all.

Farmville_Freak_super_hops_grown

One Nation, Under Hops

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hops-and-beer
The Geeks of the Industry blog, under his “Creative Strategist” tag, lists Craft Beer and the Thank You Economy as number 16. Here’s what the University of Oregon advertising student blogger had to say, presumably interpreted through his burgeoning education.

The craft brew industry is a prime example of a 21st century customer-brand dynamic. As you may know if you’ve been reading my blog, I am a bit obsessed with the philosophy of Gary Vaynerchuk and his views on what social media means to the present and future of branding. Microbrews and their cult-like support from many walks of life is a perfect example of the power of word of mouth in the 21st century. The village ecosystem of commerce is returning with the powerful viral capability of the passionate few.

Those sentiments are illustrated nicely with this clever infographic, created by Column Five Media for Visual.ly, under the title How Indie Brewers Are Outpacing Beer Industry Growth. I just love the proliferation of infographics, they are my Kryptonite. I am powerless to resist them. Enjoy.

one-nation-under-hops

You’re In The Clear: The Health Benefits Of Moderate Consumption

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health
Here’s a great infographic about the Health Benefits of Moderate Consumption entitled Beer You’re in the Clear. It was produced a few years ago by the design firm Belancio, and highlights many of the benefit of the moderate consumption of beer, something the anti-alcohol folks continue to decry and deny. They’ve also made a limited edition with, in my opinion, better contrast, making it easier to read.

BeerClear-v2
You can see a larger, easier-to-read, version at Belancio and an even larger one at Fast Company.

Pixelated Beer

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pixelated-beer
If you’re as old as me, you probably remember when video games had very limited graphics and most were pixelated, only roughly approximating what the characters and backgrounds in the games looked like. I remember getting an Atari 2600 right after high school and playing it a lot while I was in the Army, when we had long blocks of time to kill. Worse still, the very first videogame I played was — believe it or not — Pong, in a stand alone cabinet that was inside Shea Stadium, when my step-grandparents took me to see the Mets play sometime in the early-to-mid-1970s. It must have been after 1972, since that’s when Pong debuted. I was Orioles fan back then — Brooks Robinson was my guy — so I don’t know why we went to see the Mets. Anyway, pixelation seems to be hot again these days in design, some kind of retro nostalgia no doubt. An artist in Spain, Iñaki Soria Izquierdo, did a series of designs of well-know beer bottles using a pixelated style. He appears to go by just his middle name professionally — Soria — and at his site, in his portfolio, is what he calls IcoBeer. I assume because he’s in Spain, the designs are all for well-known international brands, because it would be great to see his treatment of some American brands.
soria-4-beers
His website includes only the following description:

Pruebas gráficas de representación iconográfica de objetos (Estrella Damm / Heineken / Corona Extra / Guinness) a partir de estructuras y formas geométricas básicas.

Which Google translates as:

Graphic evidence of iconographic representation of objects (Estrella Damm / Heineken / Corona Extra / Guinness) from basic geometric shapes and structures.

But they remind me of those early videogame designs, with just simple square and rectangular shapes, and very few curves, to give the impression of the bottles and labels. Anyway, I think they’re pretty cool. Here are the four designs Soria did:

Corona

soria-corona

Guinness

soria-guinness

Heineken

soria-heineken

Estrella Dam

soria-estrella

Hopshackles?

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hopshackles
Regular readers will know how much of a calendar geek I am. Ever since we first moved to Oakland back in 1996, I’ve spent every New Year’s Day morning in line at either of the Pendragon/Pegasus book stores waiting for their amazing calendar sale to begin. They take every calendar that didn’t sell before December 31st from one of their book wholesaler’s warehouses and sell them at 3 for $10, no matter how big or small. We usually buy a few dozen, and have calendars everywhere, including multiple ones in many of the rooms of our home.

One of the page-a-day calendars I picked up this year was “Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English,” which I thought would be fun, given my love of language and words. It’s based on his book and website. The very first word on January 1 was “hopshackles,” which is one I’ve never heard of.

So a little online research revealed that there’s not much out there about it, actually. Wordnik, from the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, has this definition.

n. A shackle or weight used to hobble a horse or other animal.

According to the calendar entry, it was already an obscure word in 1859, when Robert Nare wrote that “what these were, we can only guess,” and he points to the word being used in a 1570 book, “The Scholemaster” [sic]. “Some runners … deserve but the hopshackes.” I think he was talking there about Win Bassett.

So, does it have anything to do with the hops used in beer? Not so much, although the word certainly sounds like it ought to. And apparently, I’m not the only one who thought so, as Nigel Wright named his English brewery, Hopshackle Brewery, after the obscure term, and tells the story of that decision:

Where did the name “Hopshackle” originate from and what does it mean? Strangely enough I first came across the word when watching the popular T.V. programme “Call My Bluff” some years ago. What a cracking name for a brewery I thought should I ever get around to realising a life times ambition! The origin of the word “Hopshackle” is unknown, but it’s transitive verb is to hobble which has several relevant meanings.

Hobble – to walk with an uneven, unsteady or feeble gait; to hinder, perplex or tie together the legs of to prevent escape, kicking, or to regulate pace or stride. Dray horses were hobbled to ensure that they did not waste any of the valuable beer they were delivering

My OED lists the word as obsolete, and the “hop” part of the word as “obscure” and speculate it’s a combining of “hopple” and “hamshackle.” The earliest reference to it is print they have is from 1568. They define it as “a ligament for confining a horse or cow; a hopple or hobble.”

Hopshackle

So I’m glad to see the word may live on at least in the name of a brewery. Because I agree with Nigel Wright, it is a cracking great name that should be brought back from obscurity. But, of course, it’s meaning needs to be updated, modernized and made useful again. So what should “hopshackle” mean, if we’re to bring it back?

Perhaps a previously overly hoppy beer that’s had its bitterness reduced to make a more balanced beer could be said to have “put on the hopshackles.” Or the session IPAs we’re starting to see, as in “Lagunitas’ new DayTime is great for drinking with lunch, because they put on the hopshackles.” Another usage could be a synonym for restrained or balanced, as opposed to extreme beer, like “Stone Brewing’s Enjoy By IPA is a nicely hopshackled beer?

Any other thoughts, idea, suggestions? C’mon people, brainstorm!

The Science Of The Spins

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spins
Given that today is New Year’s Eve — what I generally refer to as Amateur Drinking Day — I thought this science lesson from Mental Floss on what causes the spins was an appropriate topic. In Why Does Alcohol Cause the Spins?, author Matt Soniak explains that sometimes after an evening’s drinking that the room appears to be spinning out of control. You lie down, but it doesn’t help. No matter what you do, the vertigo persists, causing great discomfort and often the loss of lunch, dinner and everything else that used to be in your stomach. Here’s why.

The spins happen because of an odd effect alcohol has on your ears — specifically, on three tiny, fluid-filled structures called the semicircular canals. Inside each of these canals is a fluid called endolymph and a gelationous structure called the cupula, which is filled with cells covered in fine, hair-like stereocilia.

As you move around, the movement of the endolymph lags behind the more solid cupula, distorting and bending it — and those little hairs. When the hairs bend, the electrical signal they send to your brain is altered, helping you to make sense of the rotations your head experiences on each of the three planes the canals sit on — movements up and down, left and right and backward and forward — and keep your balance.

Booze throws this system out of whack. Alcohol thins the blood, and when boozy blood travels to the inner ear, it creates a density difference between the cupula and the fluid in the canals, and distorts the cupula’s shape. The little hairs bend and send a signal to your brain that tells it you’re rotating when you’re really not, and this illusion of motion makes it seem like the room is spinning.

Some of the things that you most want to do when you’re good and drunk, like lie down and close your eyes, make the sensation worse, since you don’t have any visual or physical cues to counteract the false sense of motion. Looking at a fixed object and keeping your feet planted on the ground can help lessen the effect, but there’s no real way to stop it.

So now you know. The bad news is there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it apart from practicing moderation and drinking plenty of water. If I know I’ll be drinking a lot, I try to eat a hearty meal beforehand, drink a glass of water in between each beer, snack during the party and take some Advil and Vitamin B before going to sleep. Happy New Year everybody.

Maybe this will help; maybe not.

the-spins

The Magic of Brewing, the Joy of Beer

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magic
Take a tour of the Suffolk brewery Greene King with head brewer John Bexon hosted by UK beer writer Roger Protz. The video, entitled The Magic of Brewing, the Joy of Beer, runs just under a half-hour and includes a tour of Greene King’s “traditional brew house and fermenting area, taking in the ancient wooden vats where Strong Suffolk is matured.” Enjoy.