Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Gone To the Dogs?

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There was a goofy little item in today’s Taipei Times entitled Dog Brought Into Vet After Having One Too Many concerning Dingo, a Labrador from Austria, that could scarcely stand and smelled “like a beer hall.” His owner took him to see the vet and found he was drunk, not as it turned out, however, from drinking. What happened is the dog ate some fresh yeast dough that he stole off his master’s kitchen table. Apparently “[a]lcohol had formed inside his stomach as a result of the fermentation process. That left poor old Dingo drunk.”

Curiously, while looking for the drinking dog icon above, I came across an AP story from almost a year ago about a pet shop owner in the Netherlands who designed a beer specifically for his dog.

From the AP story:

[The pet shop owner] consigned a local brewery to make and bottle the nonalcoholic beer, branded as Kwispelbier. It was introduced to the market last week and advertised it as “a beer for your best friend.”

“Kwispel” is the Dutch word for wagging a tail.

The beer is fit for human consumption, Berenden said. But at euro1.65 ($2.14) a bottle, it’s about four times more expensive than a Heineken.

Apparently it’s also made with beer extract. Yum.

 

A Tip For Jesus

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You just can’t make this stuff up. According to today’s Salt Lake Tribune, two men, apparently dying for a beer, walked into what I assume was a convenience or similar type store and asked to buy a six-pack. Unfortunately, this was after 1:00 a.m. — when in Utah it’s ridiculously not legal to buy alcohol — and were told “no” by the clerk manning the store on the late shift. Undaunted, the pair asked if they could steal it. The clerk replied. “Yes, but Jesus is watching.” So the two men produced a gun and took the beer, but left a $9 tip on the counter, enough money to cover the cost of the six-pack. But according to sheriff’s deputies, the men are still suspects in a robbery, since they took the beer from the store during the prohibited time frame. It seems that despite having paid for it, technically, they still stole the beer.

 

A Bender That Brews Beer

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Remember the television show Futurama? It was the Simpsons’ Matt Groening’s other animated series that ran on Fox for four seasons beginning in 1999.

There was a robot — or perhaps more accurately a “foul mouthed, cigar smoking, booze drinking, shiny metal arsed, bending robot” — in the show whose name was Bender. Besides his name and the character’s predilection for going on one, you may be asking yourself what that has to do with beer? Well, even though the show was canceled, like many such shows it has a pretty good cult following. There are fans, of course, and then there are fans.

One such uber-fan, Simon Jansen, in New Zealand, if not an engineer by trade then one of the most impressive hobby engineers I’ve encountered. He’s also a sci-fi fan generally and it appears he started his website with the extremely impressive Star Wars Asciimation, which is the entire Star Wars movie done in Java using nothing but ASCII art. For those of you new to the web, ASCII art is pictures created using nothing but the characters that can be found on an ordinary keyboard, which were used in early e-mails before graphics became ubiquitous throughout the internet.

Those emoticons, like 😉 for example, are a simple, though enduring, form of ASCII art. But they can get extremely complicated and detailed, too. Check out the Great ASCII Art Library for hundreds, if not thousands of these.

Okay, so as usual I’m veering off on a tangent, back to the Bender. Last summer (his winter) Jansen was challenged by a friend to make an actual Bender robot. Jansen also took as inspiration a third season episode, The Route of All Evil, in which while the main plot was going on, there was a subplot involving the two characters, Fry and Leela, along with Bender himself where they undertook to “brew beer inside Bender, treating the robot like an expectant mother.” Jansen reasoned that “just having a Bender that doesn’t do anything would be a waste of time so mine shall be used for a practical purpose. One Bender himself would be proud of. I’ll use him to make beer!”

The Bender Brewer Project, as it’s known, took over six months to complete and yielded its first brew last week. The website includes four pages of detailed information showing every step of the way with copious photographs of the various stages along with diagrams and source code. But for my purposes, it gets really interesting in mid-December on page four when the brewhouse went online, so to speak.

Basically, it’s only a rudimentary homebrewing kit but you have to admire the sheer amount of work and effort to take this project from drawing board to actual robot that produces beer. His initial specific gravity was 1.034. In early January, the beer was ready to bottle and he had his first taste f it, describing it like this.

By the way I did have a little taste of the beer before I bottled it. It wasn’t totally unpleasant. It tastes very green but it had a fair amount of body. Yeasty with maybe just a hint of Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil!

How odd and cool is that?

 

Bender with brewing system inside. Reminds me a bit of the Wizard of Oz’s Tinman, but this time he’s wishing for something different. “If I only had a beer!”

 

Bottled on January 2, the new robot-brewed Bendërbrau, with labels designed by Jen, one of Jansen’s friends.

 

Malt Disneyland

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My friend and colleague, Lew Bryson, must have been thrilled when he came up with the title Malt Disneyland for his most recent First Draft column for Portfolio magazine, because in my humble opinion it’s one of the best new names for Belgium anybody has ever come up with. Of course, I love wordplay and the Walt/malt thing cracks me up. I confess I never remember to check out his Portfolio column — sorry about that Lew — but luckily MSNBC reprinted it yesterday and so it showed up in the old, handy dandy RSS Feed Reader. Naturally, it’s a great read, too, but oh that title — now that’s a grabber. Well done.

 

Bibbity Bobbity Bacon

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Let me warn you at the outset that this post has absolutely nothing to do with beer at all, apart from the fact that the link was sent to me by a brewer friend. (Thanks Melissa). She shares my love of and devotion to all things bacon and thought I’d find this video funny. As she promised, it’s freakin’ hilarious. This is stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan talking about his own love for bacon. It’s amazing that anyone could riff for that long on bacon. To keep up with the world of bacon, check out I Heart Bacon or Bacon Unwrapped.

 

Rhinodrinking

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While researching an article on beer aromas last night, I stumbled upon this disturbing little gem from RU Tube, which looks to be the Russian YouTube. Since I don’t want to be the only one with this image burned into my psyche, I thought I’d share it. Take a look — press play — you know you want to.

 

 

Making Fun of WWII

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I hope my British friends and colleagues will forgive me for not noticing this before, because it’s been apparently going on for years now, but the folks at Shepherd Neame have been advertising their Spitfire Ale with a humorous campaign making fun of Wold War 2. Since the beer was named after the famous British military fighter plane, it does make sense. And if you think war isn’t something to be made fun of, all I can do is point you to Hogan’s Heroes and Roberto Benigi’s Life is Beautiful. Anyway, I thought they were humorous enough to share. Here’s a few of my favorites below, but there are many, many more at the Spitfire website.

 

 

 

 

The Beer Vote

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The NBWA has a fun little website up asking people to vote for which of the presidential hopefuls they’d most like to have a beer with. The voting is irrespective of parties, and so far Barack Obama is leading the pack with 26%, followed by Ron Paul with 14% and John McCain with 12%. Cast your vote now to have your beer preference heard.

 

Prosit, Proshit, Oh Shit!

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My friend and colleague Rick Sellers from Pacific Brew News sent me this photo, which originated, as far as we can tell, from either Should I Drink That? or Home Brew Talk. I thought it was funny enough to share. I’m not sure if it was taken in Germany or not, but people do clink their mugs pretty hard there. More than a few times I was actually worried something like this might happen. Apparently it does. And as an amateur photographer, this is the kind of shot that luck brings you maybe once in a lifetime. How excited must the photographer have been to get this shot? Prosit indeed.
 

For the original (and much larger) photo, click on the picture.
 

Beer Can Table

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An interesting blog called Modern Mechanix, which appears to consist largely of showing how in the past we used to view the future, at least in old science hobby magazines. The one I stumbled upon was from the August 1936 edition of Science and Mechanics and featured this table made entirely from beer cans.

According to the magazine article, it took 420 cans of Pabst to make the table and chairs, which were soldered together over ten days by a Bernard Dier of Chicago, Illinois. I imagine it was much sturdier than if we made it now since these cans would have been a thicker, sturdier metal than the all-aluminum cans of today.