Today’s infographic is pretty cool. It was created as design exercise, by Kris Erickson on his blog, EricksonData. It’s what he refers to as a Gephi Viz, this time with beer data. He used the bottled beers listed in the BreweryDB, “and filtered out many of the smaller US brewers (according to number of beers entered into BreweryDB).”
Click here to see the circle full size.
Monday’s ad is for Carling Black Label, from 1948. The ad is in French for the Canadian market and boasts that Carling is Canada’s most popular lager. But there’s no translation for “Mabel, Black Label!” But I’m still not sure why they’re playing tic-tac-toe on the tablecloth.
An interesting study recently conducted at the Indiana University School of Medicine shows a preliminary result that “[t]he taste of beer, without any effect from alcohol itself, can trigger dopamine release in the brain, which is associated with drinking and other drugs of abuse.”
The study itself, Beer Flavor Provokes Striatal Dopamine Release in Male Drinkers: Mediation by Family History of Alcoholism was published last week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. From the press release:
Using positron emission tomography (PET), the researchers tested 49 men with two scans, one in which they tasted beer, and the second in which they tasted Gatorade, looking for evidence of increased levels of dopamine, a brain neurotransmitter long associated with alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The scans showed significantly more dopamine activity following the taste of beer than the sports drink. Moreover, the effect was significantly greater among participants with a family history of alcoholism.
“We believe this is the first experiment in humans to show that the taste of an alcoholic drink alone, without any intoxicating effect from the alcohol, can elicit this dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centers,” said David A. Kareken, Ph.D., professor of neurology at the IU School of Medicine and the deputy director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center.
The stronger effect in participants with close alcoholic relatives suggests that the release of dopamine in response to such alcohol-related cues may be an inherited risk factor for alcoholism, said Dr. Kareken.
Research for several decades has linked dopamine to the consumption of various drugs of abuse, although researchers have differing interpretations of the neurotransmitter’s role. Sensory cues that are closely associated with drug intoxication (ranging from tastes and smells to the sight of a tavern) have long been known to spark cravings and induce treatment relapse in recovering alcoholics. Many neuroscientists believe that dopamine plays a critical role in such cravings.
The study participants received a very small amount of their preferred beer — 15 milliliters — over a 15-minute time period, enabling them to taste the beer without resulting in any detectable blood alcohol level or intoxicating effect.
Using a PET scanning compound that targets dopamine receptors in the brain, the researchers were able to assess changes in dopamine levels occurring after the participants tasted the liquids.
In addition to the PET scan results, participants reported an increased beer craving after tasting beer, without similar responses after tasting the sports drink — even though many thought the Gatorade actually tasted better, said Brandon G. Oberlin, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow and first author of the paper.
With the study only using a cohort of under fifty people, the results will probably not settle the question, and the UK Guardian’s science writer takes issue with it in Beer, dopamine and brain scans make an intoxicating mix. But it seems to be a good first step toward a better understanding of how dopamine is related to drinking and even alcoholism. The most interesting find is that it appears that dopamine is released by the brain even if there’s no alcohol present, just the taste of beer is all that the brain seems to need. If further studies bear out the findings, this could be significant.
Today’s infographic is another one from Brewer’s Friend, this one is all about Beer Style Alcohol By Volume, showing the BJCP styles with the range of a.b.v. for each.
Today’s infographic comes from the Syracuse Pos-Sentinel, as a part of their Syracuse Beer Week coverage. It’s a Beer Family Tree and shows ales, lagers and hybrids at the top of the tree, and moves down from there, though the tree doesn’t have too many branches. Still, it’s a good starting point for a newspaper.
Click here to see the family tree full size.
Friday’s ad is for Narragansett, from 1961. After the tragedy in Boston and the swift capture/killing of the perpetrators last night and today, I thought an ad with the Red Sox was in order. This one shows Boston’s schedule for the 1961 season, and shows a cask of the Rhode Island beer emblazoned with the tagline “Straight from-the-Barrel Taste.” It’s hard to believe that was what they were going for in 1961, or that people would respond to such a claim.
Today’s infographic is perfect for Friday Frivolity, though I wish I’d known about it for April Fool’s Day. It was created by the UK beer bloggers Boak & Bailey, and suggests that not everyone is a fan of the infographic, and possibly not in favor of my project this year trying to round up as many of them as possible each day. Their Generic Beer Infographic is a hilarious take on many of the general infographics that have been created recently, and often get the information wrong.
Thursday’s ad is for Molson, from 1957. Although I don’t speak (or read) French, I only know it says something along the lines of “Molson, a full table” thanks to Google translate, though I’m confident there’s some idiomatic translation that’s more poetic.
I’ve had my share of beers made with odd ingredients, from pizza beer to Wynkoop’s bull testicle beer, with all manner of flowers, nuts, fruits, vegetables and tree parts in between. But this one has to take the cake. The Japanese brewery Sankt Gallen created a beer with elephant dung, which reportedly immediately sold out.
According to Drinks Business:
The beer, which is called Un, Kono Kuro, is made using coffee beans that have passed through an elephant.
The Sankt Gallen brewery called the beer a “chocolate stout,” despite it not containing any chocolate. The coffee beans used in the beer come from elephants at Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, which cost over $100 per 35 grams. The beans are so expensive as 33 kgs of beans in the mouth yields 1 kg of useable coffee beans.
According to another source, International Science Times, the beer “utilizes the flavor of Black Ivory Coffee, a variety of your morning brew that retails for about $500 per pound because the beans are harvested from elephant poop. And by “harvested” we mean picked out of a big pile of dung and rinsed off. The elephant poop beer uses the coffee beans to enhance the flavor in its coffee stout.” They continue.
Un, Kono Kuro is a pun on “unko” which is the Japanese word for “crap,” a fitting name indeed for elephant poop coffee. Although the elephant poop beer was a sales success, don’t expect it hit shelves anytime soon. The brewer, Sankt Gallen, isn’t adding it to their regular line-up. It’s not cheap beer, either; the retail value of a keg of Un, Kono Kuro is around $1100.
So apparently it’s pretty popular. At least one reviewer said it wasn’t bad, saying “there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.” Still, this may be going too far. What do you think?
