Wednesday’s ad is for Falstaff, from 1910. It’s a beautiful ad, showing a woman serenading the Falstaff star on a — is that a mandolin? — while sitting on a crescent moon. It was done by Valentine Sandberg, who was born in Sweden, but came to the U.S. as an infant and worked doing covers for a variety of popular magazine covers out of New York.
Today in 1969, US Patent D215807 S was issued, an invention of Wilfred W. Weingardt, for his “Bottle Opener.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
The ornamental design for a bottle opener, as shown and described.
Today in 2014, US Patent 8875616 B2 was issued, an invention of Wolfgang Roth, assigned to Rolec Prozess – Und Brautechnik Gmbh, for his “Facility for Introducing Hop into a Tank.” Here’s the Abstract:
A facility for introducing hop into a tank has a hop receiving tank that can be hermetically sealed and has an outflow and an inert gas supply at its bottom. The facility furthermore has a mixing apparatus that has two inlet pipes on its inflow side and an outlet pipe on the outflow side. This facility is adapted to a method for introducing hop into a tank, in which hop is put into a hop receiving container, air is expelled from the hop receiving container by inert gas and the hop with beer or “young beer” is supplied to the mixing apparatus.
Tuesday’s ad is for Z.H.B. Lager Beers, from the South Holland Brewery (a.k.a. Zuid Hollandse Bierbrouwerijen) in The Hague Center. The ad is from between 1925 and 1950, a wide range to be sure, but that’s according to the Memory of the Netherlands website, who also credits the ad to Jacob Jansma. It’s a pretty great illustration of a woman holding up a glass of beer, and looking slyly to the side, possibly right at you and me.
Today in 1953, US Patent 2657817 A was issued, an invention of Victor Alvear, for his “Plastic Bung for Beer Barrels or the Like.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
I have found that an elastic and entirely satisfactory and cheap stopper can be formed of synthetic elastomeric plastic having the properties of polyethylene and vinyl derivatives. This is not only cheap to manufacture but the stopper can be used over and over again. Such a stopper has been found to be tasteless, non-absorbent, insoluble, indestructible, can be used in conventional bung hole bushings and when properly formed is entirely effective. The stopper is inert to liquid as well as gases and is entirely sanitary. It is not affected by normal changes in atmospheric conditions and does not stick to the bushing. This type of plastic has the known characteristic of being form retaining under normal pressure but capable of deformation under excessive pressure and return to its original form upon release of such pressure.
Today in 1964, US Patent 3155522 A was issued, an invention of Peter John Andrew Murray, Brian James Clarke, Robert Peter Hildebrand and Frank Vincent Harold, assigned to Carlton & United Breweries, for their “Process for the Production of a Hop Concentrate.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
This invention relates to the preparation of hop concentrates or extracts for brewing purposes, and to the production of hopped beverages, such as beer, utilizing such concentrates.
An object of this invention is to provide a new process for the manufacture of hop concentrates which if used to replace hops will impart to the finished beer in their correct balance those materials contributing to taste characteristics and flavour which are normally found in beer manufactured by conventional processes. A further object is to enable economies to be effected in the manufacture of beer or like beverages.
While the invention applies to the treatment of any part of the hop plant it refers in particular to the hop cones, and the hops used may be either in the freshly picked state or dried as in normal commercial practice.
Monday’s ad is for Heineken, from who knows when. I can’t quite make out if these are actual vintage ads or modern ones made to look retro. Both feature the tagline “Heineken’s Beer,” while the first features a woman in a skimpy purple swimsuit.
Whereas in the second ad it’s a white one-piece suit. The woman almost appears the same in both, although in the first she has red hair, but in the second it appears more brown.
Today would have been the 200th birthday of George Boole, the self-taught mathematician who came up with Boolean algebra and Boolean logic. He’s been called the “father of the information age” because his Boolean logic made possible modern computer science. “Boolean algebra has been fundamental in the development of digital electronics, and is provided for in all modern programming languages. It is also used in set theory and statistics.” Boolean logic is “a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE. Boolean logic is especially important for computer science because it fits nicely with the binary numbering system, in which each bit has a value of either 1 or 0.” How Stuff Works has a nice overview of How Boolean Logic Works.
So what does any of this have to do with beer? Practically nothing, except that Scientific American had an article yesterday about Boole to celebrate his 200th anniversary coming up today. In the piece, The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age, after writing about Boole’s life and contributions to the study of mathematics, the author turns to some examples of how his Boolean logic is applied in the real world in, for instance, Google searches:
Boolean algebra and Boolean logic are very well known today, and form the backbone of electrical engineering and computer science. Indeed anyone who even casually searches the Internet , say for “Michael Jackson” the late beer and whiskey expert rather than the singer and dancer of the same name, knows how to make judicious use of AND, OR and NOT.
It’s pretty cool that he picked Michael Jackson as the search topic, and it’s a good choice since it’s hard to get just beer-centric results when the more famous Michael Jackson usually tops the list unless you figure out how to filter out the king of pop. Michael used to joke that the singer was named after him, since he was older, but it must be a pain in neck for anyone who shares a name with a person more famous them themselves. Remember the character Michael Bolton in the wonderful film “Office Space?”
I reproduced the search, and got slightly different results, but pretty funny, and cool — at least from my point of view — is in both instances one of my posts was the third result.
It’s a lengthy post I did a couple of years ago, Know Your Beer Gods & Goddesses, in which I researched world cultures and created a list of gods and goddesses that had something to do with beer, discovering over 100 examples. I jokingly included an entry for Michael as the “God of Beer Writers,” so that’s why my post turns up in a search for Jackson’s name. So that made my day, nice to show up in Scientific American, however tangentially.
And just to round out the ephemeral post, I’ll leave you with a little Boolean humor:
Today in 1943, US Patent 2333088 A was issued, an invention of Raymond M. Brown, for his “Bottle Opener.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
One of the objects of the present invention is to provide a bottle opener of the type described, having one or more back stops adjacent the prying lip and slightly spaced therefrom which permit the prying lip to exercise its function of detaching the cap, but which may contact with the flange of the cap as to spread andthereby limit the extent to which it can be flared, thus preventing the bending of the disk of the cap under any circumstances and particularly under the conditions of sudden operation above referred to.
Another object of the invention is to provide a pair of spaced back stops preferably symmetrically arranged with respect to the apex of the prying lip, permitting the latter, if necessary, to bulge the flange between the back stops by drawing upon the fullness of the flutes of the flange beyond said back stops, the metal moving.
I’ve made pancakes substituting beer for the water, I’ve enjoyed Kentucky Breakfast Stout, once with beer pancakes. And I’ve had beer that tasted rather sweet, like maple syrup, too. But it never occurred to me you could make the pancake syrup with beer. And it looks fairly easy. I recently ran across an article about The Art of Making Beer Syrup in Outside magazine, and apparently bartenders have been making them for years to use in special cocktails. Given that the only cocktail I almost ever order is a gin & tonic, hopefully you’ll forgive my cocktail ignorance. Apparently it’s just water (or any liquid) reduced, sugar added.
Outside’s recipe is so simple, even I could probably make it:
For best results, pour your favorite beer into a pan and slowly simmer over low heat until it reduces to two-thirds of its initial volume. Then add in an equal proportion of raw brown sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves completely. Pour liberally over your favorite breakfast food and wait for your insulin levels to spike.
The Good Booze blog suggests adding “a few whole cardamom pods” and “one small vanilla bean, split” to give it a little more flavor. It looks like any beer could work, although malt-forward beers seem better suited than hoppier ones, but certainly some experimentation is in order.
Allrecipes also has their own recipe, and a bar in San Francisco, The Fifth Floor (which is closed now, and reborn as Dirty Habit) used to make a drink they called Hops & Dreams, using a syrup made from Anchor Steam Beer.
And one entrepreneurial soul is trying to start the Beer Syrup Company to make commercial beer syrups.
