Month: September 2013

It’s every man’s dream property complete with all the mod cons including a kitchen, a bathroom and… beer on tap.

That’s what one guy in New Zealand came home to find after his friends decided to prank him and plumb his entire house with beer.

A seven-minute long YouTube video shows a group of lads sneakily plumbing their mate Russ’s house while he was out.

LittleJohnynNZ, who posted the video, said: ‘Me and the boys played a bit of a joke on our mate Russ. Kegs of beer have been plumbed into every tap in the house, with loads of cameras to catch the action.’

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This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase “beer gut.”

A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man’s blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol that day.

“He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime,” says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. “His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer.”

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Coors Light Beer in Indianapolis. Photographer: Michael Conroy/AP Photo

Apparently mega-companies, like mega-brewers, will do anything to stay on top. PGA suggests you visit you’re smaller local CRAFT beer retailer instead-PGA

WalMart is so committed to becoming America’s biggest beer retailer that it has been selling Budweiser, Coors and other brews almost at cost in at least some stores.

The markup on a 36-pack of Coors Light cans at a Los-Angeles-area store was 0.6 percent, compared with 16.2 percent for a package of Flaming Hot Cheetos, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Companies typically don’t release information about markups so the March data provide a rare glimpse of Wal-Mart’s alcohol pricing strategy.

Wal-Mart’s push into beer is part of a plan to double alcohol sales by 2016 and seize a larger slice of a U.S. beer market worth about $45 billion. While founder Sam Walton frowned on drinking to excess, selling cheap suds is a way to lure shoppers who typically buy other products at the same time. Repeat visits are crucial for the world’s largest retailer, which last month cut its profit forecast and reported second-quarter profit and sales that missed analysts’ estimates.

“We continue to look for opportunities to invest in price,” Wal-Mart U.S. chief Bill Simon said at a Goldman Sachs conference last week. “A great example for us is adult beverages. We have been continuing to move prices lower on that and seeing returns in the form of market-share gains in that category.”

Tecate Cans

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A couple of months ago I recommended an oak-aged Scottish ale from Innis & Gunn and mentioned some of the other beers in its portfolio. I had the good fortune since then to run into two of them — its Canadian Cherrywood Aged and Rum Aged.

The Cherrywood ale (in a 25.4-ounce bottle) has all of the positive Scottish ale characteristics of the I&G Original — the toffeeish aroma and flavor, and herbal, grassy hops. The beer is then aged over Canadian black cherrywood chips. Those who have grilled with cherrywood will have a good sense of the flavor that results, although without the smoke aspect.

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Far and away the worst thing about being a craft beer fan — worse than the weight gain, the expense and the DUIs* — is how difficult it can be to get ahold of great beers.

The market for craft beer, you see, is very different from the market for books of poetry or video games. You can’t just go on Amazon and order whatever you want. It’s much more like the market for antiques or fresh heirloom tomatoes — segmented, local and confusing. Many of the country’s best craft brewers produce only a very limited quantity of beer. Arcane laws prevent residents of many states from being able to order beer over the internet. And the beer distributor system in use throughout the country ensures that consumers in each state are only going to be able to access a limited swath of the beers being brewed at any given time.

But craft beer fans in some states (and even in some parts of some states) are much better off than others. The easiest way to see just how much better off is to navigate over to one of the most useful, least heralded websites in craft beer: Seek-a-Brew. Compiled by an eager, cartographically-inclined craft beer nut, Seek-a-Brew keeps track of which beers are distributed in which states so you don’t have to. You can search by state or beer, and even compare two states’ selection head-to-head.

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The future of Aloha Beer Co., which closed its Honolulu brewery restaurant for renovations in July, is up in the air as the company works out tax and organizational issues.

The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations Unemployment Insurance Division in April filed a tax lien against Aloha Beer Co. for $105,740.65 in unpaid employment security tax.

Aloha Beer Co. partner Dave Campbell would neither confirm nor deny whether the restaurant is closed permanently, and told me when he has an answer to that, his wife will be the first to know.

“It’s up in the air right now,” Campbell said.

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Written by Brandon Jones for embracethefunk.com

JWB-emblem

I have spoken to Johnathan Wakefield a few times over the past couple of years trying to work out beers trades, chatting about lacto, working out getting a few of his beers in Nashville for Funk Fest back in May. I knew I wanted to do a Q&A with him about his brewery aspirations and find out a little more about “Florida Weisse”. Yesterday JW started his official fundraising campaign to source the remaining money to fund Johnathan Wakefield Brewing. Last night JW and I chatted for this interview….

ETF: What was the beer or a moment where you said “I like these beers, these sour beers. I want to try my hand at brewing one” ?

WAKEFIELD: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It was definitely the Cantillon Lou Pepe. Yeah, Lou Pepe. That I want to say, in probably ’08, ’09. That kind of turned me onto those styles of beer. I could tell you what turned me onto brewing Berliners.

ETF: Yeah, go right ahead.
Continue reading “Johnathan Wakefield Q&A”

Gee, with great branding ideas like this, should NOLA be afraid? Maybe not. See next story for that controversy-PGA

 

Like many people approaching 40 years of age, it appears Hello Kitty is having a midlife crisis.

No, she hasn’t run out and bought a Harley or had a steamy tryst with the plumber (sorry, Mario). Instead, the Japanese pop icon has engaged in a decidedly adults-only undertaking – brewing her own beer.

That’s right; Hello Kitty beer is a thing, at least in Asia.

There are six Hello Kitty beers, which come in easy-drinking fruit flavors like peach, lemon-lime, passion fruit, and banana. They have about half the alcohol content of mainstream American beers – a Budweiser runs 5 percent alcohol-by-volume, where the Hello Kitty brews range from 2.3 percent to 2.8 percent.

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Here we go again. Remember the West 6th/Magic Hat controversy? Bet many of you don’t. Is this real, or just attention getting press? Does the Japanese company own the rights to anything with “Zilla” in the name, or something that kind of, sort of, looks like GZ? Sample of label only provided so readers can decide for themselves.-PGA

The Japanese company that produced the classic series of “Godzilla” movies has sued a New Orleans brewery, claiming the MechaHopzilla beer brand infringes on its copyrights and trademarks.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans by Toho Co. Ltd. It includes photographs of the Mechagodzilla character Toho introduced in 1974 and a beer can produced by New Orleans Lager & Ale Brewing Co. LLC, known as NOLA Brewing.

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