Author: Professor Good Ales

The End of History – featuring dead animals – comes at £500 a bottle

From the BBC

A beer served in bottles made from stuffed animals has been criticized as “perverse” and “pushing the boundaries of acceptability”. The End of History, made by BrewDog of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, is 55% and £500 a bottle. The bottles have been made using seven dead stoats, four squirrels and a hare, said to be roadkill.

However, Advocates for Animals and Alcohol Focus Scotland both condemned the marketing.
Continue reading “Dead Animal Beer Bottles at £500 Each “Perverse””

From Wiki…

It was founded in 2000 by Brewmaster,Alastair Hook,[1] who trained at the world famous brewing school at the Technical University of Munich of Weihenstephan. The Greenwich Brewery, home of the Meantime Brewing Company, is located 0° 2′ 12″ east of the Greenwich Meridian, though the brewery will be moving to new premises in 2010.

This mission driven company aims to help the consumer rediscover their cultural and culinary beer heritage, which it believes has, in the UK at least, largely been lost as beer manufacture has been concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of ever bigger brewers, who do not wish the consumer to have any great understanding or appreciation of beer.

Since its establishment Meantime has built a worldwide reputation for both quality and for the authentic recreation of several of the world’s iconic and pivotal beer styles. Its India Pale Ale and London Porter (beer) are generally regarded as being amongst the most historically accurate recreations of these beers available today.

Meantime has matched its reputation for autheticity with one for innovation. Its CoffeePorter – launched in 2005 – was Britain’s first Fairtrade beer (using coffee from the Maraba Coffee cooperative of Rwanda), and went on to win a gold medal at the 2006 World Beer Cup. Meantime was the first British brewery to win medals at the World Beer Cup in 2004 and is the only British brewery to have won medals at every WBC since. In 2007 Meantime had no fewer than four beers ranked in the ‘Worlds 50 Best Beers’ as compiled by the UK based International Beer Challenge; a feat it repeated in 2008.

As a consequence of Meantime’s stiving to raise the bar of British brewing Alastair Hook was named the 2008 Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers.

The tour video tour guide from The Guardian visits with a Meantime brewer. Our video tour guide makes the tour even better! Want to watch? Click…

HERE

Labatt’s, Labatt Breweries, Canada.

After 1 potato beer, 2 potato, 4… we often get the munchies and eat a lot more!

Profiled by Ken Carman

I approached this brew with a bit of “barf” mentality as beer judge. There are some fruit beers I like, but gimmicky brews remind me of Zima: a product that should have been sent to Gitmo and waterboarded until it admitted responsibility for all the other crappy gimmick beer that followed. Yet I found Saranac Summer Brew refreshing and irresistible. The lemonade is up front, yet not sickly sweet. If there hops in this they are so background they’re really not worth the mention. The malt background is just substantial enough to parade the marriage of beer and lemonade around as if they were the perfect couple. That acidic, annoyingly tart, lager yeast background I frequently kvetch about, being an ale geek? If it’s there, it’s probably covered by the lemon.

I would call it a lawnmower beer, but that term needs to banished. I have no big toe on my left foot from a lawnmower accident in the 60s. So let’s just leave it at: “Drinking beer: any beer, and mowing is for pure idiots,” OK?

Yellow, from the lemonade, our sample had plenty of foam… not too much, not too little. It smells exactly as it should: lemonade beer. “Thirst quenching” is the perfect phrase. There were three of us. One: a beer judge; me. One a hesitant experimenter, at best… a friend named George. And Jolene, his wife, who is pretty much a light fruit beer person, if any beer at all. She prefers fruity mixed drinks.

All three of us raved about this.

Hey, Fred Matt!!! This one needs to go as nationwide as possible

Written by Martyn Cornell for Zythophile.wordpress.com

(Note: a little minor editing was provided, simply because the other IPA articles are not posted here. The Professor suggests you check Mr. Cornell’s posts at Zythophile if you wish to read previous entries- Prof. GA)

Here’s the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably assume and what we can’t assume about the history of India Pale Ale, and I promise to keep it to under 700 words. But first, here’s an extract from a book written in 1882, called Our own country: descriptive, historical, pictorial:

The India Pale Ale is a device wholly of the present century. In the year 1822 one Hodgson, a London brewer who had settled at Burton, brewed something like the present bitter ale, which he accomplished in a teapot in his counting house, and called it Bombay beer. A retired East India captain named Chapman improved on this, and Burton ale soon attained the celebrity that has made the names of Bass and Allsopp household words all over the world.

How many mistakes did you find in that collection of cobblers’ awls? I believe there’s not a single statement there that could be said to be correct, with, everything, including the teapot and “Captain Chapman”, unbelievably mangled. It’s a lesson for anyone who believes that if it’s in an old book, it must be right.
Continue reading “IPA: the Executive Summary”

Written by Charlie Papizian

America’s small brewers need beer distributors to get their beer to beer drinkers. But getting beer to beer drinkers is often threatened with thumb-squashed state based beer distribution laws.

In the beer business they call these laws “franchise laws.” Some who feel anger refer to these laws as “monopoly laws.”
Continue reading “Massachusetts Beer Distributor Driven Legislation Reflects American Small Brewers Struggle”

Bar customers finding new ways to boost profits with Beer Tubes, as fans put the Tubes to the test at parties and sports leagues.

From mmdnewswire.com. Author(s) not attributed

(MMD Newswire) July 9, 2010 –  The evolution of Beer Tubes continues to gain momentum as new uses for the 100-plus ounce table top beverage dispenser are reported by bar managers and Tube fans around the world. Promotions involving the Beer Tubes are driving sales and increasing profit margins for bars and restaurants, as patrons looking for a good deal are “doing the Tube.” While those buying Beer Tubes for personal use are putting the Tubes through their paces at parties, tailgates and sports leagues.
Continue reading “Beer Tubes evolving quickly as fans, young and old, discover new ways to ”do the Tube””