’Tis the Season for a Mug of Mulled Beer

’Tis the season, once again. Chances are you’ve had a chance to warm yourself with a cup of mulled wine, especially if you’ve been to Europe around this time of year. But mulled beer?
Last year I related the story about my first sip of Glühwein (mulled wine) in the western German city of Saarbrücken. Aromas of baking spice, roasted nuts, and pine boughs drifted fragrantly in the bracing winter air, leading me to the Christkindl market in the main square and setting me down the path of annual Glühwein parties and get-togethers.
A few decades on, I did what might well come naturally to a catholic imbiber like myself: I heated up a bunch o’ beer and spiced it. Turns out the whole endeavour isn’t without historical precedent.
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Mulled beer, Glühbier, call it what you want: It’s definitely not a tradition of contemporary vintage in any of the beer-consuming countries I’ve visited. The rather incredulous glances I encountered from my Austrian colleagues last week merely confirmed the fact when I brewed up 25 liters of the stuff for the Wien Museum’s annual holiday season party. But warm beer has a history –– and not just as a pejorative reference to twentieth-century British beer.
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From Beetroot To Pineapple, Homemade Wines Sweeten Christmas In India
In October, Hilda Mascarenhas, who writes a popular food blog in Pune, India, began her Christmas preparations with an unusual request to her fruit seller.
After buying a pineapple, she asked the vendor to separately pack the peel and eyes that he had skillfully removed with his long knife.
Hilda’s husband, Merwyn, though accustomed to his wife’s culinary experiments, was as mystified as the fruit seller. What did the thick, thorny peel and tongue-lacerating eyes, normally discarded as waste, have to do with Christmas?
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Queen City Q to boycott Anheuser-Busch InBev
BBQ joint Queen City Q says it will no longer sell any beers associated with Anheuser-Busch InBev. That boycott includes its four Charlotte locations — as well as any future restaurants it owns or operates.
“We’re all for a company to win market share due to their product and service, but we are not in favor of nor do we want to associate ourselves with a company that bullies its competition in the way that AB has chosen to,†says Bryan Meredith, Queen City Q’s managing partner.
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Anheuser-Busch InBev Acquiring Breckenridge Brewery

It’s been a busy 2015 for Belgian owned, Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), the world’s largest brewery conglomerate, and it seems as if they’re not done quite yet. While most believed AB InBev’s flurry of recent acquisitions would conclude with their monster deal to buy SAB Miller, as well as, last Friday’s addition of Four Peaks Brewery in Tempe, AZ, and yesterday’s purchase of London’s Camden Town Brewery, it seems as if another blockbuster deal is near completion.
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Tempest at Two Years: Raising My Tankard to You
Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard
The Chistkindl markets tucked into Vienna’s squares large and small foretell snowflakes and frosty windowpanes. The fragrance of the town has become decidedly seasonal. Cinnamon and clove announcing mulled wine (Glühwein) mingle with the sweet brown sugar aromas of roasted and spiced almonds (gebrannte Mandeln) and the smoky-woodsy notes of roasted chestnuts (heisse Maroni). The leaves on the trees have long since flown south, and the seasoned imbibers have left the beer garden for the warmth and Gemütlichkeit of the pub or Beisl, some of them warming themselves up with that granddaddy of malty seasonal beers, the Doppelbock.
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Female Brewers Share What They Love About Beer
Among the dozens of craft breweries around Wisconsin, women run the show in only three of them.
Jamie Baertsch has been brewmaster at Wisconsin Dells Brewing since 2005. She discovered her passion while studying biology in college.
“I didn’t drink beer and didn’t know anything about it. But we had bioreactions class, and I don’t know how they wrote up the course syllabus, that the dean didn’t know what we were doing, but all we did was make beer in the class. And I was good at it. I was doing tricks with my yeast, so instead of getting a nut brown that would be like 6 percent, I was turning it into imperial porters with nine percent, and the teachers were like, ‘wow, and you could be a brewer!’ I was like,’that’s a job option?!'” says Baertsch.
Allyson Rolph has three years under her belt as head brewer at the Thirsty Pagan, a brewpub in Superior. She began as a homebrewer.
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What are the historic success and failure rates of breweries?

I quote a close friend: “Craft brewers must have a license to print money.†It was a statement uttered shortly after informing said friend about Cincinnati’s Fifty West Brewing’s $1.5 million expansion, which includes volleyball courts and a cycling business. It seems like every week we announce an exotic expansion or a how-is-that-even-possible success story — from the posh, new pub/restaurant/music venue/brewery that the folks at SLO Brew are building (replete with rentable lofts) to SweetWater Brewing’s announcement that it’s looking for not just one, but TWO new breweries to expand westward.
Sometimes, to the public, it must certainly appear that craft brewers are riding an unstoppable beer train of success (totally different from this snowpiercer), but is that perception a reality?
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In New York, Good Times Flow for Craft Brewers

At Rushing Duck Brewing Co., a microbrewery in New York’s Orange County, owners used to pour free samples of beer, because state law prohibited charging customers for a pint at breweries’ tasting rooms.
“We were getting about 200 people per weekend in, and from a keg perspective, that is 2½ full kegs we were going through for free,†said brewery co-owner Nikki Cavanaugh.
But in December 2014, with a new state law taking effect, the brewery began selling pints for the first time. “It increased our revenue drastically,†said Ms. Cavanaugh, 29 years old, who in 2012 founded the brewery about 60 miles north of New York City with her husband, Dan Hitchcock.
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New way to make yeast hybrids may inspire new brews, biofuels


About 500 years ago, the accidental natural hybridization of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast responsible for things like ale, wine and bread, and a distant yeast cousin gave rise to lager beer.
Today, cold-brewed lager is the world’s most consumed alcoholic beverage, fueling an industry with annual sales of more than $250 billion.
The first lagers depended on the serendipitous cross of Saccharomyces species as evolutionarily diverse as humans and chickens. The result, however, yielded a product of enormous economic value, demonstrating the latent potential of interspecies yeast hybrids. In nature, the odds of a similar hybridization event are, conservatively, one in a billion.
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