Professor Good Ales

BAKER LAKE, Wash. —Editor’s Note: The events in this story took place in 2004 and began receiving renewed interest online this week.

Agents from the department of Fish and Wildlife in Washington found a black bear sleeping off a major buzz, with three dozen empty cans of Rainier beer close by.

“This is a new one on me,” Sgt. Bill Heinck said. “I’ve known them to get into cans, but nothing like this.”

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Start homebrewing?-PGA

LIMA, Peru — Throughout their country’s descent into political and economic crisis, Venezuelans of all stripes have at least been able to rely on one thing: drowning their sorrows in beer.

Locals of the sweltering South American nation love to down the kinds of heavily chilled light lagers popular from Mexico to Argentina.

But pretty soon Venezuela could run dry. And that could be even more devastating than it sounds.

How did it come to this?

For one, brewery workers are on strike demanding higher wages.

Members of the Sintraterricentro union downed tools last week at two bottling plants belonging to the Polar brewery. It supplies roughly 80% of Venezuela’s beer, including market leader Polar Pilsen. The union is tiny but its members hold key positions at the plant, meaning that production has ground to a halt.

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Lager lovers can now officially raise a toast because Gibson and his colleagues recently logged the success of re-creating the ancient fling between S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus. “You can now produce lager yeasts that are very different from one another,” Gibson says. All the resulting hybrids outperformed their parents, producing alcohol faster and at higher concentrations and turning out tastier products, as documented in a paper published in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology. In particular, they made 4-vinylguaiacol, which resulted in flavors more characteristic of Belgian wheat beers. “The beers have a clovey aroma,” Gibson says. “It’s actually quite nice but maybe something we don’t always want. The idea is to have a whole range of strains, and you just pick and choose.” The hunt has now turned to finding new yeast unions that gobble up sugar more effectively, potentially creating lower-calorie beers.

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A questionable claim, at best. But we’re glad that Hoppin Frog, covered by our writer: Ken Carman, made the list. Maui? We guess our writer. Tom Becham may question that. Picture from different post, courtesy www.manteresting.com.

Ohio

Hoppin’ Frog Brewery (address and info)
Akron
Great Lakes, with its Christmas Ale and Eliot Ness, might be Ohio’s most iconic brewery, but down the road in Akron, Hoppin’ Frog’s clandestinely brewing up the state’s best beer in what appears to be a storage unit. One sip of the 9.4% beast that is Barrel Aged B.O.R.I.S. The Crusher, an imperial oatmeal stout, should be enough to make a fan out of anybody who doubts its reputation as one of the finest beers in the world.

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