Professor Good Ales

Not all suds claiming the “craft beer” label are created equal. While all beer makers say that quality and taste are what matter most, beer lovers consider many other factors—size of the brewer, corporate ownership, circumstances under which the beer was made—when evaluating brews. Which beers are considered to be the height of pure unadulterated craft production, and which do beer geeks consider barely a step up from Bud?

Over the course of covering the rapidly expanding craft beer world, it’s become clear that the field hasn’t merely grown more crowded, but far more complicated as well. For many, one of the big attractions to craft beer is that it’s created by brewmasters who are passionate first and foremost about beer, not profits or business plans. Yet over the years, as the number of players have doubled and doubled again, the craft scene has undeniably become big business.

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ASHEVILLE — Inside unadorned buildings, dark basements and hollow warehouses across this mountain town, the steam rises from shiny pots carrying a sweet smell from a brew that draws thousands.

Not far removed from the copper stills that once kept moonshine flowing in these hills, this new legal brew is transforming the state into a top destination for a fast-growing segment of the beverage market: craft beer.

Made in small batches by independent, local breweries, craft beer from North Carolina is now distributed throughout the region. The state’s roughly 85 craft brewers are earning national recognition and drawing hordes of enthusiasts, some of whom drive hours and sleep overnight on sidewalks to taste special releases.

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Tomorrow: tube bending.

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MOSCOW—The world’s top brewers once bet big on Russia’s famous love of drinking, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into new plants and distribution networks as they sought to tap a growing taste for beer in a land where vodka long ruled.

For years the investment paid off. But now the Kremlin’s campaign against alcoholism has sapped the life out of the party as a flood of new regulations and taxes aimed at turning around dismal life expectancy rates for men has made the beer market go flat, brewers say.

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Casper White Stout is quite the Jekyll and Hyde beer, but not in a bad way.

It is a deceptive beer, with its golden pour topped by a white head. The aroma is fresh grain and herbal hops. All in all, it looks and smells like a European pilsner.

So it was disorienting when the first flavors of chocolate and coffee were discovered. Not unpleasant, mind you, but I kept going back and forth between the aroma and taste, and once again marveling at the ingenuity of brewers.

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FOX, Miller/Coors and InBev all yammering and one suing regarding “truthfulness?” Comedy and irony thy name is MEGA brews and FOX-PGA

What does it really mean to have the “world’s most refreshing can?” Well, we are about to find out.

The gauntlet has been set for whether or not a new aluminum innovation from Coors really offers beer drinkers a “smoother, more refreshing pour” from the “world’s most refreshing can.”

The contender: the King of Beers. Coors’ rival company Anheuser-Busch, the North American unit of A-B InBev and brewer of Budweiser and Bud Light, has filed an official complaint with the Nationall Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus about the truthfulness of Coors’ advertising campaign.

 

Interesting: acetaldehyde is a known defect in beer, and also maybe connected to a hangovers-PGA

Whether you’re watching the big game at your local bar or playing an intramural kickball game under the influence, beer and sports seem to be a natural pairing.

Even so, if you have one pint too many, you’ll be writhing in pain the next day because of nausea and headaches. Is there a way to drink your beer without the fear of the morning hangover?

Ben Desbrow, inspired by the beer-sports connection, ran an experiment to see how beer affected the balance of fluids in the body. Desbrow, a researcher at Griffith Health Institute in Australia, examined whether making beer more like Gatorade and adding some electrolytes would mitigate its alcohol’s tendency to dehydrate people who drink it.

 

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Many people who end their Friday or Saturday nights in a hospital emergency room have been drinking alcohol. In fact, public health experts estimate that about one-third of all injury-related ER visits involved alcohol consumption.

But what, exactly, are people drinking? What types of alcohol and even what brands? Is there a direct link between advertising and marketing and later injury?

Until now, those questions have been unanswerable, frustrating alcohol epidemiology researchers. But if results of a pilot study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hold up, there may soon be a way to connect the dots.

When the Hopkins researchers surveyed ER patients who’d been drinking, they found that Budweiser was the number one brand consumed, followed Steel Reserve Malt Liquor, Colt 45 malt liquor, Bud Ice (another malt liquor), Bud Light, and a discount-priced vodka called Barton’s.

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