Professor Good Ales

Eric Fitch holds a Magic Hat glass in front of the digester building at the brewery in South Burlington, Vt. The Vermont brewery is giving new meaning to the idea of green beer. (TOBY TALBOT/Associated Press)

Written by John Curran for montereyherald.com

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. — Before he started “saving the Earth, one beer at a time,” all inventor Eric Fitch knew about home brewing was that it could make quite a mess.

Once, he accidentally backed up the plumbing in his apartment building by dumping into his garbage disposal the spent grain left over from his India Pale Ale home brew. The oatmeal-looking gunk choked the pipes in his Cambridge, Mass., building, flooding the basement.

These days, he is doing something more constructive, fulfilling the dream of beer lovers everywhere by recycling the stuff: The MIT-trained mechanical engineer has invented a patented device that turns brewery waste into natural gas that is used to fuel the brewing process.
Continue reading “MIT Grad’s Invention Turns Brewery Waste Into Fuel”

Written by John Chilson for Askmen.com

There’s nothing better than a thirst-quenching swig of cold beer on a hot summer day after an exhausting hike or an afternoon spent in the sun. Wait a minute — that cold beer is in a can, and through years of exposure to social prejudice you believe it’s of a lesser quality than its bottled counterpart. Pondering the argument for canned beers, you come to realize that numerous craft micro brewers are now offering delicious, complex and interesting beers in cans. Your internal debate has also left you with numerous questions about canned beer: Does the aluminum can affect the taste? Does good-tasting beer store well in cans? Are there benefits to drinking a good beer from a can?

Sit back and finish your suds; we’re about to make that canned-beer experience taste just a bit better with our argument for canned beer.

The argument for canned beer

The biggest misconception about canned beer is that the aluminum can imparts a metallic taste. The insides of most cans and lids used for high-end craft beers have a sprayed coating, ensuring that there is absolutely no contact between the beer and the aluminum. Test the metal-taste theory: Pour a beer in a pint glass for a pal and have them taste it for any metal taste. Also consider that most people enjoy draft beer, which is housed in a metal keg. All you have to do is think of your canned beer as a mini keg.

As far as storage goes, canned beer might have a slight advantage over bottles in that cans actually protect beer from light and oxygen. Cans are airtight and oxygen-free. When light consistently hits a bottle of beer, it can turn skunky and ultimately undrinkable. Oxygen can also leach into a bottled beer under the bottle cap and affect the taste, which could potentially destroy the beer.

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Written by Kyle Darbyson for Askmen.com

Strange beer names that inspire empty mugs
When it was originally enacted in 1516, the Bavarian Purity Law stated that beer should only contain water, hops and barley. It’s a simple recipe that hasn’t changed much through the years. So, with these draconian limits governing their product, brewers have been forced to extremes when differentiating their products from competitors. Some spend millions on slick advertising, while others pay a king’s ransom to athletes to pimp their beer. But for smaller breweries, it’s not that easy. Even if they produce a nectar that’s worthy of the Gods, it will rarely raise a blip in the crowded beer market.

So, these microbreweries have found an ingenious method to stand out from the clutter. Freed from the constraints of corporate, focus group-obsessed marketing departments, they’ve been able to develop bizarre, sometimes offensive and always attention-grabbing brand names, which results in strange beer names. It was a grueling bit of research but we managed to find a plethora of strange beer names, and here are 10 of our favorites.
Number 10: Fiddler’s Elbow

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