Archive for the 'Beer News' category
The Brewers Association released their 2010 Beer Style Guidelines a couple weeks back. A few new styles were added to the list this year: American-style Imperial Porter, American-Style India Black Ale, Belgian-Style Quadrupel and Fruit Wheat Ale or Lager categories. Minus the fact some people are trying to get “American-Style India Black Ale” changed to “Cascadian Dark Ale”, nothing too wild and crazy to report about this year’s style guidelines. Not necessarily a fun read (the post title is a lie), but interesting nonetheless.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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Luke over at blogaboutbeer.com recently wrote about the 33 Beer Journal and that got me thinking, “that would make a great portable app for iPhone/iPad/Droid/Blackberry/etc”. For my beer journal purposes I currently utilize a notebook I received as a give away at a work convention. It’s a little bulkier then the 33 Beer Journal, but it holds more reviews, fits fine in a cargo pant pocket and it was free. The problem is transferring the notes from paper to electronic form. Retyping beer notes is not really high on the “to do” list, so I have a lot of beer notes just sitting in paper form, which can make finding past notes tedious and slow.
An electronic beer journal would alleviate such things. The features I would like to see in such an app would be:
- something similar to 33 Beer Journal’s “flavor wheel”, allowing easy touch screen reviewing possibilities.
- the “beer reviewing cheat sheet” terms, for more specific note taking, and once again allow easy touch screen reviewing.
- integration with a camera, making beer label photos easier. Also, the beer’s photo could be used to figure out the beer’s SRM/Lovibond rating. Granted this would not be perfect (depends on lighting) but it could provide some extra data for the beer.
- the ability to export this information in some non-proprietary way (.csv file).
Overall I think it would make a pretty sweet app (with room for growth… twitter integration, gps info for beers had at bars, exporting to a blog, etc). Granted having the time to write up a full review based off the notes would be another problem, but at least the notes would be in electronic form and that’s half of my battle.
PS Good luck to Luke with Baxter Brewing (@BaxterBrewing), the new craft brewery and microcannery he is opening up in Lewiston, Maine.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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A craft beer persona for your web browser, specifically Firefox, that is. Personas “are easy-to-install, easy-to-use themes that change the look of your Firefox web browser”. When browsing through the Personas directory none of them jumped out as “craft beer theme!”, so I created my own. If you run Firefox, show your craft beer persona by visiting http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/108201. Enjoy.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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Received an email from Narragansett announcing some parties for their 120th Anniversary. No plans on being in Rhode Island any time soon, so the news really did not apply to me. However, the email had this little interesting nugget of information “Fact #434: During Prohibition, Narragansett had a special license to brew porter for medicinal purposes! You could still buy ‘Gansett with a prescription from your doctor.” I’m still trying to find their porter on shelves (Lew and Alan had given it good marks, so I decided to try to hunt it down) but now that I know it is good enough for medicinal purposes, I am doubling my efforts!
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News, Narragansett
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BlogAboutBeer recently announced their “2010 Mother of All Beer Blogging Contests“. Its easy to enter, and the prizes on offer are quite nice. Check out the rest of the site while you are at it, there are a bunch of well written and informative posts to read.
On the sevenpack front, I hope to be getting some reviews up shortly in this new year of 2010.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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Saw this info posted on BlogAboutBeer a while back and thought it might be of interest to SevenPack readers. The steps to win a Kegerator on February first are pretty straightforward:
- Follow @kegerators on twitter
- Simply tweet “Just entered to win a Kegerator. Just follow @Kegerators and retweet. http://xr.com/kegerator”
Full details about the contest can be found at http://xr.com/kegerator. Good luck.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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Realbeer.com posted a news item about Pabst Brewing being up for sale again. The reason for the sale is the current owner is a charitable foundation (The Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not “allow charitable foundations to own for-profit companies”. Pabst has been put up for sale a few times in the past few years, in order to conform with this tax rule, but no buyer was found. Given the current economic climate, and the fact “overall company sales declined 3.3% in 2008″, I find it doubtful a buyer will be found, and the IRS will, once again, extend the sale deadline for The Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation. If you have $300 million burning a hole in your pocket, and you want some retro-beer “cred”… here is your chance.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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A friend of mine sent me a link to the AdAge article “What Your Taste in
Beer Says About You“. The article deals with an online study done by Mindset Media on the connection between personality and beer choice. The study is a bit small (2,600 people), and they lump “craft beer” into one category (for understandable reasons, individual craft breweries still compose a very tiny part of the beer market as a whole), but it was interesting to read some of the points mentioned. I could see some of my traits in the “craft beer” category (“seek out interesting and varied experiences and are intellectually curious”) but others missed the mark (“also skew as having a lower sense of responsibility—they don’t stress about missed deadlines”), but this is to be expected when drawing broad descriptions on large population segments. Some commentators seemed to believe these are set personality characteristics, and if the description does not apply to them, the survey must be completely wrong. The comments that gave me the best laughs though, were ones saying they were craft beer drinkers and “absolutely none of your descriptions fit my profile.” Is seeking “out interesting and varied experiences and [being] intellectually curious” really that horrible?
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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 You can now search SevenPack via the Firefox search box. Just click the little drop down arrow next to the Firefox search box, select ‘Add “Sevenpack”‘, and voilà you can search the site from the search box. Hope this makes SevenPack a little more useful to people.
For others who want to add this feature to their site the steps are pretty straightforward. The Mozilla Developer Center has an article about creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox and are the directions I followed.
The feature should also work in IE7+ but I have not tested it.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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As a follow up to my previous post about Monster vs Vermonster, Rockart Brewing can keep the name Vermonster… as long as they do not break into the energy drink market (I’m guessing they did not have plans on doing that anyway). Great news for the brewery! You can read about it on Rockart’s website. While reading about the whole saga I found this point mentioned by Alan McLeod on A Good Beer Blog interesting:
Interestingly, another factor that might affect the outcome is that soda and beer are in the same trademark goods and services category called “light beverages” which is separate from both wine (listed under “alcoholic beverages”) and coffee (listed under “staples”).
Beer is a “light beverage” and not an “alcoholic beverage”? Does anyone else find that strange? I wonder how that designation happened? Has not beer always possessed alcohol? Anyway, congrats to Rockart once again.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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The article title of “Learning to drink like a local in Qingdao, China” on CNN.com certainly caught my attention. I learned a few things from reading it. For one I did not know Germany had a colonial past involving China, but the most interesting thing was from this part of the article:
Residents are the first to introduce you to their biggest export. Outside every shop is a barrel or two of Tsingtao, with a ream of clean plastic bags ready to be filled with cheap 3.5 percent beer. Tsingtao beer tastes crisp and sweet (most likely from rice mixed in to cut down on the cost of barley. It is bought by the pound and weighed to prevent gaseous volume manipulation. A pint, when sold in this method, costs around 1.5 renminbi, or 22 U.S. cents.
- Beer bought by the pound.
- Beer from a plastic bag (reminds me of the CarboPouch™).
I wonder if they drink the beer directly from the plastic bag? I think that would be a little awkward. Anyway, interesting to read about how beer is consumed in other parts of the world.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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of the 1814 London Beer Flood. From wikipedia:
The London Beer Flood occurred on October 16, 1814 in the London parish of St. Giles in the United Kingdom. At the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 l) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 l) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets. The wave of beer destroyed two homes and crumbled the wall of the Tavistock Arms Pub, trapping the barmaid under the rubble.
The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. The wave left nine people dead: eight due to drowning and one from alcohol poisoning.
Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine there is a page with slightly more detail on the tragedy, though no mention of anyone dieing of alcohol poisoning, sourced from “Camden Archives. London, England”.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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There is really not much to say about the 400 pound (when fully stocked) Hopworksfiets. Two kegs, a bar top, a pizza rack and some tunes. BikePortland.org has the full details on the bike.
Kind of reminds me of Amsterdam’s BeerBike.
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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 In a move to stop massive confusion among consumers (because we are such a dumb lot), Hansen Beverage Company, creator, manufacturer and distributor of the Monster Energy line of drinks (don’t try finding that info on “Hansen’s Official Web Site” located at http://www.hansens.com/, you will only find information about their “Natural” products. You have to go to Monster Energy Drink’s privacy policy page to figure out that Hansen Beverage Company makes Monster Energy Drink: http://www.monsterenergy.com/web/guest/privacy), has filed a “Potential Opposition to U.S. Trademark Application. Serial No. 77/765,863″ which is a trademark application for “The Vermonster”, a beer created, and manufactured by Rock Art Brewery, LLC (I do not believe they qualify as distributor because of the alcohol laws in the United States).
Now if you do actually confuse Monster with Vermonster, you probably have had too many Vermonsters, and instead of reaching for another Vermonster (or Monster Energy drink in your confused state) you should reach for a tall glass of water and go to bed.
Is this just the start of Hansen Beverage Company and Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP’s (Hansen Beverage Company’s legal council) crusade to stop mass confusion of drinks with monster in the name? As Alan McLeod points out in his post: “The Bee-to-the-Ay lists 34 monstrous craft beers on the market already.” Are those breweries next? When searching for “Monster soda” on google (I was trying to verify Hansen Beverage Company actually made Monster, because, as stated before, they do not list it on their “official web site”, so I was confused, ironically enough, with who actually made it), I actually came across Flathead Lake Monster Soda. Not sure if they are still around, but they better watch out!
You can join the Facebook page “Vermonters and Craft Beer Drinkers Against Monster” and follow Rock Art on Twitter @RockArtBrewery .
[ First read about on: A Good Beer Blog , further reading done at: Burlington Free Press (with cease and desist letter! Ya!) and A Blog About Beer ]
Author: Dave
Categories: Beer News
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